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

I rise today to commend to the chamber this motion. I listened very carefully to Senator Faulkner's comments because he obviously has history with this issue—and we have spoken of changing this long-held tradition of the executive unilaterally deploying Australian troops into harm's way—and also because Senator Faulkner was for a period of time the Australian Minister for Defence. I have heard nothing at all this morning from any side of the house that would undermine the basic principle that we seem to be hearing from all sides: that if it ain't broken then don't fix it. I would put to all of my colleagues in here that it is broken. Otherwise we would not be in this situation.

I took on the so-called war powers bill. This bill, the Defence Legislation Amendment (Parliamentary Approval of Overseas Service) Bill, has been on the Notice Paper since the mid-1980s. The Australian Democrats introduced it, Senator Bartlett had carriage of it when I came into this place in 2008 and it was the first bill that I introduced. It is profoundly important.

If you believed that this extraordinarily important decision making should remain entirely behind closed doors in the hands of the Prime Minister on the advice of his National Security Committee and the cabinet, with secret briefings with the opposition, you would have to go back and look at how it is okay for Australia to retain this tradition when our parent parliament in Westminster and the United States congress—kindred democracies all around the world—put these decisions to their legislatures and effectively trust that the collective intelligence will be greater than that of the executive sitting alone, responding to imperatives that are occurring largely under the table.

That is what happened in 2003, when we went into arguably an illegal invasion of Iraq on the basis of just such an imperative. Then the executive authorities had the nerve to turn around and blame the security agencies and the analysts, who had been telling them all along that there was no link between the Iraqi government and the gruesome attacks on the United States on 9/11 and that, furthermore, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and had not been since 1991. The intelligence agencies and analysts were telling the government that. You went to war nonetheless. If that example does not persuade this parliament that something needs to change, what on earth will it take?

That ripped the lid off Iraq, because there was almost zero tolerance among the secular Baathist regime in Iraq for the kind of hideous extremism that we see prevailing in the north-west of that country today. Now there is an explosion of sectarian tensions. We helped ignite that in our illegal invasion of that country on the behest of the executive. Millions of people around the world, including me, demonstrated and marched and tried to stop that war—and civil society was right and you were wrong. I think it would be easier to listen to your argument about this present deployment if there was even one small admission of culpability for the disaster that is unfolding there at the moment.

We heard the Prime Minister at his press conference yesterday saying this is a strictly humanitarian role, but we know, for example, that it is almost certain that Pine Gap is being used for drone targeting inside Iraq and elsewhere; that the SES are on the ground; that the Royal Australian Air Force has fighter-bombers either on their way or on very high alert; that we are now apparently running Russian or eastern European weapons in to protect Kurdish minorities in the north-west. We are practically at war. This has long since ceased to be any kind of humanitarian gesture.

If this were put to a vote, and Senator Conroy and Mr Shorten have already put a view into the public domain, it may well be that this parliament would accept the deployment. But you, Senator Johnston, and the rest of the executive and your colleagues would be forced to circumscribe, put some boundaries around, the scope of the deployment. I suspect the reason that you will not do that is that we are once again—Korean War, Vietnam War, first Iraq war, second Iraq war, Afghanistan war—acting at the behest of the United States government, not the people of Australia. Have we not proven ourselves yet to the United States government? Can we not stand on our own feet, as Canadian authorities have done, as the British have done, as New Zealand authorities have done, as other countries have done? What is it that is special about Australia that says we have to simply keep following in the slipstream of this great power that has made so many grievous strategic errors in recent history?

So, yes, we will return to this debate, and I think it is appropriate that it happen this morning. I commend this motion to the chamber.