Nita Green (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this private senator's bill, the Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Approval of Overseas Service) Bill 2020. In doing so, I begin by saying that the tone that the mover of this bill brings to this debate diminishes the Senate and our ability to have a really robust, meaningful, important discussion about matters of national security and national defence. The way that members of this place are spoken to and spoken about in relation to this should be above party politics. I am going to use my time in this chamber to speak in an appropriate tone for the level of debate required for this important matter. The tone coming from that end of the chamber diminishes the debate itself and diminishes the mover of this bill.

I want to begin my contribution to this debate, as I'm sure others in the chamber would do, by acknowledging all the Australian Defence Force members who are currently serving overseas and to also acknowledge their families, who have probably spent many nights without their loved ones and hope to see them come home safe and sound. And I acknowledge that nobody in this chamber or in this parliament would seek to send a member of the Australian Defence Force into harm's way without justification, without advice, without the rigour of questions being asked as required. I think we can all acknowledge that respectfully—that we care about these men and women, that they play an incredibly important role in our country and in the defence of our country and that we owe a debt of gratitude to every member of the Defence Force who is deployed overseas currently and who has been deployed overseas in the past. I just want to acknowledge those men and women today.

I have a few issues with this bill and this proposal. I think it's fair to say that the Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Approval of Overseas Service) Bill 2020 is a bill that has had many iterations. Since 1985, I think it was, there's been some form of this bill being pushed through debate by members of the Greens or the Democrats. It's something that is discussed from time to time in this place. We've had many parliamentary inquiries, and there is a parliamentary inquiry on foot at the moment about this very issue. So, discussing this is something that I think all parliamentarians take very seriously, as well as looking at it again and again in the context of the geopolitical circumstances that we find ourselves in. We go back and we have a look and consider this with thought, with care. But this is a bill that is not supported by the government, and there are many reasons for that.

I want to address one of the underlying premises in this bill, and it goes back to the tone of the debate. There seems to be this underlying premise that the decisions that are made by the executive in relation to the deployment of the Defence Force are made in secret, or that there's no accountability to the parliament—that there's some sort of covert decision-making that we don't talk to the public about. But that's not true. We know that decisions sometimes do need to be made quickly, in the interests of the safety of members of the Australian Defence Force and the safety of others overseas. But I'm on many parliamentary committees in relation to defence, and I know that members of Defence diligently come to parliament and sit in front of estimates for hours and hours on end, answering questions. They are called before many inquiries and committees to provide briefings. They provide private briefings to parliamentarians on matters that we need to understand in our roles. And they are accountable to the executive, and the executive is accountable to the Australian people. We know that. I want to dismiss any idea that there is no accountability for the Defence Force or for the executive regarding the decisions that are made and to note that these decisions are ultimately made publicly.

I also acknowledge that on the occasions when there is a change in posture and when deployments do occur—and we saw that in the last term of parliament around the evacuation of people from Afghanistan—I think it's fair to say, whether it's the former government or whether it's our government, that the executive really does try to communicate that as urgently as possible to the Australian public and that they do speak to the media about that so that they can be asked questions. But sometimes there are some sensitivities about making that news public before troops are in a safe position. I just want to put that on the record—that I think the former government made that information public at an appropriate time, when the advice was given to them and when it was safe to do that. That's because the nature of deployment, the nature of sending people into harm's way, the nature of sending people into so-called emergency exits, is usually in unforeseen circumstances or where things need to be dealt with quickly. It's very clear that we need to make sure that the Defence Force has the urgency and the flexibility and the opportunity to take these necessary steps. I think that this bill would prevent that from happening.

There are also a number of holes in this bill. As the previous speaker alluded to, there's been some sort of attempt to capture this idea of emergency situations, obviously trying to pre-empt a discussion about the Defence Force needing to be agile and effective. But I was reading the bill this morning. It has a few holes. There is no definition of 'emergency exits'. There is a pretty loose term of what an emergency exit would be. I'd be concerned about that. There's no definition of what it means to be required to serve beyond territorial limits and what that could include. And what was concerning to me was that the process of requiring parliament to sit after a proclamation is made through the bill would require information to be made public, possibly in a window that doesn't serve the purposes of the actual emergency exit.

These are technical terms, but I have done my homework—I've read the bill and I've really considered this in the context of how this would take effect or how it would practically be provided. There are some things that have not been thought through about how this would operate. There's been an attempt to try to say that there's no reason why this bill shouldn't be supported. Well, there are plenty of reasons. There are plenty of holes in this bill.

I'm also concerned about one of the subsections in this bill which requires that the minister come back to the parliament every month or at the start of every month of a sitting and provide information that includes the number of people deployed. That's information that we might not necessarily want our enemies to understand at that particular time. I think there is certainly an argument that the Minister for Defence at the time, or the Prime Minister in particular, should be asked genuine questions, but I think across the chamber we are respectful that some information at some times needs to be dealt with sensitively. There is no accounting for that in this bill.

These are certainly just some of the things I picked up on a first reading. There have been a lot of parliamentary inquiries into previous bills of this nature that have picked up similar issues around unforeseen circumstances. That's because we're dealing with a bill that is about a political agenda of a political party. I know that's something that the Greens might not want to hear, and I'm sure they will be very precious about that, but the truth is that this is something that I know many people in the public have long memories about. They remember previous deployments and how they may or may not have been treated. The Greens political party is seeking to campaign on this issue. Campaigning on the deployment of Defence Force personnel is something that I think is pretty distasteful but this is something that the Greens political party is pushing as a political agenda.

I did want to keep the tone of my contribution pretty respectful, but I don't think there is a more self-indulgent, self-righteous, self-interested group in this Senate chamber, who should be so far away from national security decisions it is not funny. These are people who should never, ever be involved in making national security decisions, and they should never, ever be involved in having some sort of balancing power that decides what we do in the defence of our country. That is a pretty broad explanation, but, to make it very clear, this Senate at times has different compositions, and I know that we are subject to the composition of this Senate to pass legislation. Every form of government is. What I would not want to see is a situation where the Greens prevent action being taken because of a political purpose, because of a campaign and in order to seem to hold the executive to account. There are matters where that should happen and does happen, no matter who is sitting on the government benches. There is a purpose to the crossbench, and we respect the crossbench and we respect the composition of the Senate. But what I do not want to see is a situation where we have troops about to be deployed to an emergency situation or to a situation that involves putting people in harm's way and that decision is held up because of the self-interested political purposes of the Greens political party. They should be far removed from national security matters.

I think the Australian public would agree with that, and they do. The Greens certainly are not a party of government and they certainly are not a party that takes these issues seriously enough to be part of the decision-making process. They are not members of certain committees in this parliament for very good reason, and that's because only parties of government, I think it's fair to say, take the responsibility of national security seriously in a non-partisan way. We know we have a job to do when we come here. No matter who is in the executive or who the Prime Minister is, we take that role seriously. The members at the end of the chamber in the Greens political party don't take those responsibilities seriously. They should not ever be involved in this decision-making process, and that is something that I'm very, very passionate about.

I have a lot of sympathy, certainly, for some of the community members who have personal experience with this and want to come and talk to us about the impacts that deployment has had, but what I would prefer the Senate to be doing is to be discussing matters relating to how we can improve the lives of veterans who have been deployed. I think everyone around this chamber would agree that that is something that we should be talking about and considering. The Albanese government is working really hard to reduce the DVA backlog. We are delivering 10 Veterans and Families Hubs, and we're also making sure that we have additional payments to veterans in the total and permanent incapacity cohort. This is the stuff that we should be talking about when it comes to deployment—how we treat the people who return from oversees with respect and with the care that they deserve.

What we shouldn't be doing as a Senate is entertaining the idea that anyone in the Greens political party has any interest in the national security of our country other than their own self-interest and their own political pointscoring. That's what this is about. They can shout and scream and call us names and talk in emotive terms and call people 'warmongers'. The stuff that they do around this is pretty distasteful. They can do all of that, but at the end of the day there's a reason why they're not a party of government—long may that be the case. I do thank other members of this chamber who are engaging in this debate in a respectful way, because our Australian Defence Force members deserve that respect.