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

It was a concise but profoundly disappointing contribution from the coalition and it gave us no comfort whatsoever. Senator Marshall and Senator Singh also mentioned the civil society groups that I listed in my second reading contribution. They all paid respect to the huge amount of work that has gone into getting this convention off the ground and getting parties to sign up to it but are now advising this chamber against voting for the bill. Is it the government's view that those groups are wrong, when they say—and I can provide more detailed quotations if that would be helpful—this bill is not at all consistent with the language of the convention which has a universal obligation not to have anything to do with these weapons at all within certain carve outs that we have all described thus far around interoperability and so on? Is it your view in fact that those groups are simply wrong? Are they misled?