Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] To the people who have served in Afghanistan; to the people who lost mates in Afghanistan; to those of you who have missed birthdays, wedding anniversaries, Christmases and kids' first days of school; to the people who lost their health and livelihoods and who lost who they once were over in Afghanistan; and to the many, many people who left a piece of themselves in a war for a country on the other side of the world: we sincerely thank you. We thank you for your service, and we thank you for the sacrifices you have made for this country. We thank you for all that you gave to the people of Australia so we can live our lives in peace, far away from war and conflict. Your country is incredibly grateful and always will be.

Today is hard, and I know many of you are feeling a lot of pain and a lot of hurt about what's going on in Afghanistan. I know that you're confused. You gave everything you could have over there, and you've done everything you could have done—we know you did—just to see the country you tried to save crumble to pieces within minutes of our troops pulling out. And here we are, watching in horror, as Kabul falls to the resurgent Taliban. We're seeing videos of Afghans handing over their babies to American soldiers, trying so desperately to find a way to keep their children safe—even if it means never seeing them again. We're seeing people clinging to the evacuation planes as they take off from the runways out of Kabul. There are plenty of crowds gathering outside the airport gates in the middle of a pandemic, doing everything they can to run, to escape, to get themselves and their families far away from the Taliban, who have once again taken over their country.

It is heartbreaking. There is no other word for it, it's absolutely heartbreaking, but we shouldn't doubt what we fought for. We fought for our values and they're worth fighting for. They are always worth fighting for. No matter what the odds, no matter the result, you value what you fight for. We have always done that. You fought to give little girls a chance to go to school, and you fought to rid the world of the shadow of extremist terrorism. You fought to give people in one of the poorest nations in the world a say in the way their country was run. You fought to make the world better. You certainly fought to make their little bit of the world better, safer and fairer. And that's what Australians should always fight for, because they are part of our values. You did what you believed in and you did what you were asked to do. You should always hold your head up high, stand tall and be proud of what you've achieved, because you did exactly what the country asked you to do.

If anyone wants to judge the result of our longest war by what the country looks like once we leave it, they've missed the point. The only question to ask is what the world would look like if we hadn't gone there in the first place? We need to consider that. What would it look like if Australians hadn't stood up for what we stand for? I have no doubt that we would be living in a world that would be shivering in the shadow of terrorism. People all around the world would live in fear that the disgusting disregard for human life we saw on September 11 would be felt any day, any time, because the ones who think of human life like a bargaining chip, a perverted holy war, would still have a place to call home in Afghanistan.

To those who fought in our longest war: you made us safer, you made Afghanistan safer. You have got nothing to apologise for, you've got nothing to bow your heads down for. If there's failure to be found in what we've seen in the last few weeks, it's to be found in this building. Any failure sits on the shoulders of all the people who sit in this chamber today, and on the shoulders of people who sit in the other place, who made bad decisions about how to run this war. They're the people to blame. They're the people who need to go and have a look at their own conscience—and not just the ones sitting in there today, but the ones from the past. I hope you're taking time out, especially the ones from the past, to have a good think about your actions, because, by God, you need to!

There will come a time when we get to look at this carefully. There will be time for anger, for hard questions about what has gone wrong here. I will be moving a motion this week so that we can do that. We will start that process, because, God forbid, I do not want to go over this process for another 20 years. I do not want to make the same mistakes again for our kids and our grandchildren who will be serving the country. I don't want it, and they don't either!

We sent troops to a country under the thumb of a brutal regime and, for 20 years, we gave them life free of it. That's not failure in my books. If there was anything we could have done to make the Afghan government and its institutions more resilient to the forces of the Taliban, we should have done it. If there was anything we didn't do that we could have done, we should know about it so that it doesn't happen again in the future. And the only way we honour and respect the sacrifice that has been made by those who served under an Australian flag in Afghanistan is by asking hard questions—and they need to be asked—about what we could have done differently, to have a very different ending to what we have today. It needs to be examined.

It's false patriotism to say that asking hard questions about the results of our longest war in any way undermines or disrespects the contribution those troops made. Patriotism means holding your country to the highest standards you know your country is capable of achieving. We owe it to Australia to ask how we could have done better, how we could have had a better result at the end. That's what I want to do for all of us, because we need those answers. We need them. We need to go over the past to make sure that we don't make the same mistakes in the future.