David Feeney (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

Senator, if the matter were handled in any other way, then you would essentially be insisting that nobody who is in a military alliance with any one of the United States, China, Russia, Brazil, Iran or India would be able to sign this treaty. You would be creating the conditions whereby this treaty would have very few signatories and would be a dead-letter treaty upon arrival. That is not what we are interested in doing. What the government has done is work to frame a convention that will establish an international norm that countries are able to sign up to, notwithstanding their military alliances with non-state parties, that will create the conditions for this treaty to actually have some impact.

Debate interrupted; progress reported.