Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, what I would like to do today, with this opportunity to speak, is ask some questions. I want to precede that by saying that I don't know a lot about this topic, but I feel very strongly that we need to know more about it in this chamber and in parliament itself. This in some ways refers to the trial, and Senator Kitching and Senator Abetz have discussed that. I won't comment, because I don't know the facts and there is a trial underway.

I want to turn to and ask questions about the source of the conflict, the root cause, because I think many people in this chamber will share these questions with me. What is the source of the regional conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more particularly what is the source of our entry as participants into those conflicts? I can vividly remember Mr Alexander Downer retiring from parliament and saying, in his ABC interview, that one of the things he remembered—they were talking about various stories—was that the Prime Minister at the time, John Howard, came back from America when they had the 9/11 catastrophe. He walked into the cabinet, I believe, and just said, 'We're off to Iraq.' That floored me. We're committing all these troops, changing their lives and changing the lives of people in other countries, with no debate—just saying, 'We're off to Iraq,' with no Executive Council meeting, no cabinet meeting and no parliamentary scrutiny or review. I don't think that the parliament should have the power to declare war or to decide whether or not our troops are engaged overseas, but it needs to have some review. Governments need to be able to act quickly, but we must have some review regularly.

As I understand it—and I may be wrong on this—we never declared war in Afghanistan. The Afghanistan war, at its core, is a civil war. It's a tribal nation. It's had conflict for hundreds of years. People have tried to take it over. The Americans and the Russians—people with far superior weapons—have been in Afghanistan, but no-one has conquered Afghanistan. It remains an unresolved conflict that is just sucking up lives. Remember that Australians weren't dealing with soldiers over there; they were dealing with terrorists. Sometimes little boys or girls were dressed up, wrapped in a bomb. People were infiltrating our own armed forces. Trainees from Afghanistan that we were training were infiltrating our forces and shooting Australians and Americans in their training camps. This has not been a conventional war, and we have put young people from Australia in harm's way. Some died, and some have a far worse fate. They are suffering with the acts that they committed under extreme stress, and they will live with that. It should be our duty, no matter the findings of this trial, to help them to live with that.

I come back to the person who took us into Afghanistan, the head of this country. We were told we were going into Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and the people of the greatest democracy in terms of size and the most powerful nation on earth, the United States, were told the same lie. The US Secretary of Defense, the President and various cabinet ministers admitted later that there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, and our heads of state admitted that here. Who will hold these people accountable?

Who will hold the agencies accountable for briefing them? The ultimate responsibility for soldiers' actions are the values of the country and the leaders of the country, because the leaders are trustees for the values.

But there is hope. For the first time in many, many United States presidencies, we have a president—Donald Trump—who has not started a war. My understanding is that he is the first in many, many presidential terms. It's now the lefties, the Obamas and the Bidens, who want to drop bombs on behalf of globalists. It is Trump who is withdrawing troops and he has done so since he first became President. Trump is the first President to engage in peace-making efforts with South Korea.

I highlight the responsibility of the senior levels of our government and of our parliament, and our joint responsibilities to fulfil them.