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

I rise with a sense of dismay that the parliament has left precisely four minutes for this discussion to occur. Senator Conroy has done me the courtesy of getting through his speech very rapidly. It is an insult to the service personnel that we send overseas that the parliament would set aside four minutes for a debate of this nature. Associate Professor Rodger Shanahan, who is a research fellow at Lowy, has called the Prime Minister's announcement on our RAAF deployment over Syria as long on rhetoric, short on detail, lacking any semblance of strategic vision or acknowledgement of the potential impact on the situation inside Syria.

The document tabled by the outgoing Minister for Defence that the Senate has been given four minutes to reflect upon tells us a tiny little bit about the government's military intentions, which many believe were fast tracked for entirely domestic political reasons, but nothing at all about the political or diplomatic solution in Syria. There is no military solution to the civil war inside Syria, our only contribution being to fan the military flames. It is entirely counterproductive.