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

Iran, thank you, Senator Feeney. And who could forget the United Kingdom and France? We do not have a stable, bipolar situation any more, with two rational governments facing off across western Europe to its great misfortune. We have these weapons potentially in the hands of non-state actors, for whom deterrence is a joke. We have them in the hands of highly unstable regimes such as Pakistan. I wonder how the senators who have taken the time to come down here this afternoon and heckle about the idea of disarming the world of these horrific devices would feel if we came in here one morning to hear that one of these weapons had been detonated. We have lived in this extraordinary period of the last few decades where some survival instinct has kept the finger off the button. We must never take that for granted, as we have seen some examples of this afternoon. For some reason we feel that it is sensible and sane and part of an ordinary and entirely rational military doctrine to hold tens of thousands of weapons that could end civilisation in an afternoon; for some reason we feel this is somehow a great idea. I find it completely dumbfounding that this obsolete Cold War logic has followed us all the way to 2011. The Greens believe that the US government and Australia should not collaborate on support for nuclear weapons to be floating around the world on ballistic missile submarines. I acknowledge that the former Prime Minister, now the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Kevin Rudd, has poured a huge amount of energy into these endeavours and has seriously tried to move the international debate forward. But at the same time that is occurring it is being undermined by the efforts of the global uranium mining industry and by precisely the response we had from the defence ministry that while trying to abolish these weapons we somehow believe there is still a place for them in Australia's defence and security doctrine. There is no place in the defence doctrine of any country in the world for weapons as horrific as these. I think having an honest conversation about removing the US nuclear weapons umbrella from Australia's security policy would strengthen, not destroy, our alliance with the United States.