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

Minister, I indicated before that I was going to provide you with citations for some of the figures that I quoted before. I wonder whether it might not be helpful, by leave, to table the document that I am referring to. It is the article that cites three studies and, in particular, I draw the minister's and the department's attention to citations 3, 4 and 24. I know it is a little unorthodox to seek leave to table it before the minister and Senator Joyce have had a chance to view it, but I will test the view of the chamber now.

Leave granted.

Thank you very much. We can maybe come back to the questions that I have raised. The three documents that I have cited from this study go to the government's view as to the veracity of the figures and the situations described in those three documents. The reason that I have spent so much time dwelling on this is that, despite the attempt by the minister to paint the conflict in Iraq as hypothetical, the war did in fact happen. The invasion of Iraq did in fact happen. It is the view of the authors of the International Red Cross and Human Rights Watch as well as that of a number of the other authors who are cited in this study that not only did that conflict occur but that up to two million submunitions were scattered across metropolitan and regional areas of Iraq in an operation in which the Royal Australian Air Force flew close support for US military units that were firing those weapons into those areas. That is the reason I have dwelt here.

I also want to come to the reason why I asked the minister before whether he had a copy to hand of the responses that the Department of Defence provided to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee when we put some of these very same questions to the department during the committee's inquiry. I will quote from Defence responses (c) and (d). These were responses to questions directed from the chair relating to section 72.41, where we spent most of the evening discussing the matter of interoperability. I seek the minister's views on whether Defence has been correctly quoted here:

In particular, Article 21 will allow Non-States Parties—

and this is Defence's view—