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

The AUKUS political deal was a last-ditch attempt by Scott Morrison to cling on to power. Brought before the Australian people in the dying chapter of that benighted government, it was his final roll of the dice. His prediction was this: 'If I come together with some of the most outlandish and least trusted world leaders and propose to the Australian public and the parties in this place that we bind ourselves to the Americans and the British,' led at that time by Boris Johnson, 'under a project that will see hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the acquisition of nuclear powered submarines, necessitating a waste dump on Australian soil and nuclear submarines in our waters, then no Australian Labor Party that can call itself progressive will possibly be able to back that. No Australian Labor Party, bound as they are to a platform that includes support for nonproliferation, will surely be able to back that? They'll have to oppose it. It will sound so ridiculous, particularly being led by Anthony Albanese. They can't possibly back it. So they'll oppose it and we will have,' he thought, 'a khaki election. We'll have an election where I can say, "I'm Scott Morrison, defender of the people of Australia, and the other side want to put us at risk."'

What he did not count on was the fundamental spinelessness of the leadership of the current Australian Labor Party and the reality that the leadership of the current Australian Labor Party are not progressive. They have no desire nor ability to oppose the conservatives when it comes to questions of so-called national security. He had not counted on just how committed people like Minister Wong and Mr Albanese were to fundamentally binding themselves to the Liberal-National coalition, which on questions of national security you wouldn't trust to run a lemonade stand, so they could have the maximum possible chance of getting elected. So Mr Morrison's gamble to get himself a khaki election failed, and here we are today, buried, as the Australian people, under the $370 billion price of Labor's fundamental political spinelessness, where we as a nation are asked to trust, for the next 30 years, in the judgement of the United States of America.

Let us examine the record of this nation with which we are to link our foreign policy for the next three decades—to which we are to bind ourselves inexorably and indivisibly. Let's examine their record on matters of war and peace since the Second World War. There was the war in Vietnam: five million tonnes of bombs dropped on a nation. That was more than all of the bombs dropped by the United States in the entirety of the Second World War. There were the illegal bombings of Laos and Cambodia. There was the invasion of Panama. There was the support of coups all across South America—in Chile, in particular, and in El Salvador. There was the support of the Contras in Nicaragua, violent and vile as they were. And then it rolls wonderfully up to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Iraq was an illegal and immoral invasion which fundamentally undermined international law, left 500,000 people dead and 1.2 million people displaced, and created five million orphans. Australia's, Britain's and the United States's populations were led to war on the lies of a US president. And then, as if add a dark bow to the whole thing, there was Afghanistan, where America in its wisdom spent 20 years, trillions of dollars and countless lives to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.

This is the country that now, only two years out from living under a fascist president who led a coup against his own government in order to overturn the results of an election, and 18 months away from either his return or the potential election of President DiSantis—a competent fascist—the Australian Labor Party proposes that we bind ourselves to for the next 30 years. This is the judgement that we are being asked to trust, not because Penny Wong, Richard Marles or Anthony Albanese think it's a good thing—