Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The sacrifice of Australian forces in Afghanistan shows our nation at its best. Almost 40,000 Australian troops served in Afghanistan to defeat terrorists and support our allies. Forty-one Australians lost their lives, another 260 were wounded in battle, and hundreds more remain with the mental scars for life. Consistent with our proud history, our Australian diggers served with unparalleled courage and their performance was respected by other armed forces around the globe. With the help of our allies, our Australian troops achieved their mission's primary aim of bringing justice to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda operatives, who were responsible for one of the greatest acts against humanity in history. As we approach the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, we should remember the loss of thousands of innocent lives on that day.

The secondary objective of our mission was to support our allies, especially the USA. Following September 11, Prime Minister John Howard invoked the ANZUS treaty for the first time. There had been an attack on America's homeland, and we had an obligation to help them. But our commitment was not just borne from a contractual requirement; we share a common bond with the US as countries formed under God to defend freedom, equality and peace between nations. We have fought alongside America in every war since World War I and we have been proud to fight with them again in Afghanistan. Fighting with America is in our nation's interest because we have an interest in defeating any ideology that seeks to undermine our freedom and our liberty. Over the past 100 years we have helped defeat fascism and communism, and now Islamic terror.

As good friends, though, we must be willing to tell home truths when needed as well. The war in Afghanistan was launched for a just moral cause, but, as the years rolled on, the mission became aimless and it wasn't always clear how success could be achieved. To the extent there was an objective, it appeared to be the establishment of a free and democratic country in Afghanistan. As former president George W Bush said in his second inaugural address in 2005:

The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

In hindsight, this was the folly of vaulting ambition. Our reach exceeded our grasp. We must vigilantly protect the freedom and rights we enjoy, but we cannot impose our system on other countries at the point of a gun. Some now say the West should have left troops in Afghanistan, just as we have in Korea, Japan and Germany since World War II, but those troops were not facing IEDs 20 years after the war ended, and by 1965 there were no ongoing hostile civil wars in those nations. We need to concentrate on building our own nation first, before we build the nations of others.

I support the member for Herbert's call for a parliamentary inquiry into the war in Afghanistan. We owe it to the sacrifices that he and other Australians made to conduct a warts-and-all review of what went right, what went wrong and what we should never do again. Such an inquiry should also examine the chaotic withdrawal of citizens and visa holders over the last few of weeks. I'm increasingly concerned about the misplaced priorities of our military leaders. Just three months ago, 30 current and former defence personnel formed the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group. At the time, former Chief of the Defence Force Admiral Chris Barrie claimed that climate change was one of the two existential threats that keep him awake at night. There was no mention of the exit from Afghanistan, or the South China Sea, or China's bellicose statements about Taiwan. Our increasingly woke armies have been embarrassed by the Taliban in the last few weeks, and it is time for a rethink.

And what better time than today, which marks the 70th anniversary of the ANZUS treaty. The ANZUS treaty was signed in 1951. We were at war on 1 September 1951 against Communist Korea. China, less than a year before, had sent 200,000 Red Army troops across the Yalu River to fight us. At the time, Robert Menzies wrote in Foreign Affairs:

... the real and deadly and present question is whether, inside the next two years, we shall ... be strong enough to resist (and therefore deter) a vast Communist aggression against one manifestation of which we are actually now fighting in Korea.

The ANZUS treaty was a pact of free nations against the tyranny and destruction of communism. Seventy years later, once again our biggest security threat is communism from a resurgent and bellicose communist China. A day after Kabul fell, the Chinese tabloid daily Global Times wrote:

From what happened in Afghanistan, those in Taiwan should perceive that once a war breaks out in the Straits, the island’s defense will collapse in hours and US military won't come to help.

But now we see our leaders talk of the threat of climate change rather than the threat of communist China. We risk making the same mistake as we did in Afghanistan, reaching for what we cannot grasp. We cannot alone change the climate, but we can defend our country and our freedoms and that is what we should return to doing now that we have left central Asia.