Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, but I have to tell you: you know when you are on the money—and I said it yesterday—when the opponents to what you have to say continue to interject in their effort to suppress the flow of your debate, your contribution to the debate. But—through you, Mr Acting Deputy President—Senator Ludlam is, honestly, an intellectual vacuum when it comes to the issue of the operation of executive government in Australia. Executive government is made of this whole cabinet of very decent men and women, some of them—most of them—great leaders from their own communities. There are 225 members of parliament in this place, and they are selected on the basis of the collective belief that they are the finest minds, they are the best people to make a contribution to the nation. So, this business that somehow the Prime Minister of the day rolls over in bed of a morning, at 3 am—he might be like me and have to get up every half an hour during the night—and checks his tweets and finds out that a leader of a foreign nation has tweeted something so he picks the phone up to the head of Defence and deploys all our troops to the Middle East or some other theatre of war—what a complete nonsense. This is a complete nonsense.

These are the people who would have us bring them to the table to be involved in decisions of when this nation may go into conflict. Additionally—and I am going to try to do this without using the word 'communism' from top to bottom—let me read to you some of the current thoughts of the Australian Greens, who are advocating this bill. These are thoughts that were published on 21 December 2016. There are enough Greens here to stand up each time I read an element of this and tell me that it is not so. This is the Greens policy called Left Renewal. The Left Renewal movement is the power within the Greens now. It opens with:

That our struggle for social justice brings us into irreconcilable conflict with the capitalist mode of production, and all other forms of class society.

You either have capitalism, socialism or the big C. I am not going to say the word, for fear of an interjection. This is a party whose ideology now supports non-capitalist forms of government. Capitalist government covers all of the UK, most of Europe and the United States. They want a vote to determine whether we interfere in a conflict. So if there is a socialist invasion—I am going to have to say it—or a communist invasion of a near neighbour, the Greens will not support intervention for peace purposes, because that nation that is invading their capitalist neighbours fits neatly in their ideology.

They also talk about:

…'good people' gaining control of these authoritarian and exploitative power structures.

They are talking about what is called a participatory form of democracy. That is what this document is, this manifesto. They say every Australian should have a say in this. Let's just run this around for a minute. Our national security is under immediate threat, we have had a Pearl Harbor event, and they want us over the next—if working with them is any experience—two years to come into this place and debate every single aspect of the decision. They do not want to just make a contribution; they want to go back to every single Australian—and God forbid they want to go back to their mob and get their input—as to whether we should go over there and protect our national interest security-wise or take some rose petals and fling them in the air in front of advancing troops. This would go on forever and ever if the parliament were involved in having to make a decision.

We have good men and women—be they Labor, be they the coalition or, perhaps in a hundred years' time when the world has come to an end, the Australian Greens—in there making considered decisions about our intervention in military events. It has worked for us. There is not a military event—and I look back retrospectively. I hate war. I hate conflict. As I look back, there have been one or two that perhaps with more information we might not have engaged in as we did, but in the large part—

Senator Rhiannon interjecting—

No, no—you would be talking in Japanese today if you had been in charge in the mid-forties. You would have a housekeeper who was a Papua New Guinean who had been displaced. You people are outrageous—through you, Madam Deputy President, before I get into trouble. I say this: Australians, one and all, ought to think about what is being attempted here. You have the absolute socialist Left, with great communist links, who want to get a seat at the table to make decisions about where, when and on what terms we engage in military practice. This idea has been rejected by hundreds and hundreds of politicians representing the interests of their constituencies between—