David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of answers given by Minister Farrell to questions without notice asked today by both Senator McKim and me, and of answers given by the Minister Gallagher to Senator McKim.

It's now 20 years since Iraq was illegally invaded, an invasion that was predicated on a lie that was sold to the world by the United States and the United Kingdom. It was a lie that our government accepted at face value, never testing it, never bringing it to this parliament, never putting it to the Australian people; and it was a lie that produced a brutal war, the effects of which are still being felt 20 years on. Those effects are particularly felt by the people of Iraq. There were some 7,000 Iraqi civilians killed in just the first two months of the 'shock and awe' campaign, as it was described. Some 500,000 Iraqis have lost their lives since, and millions of Iraqis remain displaced, many of them refugees in their own country—all for a war based on a lie. We followed the United States into the war like a little loyal poodle. And has this government learnt the lessons from that war? Obviously not.

First of all, this government joined with the coalition to refuse to release the documents about the decision-making leading us into that war and continue the secrecy of the coalition under the new, Albanese government. But then, in this last week, we have seen just how little Labor have learned from history, because they have committed us to a $368 billion plus nuclear submarine package with the United States and the United Kingdom—the two countries that peddled those lies that dragged us into the war with Iraq. They've signed us on to a 30-year, $368-plus billion nuclear submarine program which will inevitably drag us into the United States's next war, because that's the purpose of it. It's to tie the Australian military and the Australian people intimately into the United States military—because these are subs we can't build, we can't crew, we can't operate and we won't be able to deploy without the express consent of the United States.

That isn't about defending Australia; it's about projecting force, well from our shores, into the South China Sea as a loyal sub-unit of the United States military. And that lie that is repeatedly told by the Albanese government, peddling the reheated cooked-up coalition policy that this is about defending Australia, is being learnt by millions of Australians as we speak.