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

The Greens oppose these amendments coming from the coalition. Rather remarkably, the contributions from the coalition ignore the existing law. The law requires the make-up of this committee to reflect the make-up of the parliament. It actually says that expressly in black-and-white. We have a series of propositions put by the coalition to urge the government to populate this committee with breach of the clear legislative requirements that are being made up in a manner that represents the diversity in the parliament. It is quite remarkable, seeing a major political party urging the government of the day to not only maintain a political club but to do so in clear breach of the law on a national security committee.

When this committee was established, the parliament turned its mind to the idea that it would be receiving significant amount of privileged secret information, so, rather than create a club where only a select subset of the parliament would get access to it, the parliament expressly legislated that if you're going to have a committee which receives rafts of secret information and then provides reports to the parliament on how it should respond, the parliament said, 'Well, that committee should be reflective of the parliament.'

We have now had the coalition, both today and on Friday, state that this committee should statutorily exclude anybody who is not from the coalition or the Labor Party. They use this term 'parties of government' as though the coalition is to be trusted. This is the same political party that made Scott Morrison the Prime Minister, who had so many breaches of integrity that the entire nation, except for a tiny subset of hard-right ultras in the coalition, breathed an enormous sigh of relief that he was no longer in a position to have access to that kind of information. This is the same coalition that in its fringe 'cooker' section is working on QAnon conspiracies, and sharing QAnon conspiracies as part of their political project. And the coalition say that they are somehow a trusty set of hands on national security.

Let's be utterly clear about it. There are a bunch of people elected as coalition MPs who cheered on the riots attacking democracy in the United States. There are a bunch of people in the coalition who cheer on the attempts by Donald Trump and his mates to subvert democracy in the United States. And there are a bunch of people in the coalition, elected into this chamber and into other parliaments around the country, who would cheer on the subversion of democracy in Australia. And they say that they're somehow to be trusted, uniquely trusted, with security and defence information. It would almost be laughable if it were not so serious.

What have we seen from 17 years of unanimous like-mindedness, the unchallenging club? What have we seen? Well, we've got a little bit of an insight into the outcomes of that in today's media. We're seeing billions and billions of dollars stripped out of our defence and security budget by unscrupulous consultants who realise that nobody is checking. They realise that the bulk of what goes for scrutiny of the defence expenditure and defence programs in this country happens in this secret club that Senator Paterson used to chair and is so in love with. The secret club chaired by Senator Paterson, in the course of his entire occupation of the role of chair, somehow missed a multibillion-dollar rort of defence coming from KPMG. How many times did KPMG turn up and say they loved what you were doing—less scrutiny, more money, less power? Somehow or other it just passed them by on their secret committee.

The same secret committee signed off on the French submarines deal and said it was so important and we should urgently do that. They loved it. That was $5 billion and a decade wasted. Who has been held to account for that? Nobody on the secret committee, nobody in the defence establishment. Isn't it going well? Is this the same secret committee that was in charge of oversight of the national security when the 2016 white paper was delivered that said there was a mess, and when the Defence Strategic Review was delivered, which says that pretty much no part of defence is working, that they're not meeting the right strategic challenges and they couldn't procure their way to a shared meal in a pub? Is that the same secret committee that's been doing such a great job? It turns out it is, and they want to just keep the club operating. Any objective view of it says that it's not working.

If this amendment, sometimes referred to as the Wilkie amendment, works its way through, and there is at least one critical voice, one critical mind, on the committee, how could that be a backward step? I know that there was tittering from the coalition benches when there was a discussion of Andrew Wilkie being a whistleblower. There was a little frisson of tension from the coalition. Imagine putting a whistleblower on it. Imagine putting somebody on it who had firm integrity, who stood up when they saw an unlawful war coming, who put their liberty on the line to call out what has ended up being a two-decade debacle from our country and our allies in Iraq. Imagine putting someone with that kind of integrity on a national oversight committee. That's something the coalition could never come at, putting somebody like that on the committee—just one critical voice, one critical mind. The thought of having even just one critical mind on this committee has given the coalition a serious case of kittens. They've all been birthing kittens for the last 48 hours at the prospect that there might be one critical mind. We aren't so frightened of democracy. We kind of like a critical mind being on this committee, and we will be opposing this amendment.