Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I seek leave to make a short statement on the 106th report of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties—Nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.

Leave granted.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I will speak briefly on the recommendations of the 106th report of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties—Nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. We had a response from the government short while ago—a matter of only a couple of weeks—that addressed the recommendations of the report. I spent nearly a year working with the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties on this report. It is a very good document. It canvasses the issues very well, including some very difficult issues that this parliament has struggled to get cross-party or cross-partisan agreement on for years, if not decades. I put to the chamber that it is quite a step forward to have all the major representation in the parliament come out with a unanimous report on an issue as divisive as nuclear weapons has been. It addresses not simply non-proliferation and the very real concerns that people have about nuclear states or nuclear threshold states like Iran, North Korea and Burma, which obviously pose grave security threats, but also disarmament. Disarmament is the sometimes forgotten article of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which proposed that the five permanent nuclear weapons states—I should not say ‘permanent’—and the other states that have obtained nuclear weapons in the past 60 years should put those weapons aside, dismantle them and remove them from strategic doctrines permanently. It is a very good study, and it addresses many of the issues that Australia is going to find itself having to contend with, including the obvious hypocrisy of being one of the largest suppliers of uranium in the world to many of the world’s nuclear weapon states. The fact that the report was able to come to such a set of recommendations is, I think, a credit not only to the chair and to the secretariat but to all members of the committee.

I want to address in particular recommendation 21 of the report. In the government response, for some reason recommendation 21 was that the parliament adopt a resolution on the parliament’s commitment to the abolition of nuclear weapons. That is quite an important way for this parliament to send a sign to the rest of the world as delegations from around the planet convene in New York at the end of next month for nearly a full month of talks on the five-yearly Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, an absolutely crucial conference. In the past, Australia has played, in fits and starts, quite a productive role in these negotiations through the work of the former Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons and, more recently, through Prime Minister Rudd’s announcement of the Australian co-chaired International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. We have played quite a powerful enabling role in recent times. We have 12 ‘lost years’, I would say, under the Howard government when we simply did more or less whatever the Bush Administration told us to. Thankfully, we have moved to a more nuanced position. We are looking after Australia’s strategic interests in a better way, even though we have not been as outspoken on the issues of nuclear weapons in Australia’s security policy, as we have seen a much bolder statement more recently from our ally in this matter, Japan.

Recommendation 21 was quite sensible: it just said that there should be a parliamentary resolution. We are not seeing such a thing at the moment. It is quite clearly not on the government’s radar. For some reason the government, in their response to JSCOT report 106, bounced that to the presiding officers. So, quite rightly in my view, the statement that has been tabled by the President this afternoon says that this is a matter for the parliament as a whole rather than for the presiding officers. It would require a resolution to be prepared and then put to the parliament by a parliamentarian or group of parliamentarians. In the absence of such a move by the executive—and perhaps we could see a contribution from the Minister for Defence, if he has any information that would enlighten the chamber that this view is incorrect—the Parliamentary Cross-Party Group nuclear on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, of which I am one of the co-chairs, will forward such a resolution for consideration by the Senate. This coming Thursday is the last sitting day of the Senate before that very important Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. I think it is entirely appropriate that the Parliament of Australia forward an extremely strong resolution that will give our delegation to New York in a matter of only a few weeks—and my understanding is that it will be a large delegation—the knowledge that they have the support of all the parties in the parliament to rid the world of these weapons once and for all.

By some mystery or miracle of self-preservation and sanity, these weapons have not been used since late August 1945. In conflict they have been used many times and caused great harm to civilian populations and military personnel in testing, including here in Australia, but they have not been used actively in warfare since the end of the Second World War. That is something that three generations of people can be profoundly grateful for, but it is not something that we can assume will remain in perpetuity. We have a very brief moment in time in which I can stand here in this chamber and say that these weapons have not been used since the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Every single day that passes, we simply cannot take that as it for granted.

I have read the reports of security analysts who have said that they do not understand why nuclear weapons have not been used in some fashion or other by the terrorist networks that are receiving this material in unknown quantities through the very porous borders of the world’s black markets in nuclear materials. They do not know why such large quantities of these materials are still loose and circulating on the world’s black markets. They know we simply cannot take it for granted. The most common thing we hear is people saying that that is a Cold War issue: the risk of nuclear attack has simply abated since the United States and the former Soviet Union stood off with Western Europe as the potential battleground; those days have passed, and this is not an issue we need to worry about anymore. I strongly disagree with that. The authors of this report strongly disagree with that. It is absolutely time that Australia played its part, as we have played a productive part in times past, to abolish these weapons once and for all so that we never again face the spectre of the atomic bomb victims, which the Japanese called hibakusha. For many of them, their entire life’s work since those attacks has revolved around peace education and around the abolition of these weapons so that there are never, ever more hibakusha.

The cross-party group on nuclear weapons in this chamber will produce a resolution which we will put to the Senate and which we believe should be very strong. It should be unambiguous that these weapons must be abolished for all time. They must be taken out of Australia’s security policy, to the extent that they still remain there. Australia can play a productive role diplomatically, politically and in its defence capabilities in ridding the planet of these weapons once and for all.

Question agreed to.