Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

He said he 'regrets'. In his statement to this Senate earlier today, before this happened, he did not say that he was sorry, just that he regretted that offence had been taken. Well, offence was taken, and offence was rightly taken, because it was a clear inference that the workers, the people at the Australian Submarine Corporation, were not up to the job.

I did think at the time, on 17 December 2013, that it was interesting that it was Minister Cormann who said at the time that Sophie Mirabella was appointed to the Australian Submarine Corporation:

… her legal background, and her extensive experience working with the manufacturing industry … will make a valuable contribution to the board.

And here we now have the minister saying that he would not even trust them to build a canoe. That could be a partial justification—that is, they appointed someone who knows nothing about submarines to the board; however, I return to the main points here.

This is an accumulation of things for me; it is not just about this latest insult. It is also the fact that the minister has before shown that, in my view, he undermines the integrity of and the confidence that we might have in the Australian Defence Force. We will all remember that the ABC ran a program with asylum seekers saying that they had burnt hands because they were forced to hang onto hot pipes on an asylum seeker boat. An investigation was called for and the minister said that he would not conduct an investigation, that he would not hear for a moment any allegations or criticisms of anyone in the armed forces and that, in fact, the investigation should be into the ABC. Of course we have seen subsequently what the government thinks about the ABC with the cuts that have been made. But you cannot have a minister who will not take seriously complaints that people might have. At the same time, he should take seriously the praise people have and the agreement and the support people have for the armed forces. If you are the minister you have to take both sides of things seriously, and he did not.

Also in relation to my confidence in the minister, I want to go to the issue of the deployment to Iraq. Again, we have a situation where the minister was asked on television, 'Do you believe you can destroy the Islamic State?' He said, 'Yes, we can destroy the Islamic State.' He then went on in that vein without any evidence or anything other than the muscular rhetoric that the Prime Minister had shown and that we have seen in here today. We have seen that same rhetoric that the minister is capable of, but it has not been backed up by evidence, it has not been backed up by the kind of competence you would expect in a Minister for Defence. That is a serious issue for me in this case.

We have already heard that Mr Bruce Carter was told by the minister, less than a couple of weeks ago, that he would stop criticising the ASC in public and then, within a matter of weeks, he comes out and completely undermines any kind of confidence that people might have. The bigger picture here though is we have a minister, a defence minister, who is overseeing Australia's deployment of troops to Iraq and there is still no clarification from the government as to the legal basis for their engagement in Iraq. What I saw was Australia pleading with Iraq to let us be there after the Americans asked us to go and a lack of clarity around the legal status of our troops being there—to the point where the latest that was put out there was that they are there under diplomatic immunity. In the absence of the legals, they are advising troops to work alongside Shia militias who are involved in just as barbaric behaviour in many instances as the Sunni militias and the Islamic State have been capable of doing in various places, and my big question here has always been: what vulnerability has our defence minister put on our armed service men and women if they are caught up in war crimes in the future—accusations of war crimes? If they are associated, if they are—

Senator Canavan interjecting—

I will not be verballed by people with interjections like that. What I am making is a very straight legal point here as to whether the men and women in the armed services are going to be protected from accusations of being associated with people who may, in the future, be accused of war crimes if they are in the Shia militias or other militias with whom they are associated via the Iraq army. That is a point that I would have thought a Defence minister would have wanted to have covered off before anyone sets foot in Iraq in this current conflict.

But I want to return to the big picture here in terms of Defence procurement. Defence procurement is a critical matter, and you would want to have confidence in the minister overseeing the process. What we have seen is a minister lose his cool, condemn the capacity, the competence and the capability of the ASC, undermine confidence and then say he is going to oversee a procurement process. I do not have any confidence that this minister can oversee a procurement process where he will be outdone on every front by the countries with which he is engaging. Defence procurement is not a simple handing over of the cash and taking whatever it is you are buying—in this case, a submarine, but it might be other defence equipment. There are all kinds of issues associated with it, and I am not confident that this minister is competent, having seen the behaviour to date overseeing such a procurement process.

Apart from that, of course, there is another broken election promise, made on 8 May 2013, to build 12 new submarines at the Australian Submarine Corporation in South Australia. That was a promise to the people. But, frankly, we are seeing election promises just being chewed up and spat out virtually every day. Nobody could have any confidence in anything that the Liberal Party had to say before the election, because after the election it was just meaningless. Then we had a complete attempt to cover up the broken promises. Further to the issue of procurement, I have wondered ever since the last election what was promised to Incat and associated companies in Hobart in terms of support for the Liberal Party at the last election. But I will not go into that now, except to say that it is a matter of concern.

Finally, I want to go to failing to protect the Christmas and recreation leave of and failing to demand a real pay increase for ADF personnel. When it was put to me that the government were expecting our men and women of the armed services to go and serve in Iraq and, at the very same time, came out with this decision to cut their leave and cut their pay, I said on that very day that it was appalling and that the people of Australia would not support it. Everybody can see that it is entirely the wrong thing to do. If you want to build loyalty in your Defence forces, if you want to give some sense that you mean it when you say you support them, then not only do you actually support them but you have a record of looking after them when they come home and of dealing with the issues. Yet we have seen some pretty shabby treatment of people who have come home from Afghanistan and, previously, Iraq and other conflicts.

I went to Sydney to see that fantastic production between the Sydney Theatre Company and the Australian Defence Force, The Long Way Home, with veterans talking on stage about their experiences of post-traumatic stress and of coming to terms with what they had to live with once they came back to Australia. It is a very moving and powerful piece. Sitting there you realise that it is all very well to do the big farewells and the big media stories at the time people leave for conflict duty, and it is all very well to stand up in here on condolence motions, but if you are not prepared to actually put the money into looking after the people who come home and have to live with it for the rest of their lives, with either physical or mental anguish and disability, then we are not standing by our words that we support our men and women of the armed services.

It is in that context that I support this censure motion of the minister because I do not have the confidence that he has the temperament to oversee a procurement process, given his reaction to the issue of the Submarine Corporation and his reaction to the issue of the complaints about the ADF with the asylum seeker boat incidents. He just reaches a conclusion and does not investigate the matters properly. But, more particularly, the big picture here is: he should be saying he is sorry. He should not be insulting people who are working in that particular business. More particularly, as the Defence minister of Australia, he has an obligation to have a level of competence that is not being demonstrated If people do not have the confidence that he can oversee the procurement process, then the Prime Minister should take that on board and think about that very carefully because it is pretty fundamental.