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

( Let us go to a specific case study around interoperability, and perhaps we will dwell here for a while and then come back to the issue of stockpiling and transiting through Australian airspace, waters and territory at a later time. I want to start with the question of interoperability, because I suspect it is the key sticking point. Would the minister care to comment on the very serious allegations, which were documented in a startling amount of detail in cables released through the Fairfax press by the Wikileaks publishing organisation, that Australia worked behind the scenes to undermine the objectives of the convention. When it was unable to do that on behalf of the United States, it resorted to implementing this bill in a way that is essentially structurally flawed. The allegations which I refer to were reported on 2 May 2011, so I guess the government has had plenty of time to contemplate those allegations. I will quote very briefly from a piece by Philip Dorling that ran in the Age on that day:

Diplomatic cables … reveal that, in 2007, Kevin Rudd's newly elected government immediately told the US it was prepared to withdraw from the negotiations if key 'red line' issues were not addressed - especially the inclusion of a loophole to allow signatories to the convention to co-operate with military forces still using cluster bombs.

Minister, the reason that this is significant is that Australia—and I deeply believe this—has no intention of kitting out the ADF with cluster weapons. This is not to do with us at all. I had an exchange with Defence, probably during that session that you were representing the government at the estimates table, about the ADF retaining a small quantity of these weapons—just a sample of live weapons—to train our troops. I have actually seen this happen at al-Minhad in the UAE. I have seen the kind of training that they undergo on how to recognise these things, particularly when they find their way into IEDs and so on. I completely understand and support the retention of a small representative sample of these sorts of things so that the ADF can train and know how to disarm them and so on. I do not propose to dwell there. My question is: if we have no further use for these weapons ourselves, apart from training, why would we be prepared to withdraw from the treaty if these red line issues were not addressed?