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

Thank you, Chair. I remind Senator Macdonald, who was actually sitting here, that I did move such a motion 14 minutes and 40 seconds ago, and it is nice of you to join us. As time is short, I will conclude my remarks and come back to the nature of the questions I put to the minister and why it is so extraordinary—it is one of the rare occasions I would agree with Senator Macdonald—for the minister to simply leave the chamber. He was given three or four hours notice that I was going to put this to him. The appropriate thing to do is to simply table the question, and that could have avoided this speech, although I probably would have found another opportunity to read it in.

In conclusion, we simply should not be fuelling these kinds of conflicts in our region or anywhere else. We should go into these matters with our eyes open. So the question I put to the minister was around Australia's participation in the conference in Oslo in early March around the humanitarian impacts of the use of nuclear weapons . We believe that there is not just massive civil society support for such an endeavour but support among many governments around the world, middle powers such as Australia who have taken these positions and others around the world representing not millions but billions of people, that there should be an international legal time-bound obligation on the nuclear weapon states, which exists on paper under article 6 of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, to abolish these weapons. When North Korea, Iran and these other so-called nuclear break-out states, even Burma for a period of time, propose the construction and deployment of these weapons, they do so because other powers already hold them. The existence of nuclear weapons in the hands of the United States government invoked the need to develop them by those authorities in the Soviet Union, which invoked the Chinese authorities, the French, the British, the Israelis, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the North Koreans and the Iranians. Even in Australia there was a move on for nuclear weapons capabilities, and every now and again that idea boils to the surface and settles back into the depths again. Will Australia send representation to this meeting in Oslo? That is a question I would have appreciated an answer to from the minister. Who are we sending and at what degree of seniority? Are we going with the intention to help engage in dialogue about an international legal agreement to ban these weapons, or are we going there on behalf of our ally the United States to frustrate and delay? I hope for and expect an answer to this question on notice very soon. I thank my colleagues in the chamber for their support in allowing me to canvass these issues, as I will do it again until this world is free of these weapons once and for all.