Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is a very timely debate that we are having in this house today. I rise to strongly support the motion that, prior to any decision to send Australia into foreign conflict or war, this parliament should be placed in a position to endorse that decision and have veto over any decision. We are having this debate today in the context of an announcement very recently by the Prime Minister that Australia would, through aerial bombing, engage in the Syrian conflict. What was lacking from the Prime Minister's announcement was any strategic objective and any exit strategy. In fact, it is entirely accurate to say that the Prime Minister has no plan and no idea of what he actually intends to achieve through this armed intervention.

In Australia's Westminster system the authority of executive government flows from the parliament, not the other way around. To put that another way, it is the parliament that is sovereign over government in this country. You cannot form a government unless you have the numbers to do so in the House of Representatives. If you acknowledge the simple fact that parliament is sovereign over government, you then have to ask yourself: isn't it reasonable that the biggest and most important decisions that are made in this country are ultimately made by the parliament? It is this parliament which decides who forms government and it is this parliament which should decide whether Australia goes to war.

The current situation in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East is highly complex and has a range of contributing factors. No-one here is denying that. We have a brutal regime in terms of the Assad regime but we also have long-term causal factors including a lengthy drought which displaced many hundreds of thousands of people in the eastern Mediterranean area. As I mentioned in my inaugural speech we also have findings from the US National Academy of Sciences which conclude that long-term climate influences have played a causal role in the Syrian conflict. When you have complex causal factors that have led to civil war, rampant human rights abuses and large-scale civil dislocation there is a strong argument for a robust, comprehensive process to determine whether this country should involve itself in that region militarily.

There have been a number of arguments raised in rebuttal of the Greens' position today. I want to rebut those rebuttals because, frankly, many of them do not take into account the realities of the situation. Firstly, we often hear the argument that decisions to go to war or enter into armed conflict need to be made quickly. The desirability of speed in these contexts is often vastly overrated. In fact, when the decisions are around entering into armed conflict or going into war the Greens would prefer that a correct decision were made rather than a fast decision. We would prioritise a correct decision over a quick one.

It is undoubtedly true that there are doubts over the legalities of this decision by the Prime Minister. The Greens absolutely agree with Paul Barratt, a former secretary of the Department of Defence, who recently said that the parliament should require an opinion from the Solicitor-General to be tabled in this place to reassure members of both houses of this parliament that the action being taken is actually legal.

As our leader, Richard Di Natale, said in his contribution to this debate, the simple fact that a decision to go to war, to commit Australian armed forces to war, can be made in the Prime Minister's political self-interest is enough of an argument to require that that decision come before the parliament. Frankly, it is an outrageous scenario that in this country someone who has the good fortune to be made Prime Minister can in his own political self-interest, or that of his political party, decide to commit Australia to war. It is something that we need to address.

I also want to rebut the accusation we heard from the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Abetz, during question time this afternoon that, somehow, a questioning of the decision making mechanism in this context is somehow an attack on the men and women who serve in the Australian Defence Force. That argument is the last refuge of the weak. It is the last refuge of the political scoundrel. It goes to show how absolutely unable Senator Abetz was, this morning, to make a rebuttal to the Greens suggestion. This is in no way a reflection on the capacity of the men and women of the ADF. In fact it is a reflection of the Greens respect for the men and women of the ADF because, when you make a decision to commit Australia to war, you are making a decision to place the men and women of the ADF in an extremely dangerous position. We owe it to them and we owe it to their families to ensure that we have a robust decision-making process before we make a decision to commit them to danger. The Greens have an absolute respect for what the men and women of the ADF do. We just want to make sure that they are not unnecessarily committed to war and conflict that places them in more danger than they otherwise would be.

Senator Conroy, in his contribution, said that he wanted the government to explain to this parliament what its plan is and what its exit strategy is. We agree with Senator Conroy that that should occur. There are two major problems of course with that. Firstly, the government does not have a plan or an exit strategy in relation to Syria but, secondly, what Senator Conroy is calling for is an after-the-fact process not a before-the-fact process. That is where the Greens very strongly differ from the position of the ALP in relation to this matter. We strongly believe that before any decision is made and as part of that decision-making process the parliament needs to have a capacity to determine whether or not Australia should enter armed conflicts or war.

Ultimately a parliamentary debate and decision would enhance, significantly, the legitimacy of any deployments or war that Australia entered into. That is very important. Because we are the representatives of the people in this place I would hope that all members of this chamber would want a majority of the Australian people to back any decision to deploy into conflict or war overseas. Parliamentary approval would give legitimacy to a decision and it would remove the capacity of people to allege that a decision to go into a war or into an armed conflict was made out of political self-interest or political expediency.

There are many matters that come before this parliament. There are matters that many would think of as relatively trivial and there are matters which are of the absolute highest import. The decisions that we are talking about today fall clearly into that latter category. They are amongst the most serious and significant decisions that can be made. They are decisions that can expose, not only members of the ADF, but ultimately in the long term every Australian citizen to more danger. Because these decisions can expose every Australian citizen to more danger they ought to be made in the parliament which ultimately is accountable to the people through the ballot box.

The Greens have said consistently that we have extreme concerns over the decision the Prime Minister has made to commit us in Syria. We believe he has absolutely no plan. We believe he has absolutely no strategic objective. We believe he has absolutely no exit strategy. We basically believe the Prime Minister does not know what he is doing. I have to say that it strikes me that the Prime Minister has made this decision primarily so that he could be seen to be doing something even though he has no plan, no strategic objective and no exit strategy.

Ultimately we need to start talking seriously about peace in that region. We need to start getting people together, sitting down and talking about how we are going to remove or mitigate some of the causal issues that have led to this conflict. As I said at the start of my contribution, this is an extremely complex scenario. There are a range of causal factors here. Ultimately, if you are not sitting down and talking about peace, then you are not going to achieve peace. When people pick up guns and get into planes to drop bombs, that is a step away from the peace that every human has a fundamental right to and that every human hopes for.

It is very easy for us to sit in this place, but we need to put ourselves in the shoes of the men, the women and the children who are, right now, cowering in their houses, who are, right now, afraid to go outside and who are, right now, wondering what their long-term future is. We all need to put ourselves into the shoes of those people and ask ourselves: is an Australian intervention in an armed conflict with no strategic objective, no plan and no exit strategy the right way to go here? When you make these big decisions, you need to ensure you have adequate checks and balances. That is a fundamental principle of any democracy. In the Greens' view, leaving a decision like this in the hands of a Prime Minister does not provide the necessary checks and balances.

A further rebuttal that has been made today is around the confidentiality of sources of information and the difficulty in placing it before parliament. They seem to manage that all right in the congress in the United States. They seem to manage that okay in the United Kingdom, where matters similar to this have in fact been brought before the parliament. I would say that information that supports any argument that Australia should go to war or should enter into an armed conflict absolutely ought to be able to be provided to parliament. Maybe it needs to be de-identified in some way to protect sources or to protect people who are operating on behalf of Australia, but we believe that it can be done and that that argument also has little or no merit.

Ultimately and fundamentally, this is about whether or not you believe that parliament is sovereign over government or the other way around. Clearly, parliament is sovereign in this country. So I am very proud to support the motion before the Senate. It is worth pointing out, in the context of Syria, that we are now being committed by Mr Abbott to enter into a conflict which ultimately risks making the situation worse. It is worth remembering that it certainly will put men and women serving in the ADF at greater danger than they otherwise would have been. For those reasons and the other reasons that the Greens have articulated today, we absolutely need in this country a process such as that exists in the United States and many other countries, where the parliaments get an opportunity to debate and determine whether their countries should enter into war and armed conflict.