Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

In contributing to this debate today in relation and response to the Deputy Prime Minister's and the defence minister's statement in relation to AUKUS, it has been fascinating to read through this ministerial statement in the current context. What we have here is one of the most tortured political statements I have read in a very, very long time.

The Australian community more broadly were absolutely stunned by the announcement in the dying days of the former government of this so-called AUKUS pact. We woke up one morning to a bunch of articles about us acquiring nuclear submarines and sections of a Zoom facilitated press conference with President Biden, the then UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and Scott Morrison on TV. Most of the community spent about a day hearing about this term—'AUKUS, AUKUS, AUKUS'—and then that was it. The mainstream media coverage ceased at: What would we be getting? What kind of submarine would it be? What kind of capability would it have? Left totally unexamined was why these three men had taken that particular moment to introduce the idea onto the global stage. Left unanalysed and unengaged with was the question of why these three people at this particular moment in time would take this opportunity to announce such a shared project.

Well, let's examine it a bit together. You had Scott Morrison, who knew in his heart of hearts that he was on the way to losing government, desperately trying to find a way to differentiate himself from an opposition that had decided that it would accept nearly anything that the Liberal government proposed in order to get back in power. You had President Biden, who had just endured week after week of scenes showing testament to the world of the absolute lack of judgement that has been displayed by the United States in the last 20 years in relation to foreign policy, global diplomacy and war. As its misguided intervention into Afghanistan came crashing down and we all watched those horrific scenes as Kabul Airport was evacuated, the weakness and the intellectual limitations of the United States were on display as never before. Then you had Boris Johnson, who, fresh from being foiled in his attempts to prorogue his own parliament, facing complete rebellion inside his own government, would have rather been on the frontlines in Kyiv than in the houses of parliament, facing his own colleagues.

And so these three men took the opportunity to try to change the conversation by making this announcement—something they had been cooking up in the background with their defence departments, which had purposefully been circumventing the State Department in the United States, the foreign affairs department of the Commonwealth of Australia and the foreign ministry of the United Kingdom. This has all been kept very, very close to the chest. All that was really given to the Australian people was: 'Hello everybody, we're going to develop a nuclear powered submarine in the face of decades of steadfast opposition by the Australian public to the nuclearisation of our waters. We're just going to do this now. We have no idea how we're going to achieve it and we have no idea how long it will take. We've got absolutely no idea how much it will cost—we'll figure that out. Just follow the shiny announcement over here.'

What we have seen in the more than 12 months since that statement is that the details of this agreement have not been ironed out and that the principal impact of such a shared project to bring into the world such a despicable weapon would be to fundamentally compromise the independence of Australia—our ability as a nation to make decisions in line with the Australian community's expectations. It's a baseline expectation of the Australian community that the government it elects will make decisions that reflect its interests. And yet here we have a project which would seek to bind us up with the United States for the next one, two or three decades in pursuit of a technology type with which we have no experience and no capability, and therefore must be wholly reliant on the United States and United Kingdom in that development process. This puts us completely in the power of two nations which, over the last two decades, have demonstrated some of the poorest decision-making in relation to war and foreign policy that has been seen since the Second World War.

This minister's statement references the United Nations charter and the absolute importance of upholding that charter, and of confronting nations when they violate it—particularly when they act in relation to wars of aggression. It rightly condemns Russia for doing so—as the Australian Greens have done on multiple occasions. The torture in this statement comes in when you realise the fact that this minister is making this speech less than a month out from the 20th anniversary of the United States violating that charter, and the Australian government joining with the United States in the violation of that charter, through the illegal and immoral invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq. The irony in that almost beggars belief. Twenty years on, with Iraq still in ruins and with Afghanistan falling apart, this Labor government would ask the Australian people to put their faith in the United States, not only for the next 10 years, not only for the next 20, but for the next 30 or more years, gifting to them in the process multiple billions in public funds.

There will be some who say, 'They're just lending us a piece of technology; they've done that in the past.' To make such a statement is to demonstrate such a profound level of duplicity in this discussion as to be unworthy of this place. Every member on the Labor side, every member of this government, understands—truly, they understand—that this technology acquisition is fundamentally different. This is not a propeller. This is not a new version of troop carrier. This is a nuclear powered submarine, reliant on an industry we have purposely never developed in this country—a capability that we have actively chosen not to develop, because of the risk it poses to triggering an arms race in our region, the very region the minister says he seeks to stabilise.

In putting this forward, they suggest to us that we would be able to co-build this capability, having no ability to sustain it ourselves for decades and yet utilise it solely in our national interest. I ask you to consider whether that really sounds right. Do we really believe that the United States and United Kingdom would gift us the opportunity to use their shipyards to build boats for us if they believed that we would ever utilise them against their national interests, against their strategic objectives? Pull the other one.

Twenty years on from Iraq, in the aftermath of the collapse of Afghanistan, we must learn the lessons of this recent past. We must strike out on our own, we must have an independent and peaceful foreign policy.