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

I speak today in support of the International Organisations (Privileges and Immunities) Amendment Bill 2023 on behalf of the Australian Greens. We in the Greens recognise that this amendment has the potential to broaden and deepen Australia's engagement with the international community. We agree that international organisations carry out critical work, particularly in the areas of humanitarian work, scientific exploration and other fields, to promote international cooperation and collaboration. The Greens do share concerns that DFAT's submission did not go sufficiently into the reasons for its change in position since 2013 and therefore does not articulate how the new bill prevents or mitigates the department's previous concerns regarding the expansion of the scope of the act.

We believe in Australia's role in international cooperation. We are deeply committed, as a party of peace and nonviolence, to cooperation and peaceful consensus-building with our friends and our partners. Our movement is built on a belief and a foundation that global cooperation facilitated by peaceful, non-violent conflict resolution is essential to ensuring human and environmental wellbeing. Foreign affairs, we believe, should operate on relationships of exchange, collaboration and genuine consensus-building.

With the oldest governance structures globally, First Nations peoples' approaches to interpolity, coexistence and relationship-building with neighbouring political entities should drive foreign affairs policies. We need to acknowledge that, if we are to address the climate crisis, to eliminate nuclear weapons and to collaborate on so many of the other pressing issues which face our collective human species, we need to use this knowledge and wisdom and place it at the heart of how we work. We need to work together to address the shared human and environmental challenges that we are now faced with.

The foreign minister noted in a brief on the bill, which was provided to my office in our consideration of the legislation, 'The bill will improve Australia's ability to attract and host international conferences.' Which conference do we think they pointed directly to? They included the 31st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change—COP31—for which Australia has bid. Yes, it has. Hasn't the Australian government bid for COP? Yet, I think, and the Greens believe, that the government needs to do a lot more if it truly wishes to attract COP with dignity and to make a pitch for such an important global gathering upon a basis of integrity.

I am privileged to have had the opportunity to meet with Pacific leaders during their visits to Australia. In this political landscape, it is always a pleasure to be a foreign affairs spokesperson who can wholeheartedly embrace and hear their climate concerns. It is a pleasure to be somebody that can sit with them and not ask them to validate their fears and frustrations, and not ask them to balance their reality of losing their homes and their sacred sites to the ever-rising waters of the Pacific against the internal difficulties of taking action, as they are so often asked to do by representatives of both the Liberal Party and the Labor Party. It is a pleasure to be able to meet with them and work with them in solidarity in the fight against catastrophic climate change, which they are facing on the front line.

Former leaders, including leaders of the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Tuvalu and Palau, have said that Australia should stop trying to hurry their countries to support Australia's bid for COP31. I'll just make that clear. Our country has been placing pressure on Pacific island leaders to support this nation's bid for COP in a context where their homes are sinking because of the very fuels that this government continues to burn and rip out of the ground and as a direct result of government action. This is just the latest example of a patriarchal and disingenuous approach to foreign policy which has characterised the approach of the Australian government to the region not just for the last couple of governments or for the last couple of decades but, indeed, since the very beginning of an independent Australian foreign policy approach in our region. From the very beginning, the leaders of both the Liberal and Labor parties—whatever side of politics they have been on—have been on a unity ticket when it comes to the Pacific with a sole goal in mind, and that's to maintain Australian power in the region on behalf of the United States and to operate effectively, first and foremost, as a sub-imperial power.

That has meant that at every step when Pacific island leaders have come together, whether it be to join in the non-aligned movement and to be represented at Bandung as the world came together to chart a pathway to peace in the middle of the Cold War, where was Australia? It was bugging those meetings and actively placing policies in the way of such peaceful and non-violent cooperation in the face of the global arms race. When Pacific leaders come together to champion the denuclearisation of their homes and waters to make sure that their homes and lands are never again the site of nuclear testing—when their homes and lands have so often been used as the playground, the theatre, as global powers play arms-race games at their expense—where is Australia? Australia is actively undermining the work of global nonproliferation and actively bringing a nuclear arms race to their backyard through our government's support of AUKUS.

For decades and decades, Pacific leaders have sat around table after table with prime ministers from all sides of parliament and begged them to stop burning the coal and gas that is sinking their homes. And this government has the cheek, the barefaced audacity—I am losing track of the number of coalmines that our so-called environment minister has approved. She is not only failing to keep the stuff in the ground and not only failing to transition away but actively opening more. Yet the Australian government has the cheek to go to a Pacific island nation—to Fiji, of all places, which has relocated town after town due to rising waters. This is not at some theoretical point in the future; multiple towns have already had to be relocated, with many, many more on the list. Minister Bowen, from the other place, goes into a meeting with Pacific island leaders in Suva and comes out saying that he hopes that this COP, to be hosted in Australia, will be remembered as the Pacific COP. What a joke! What a cruel farce!

The reality of the moment is this: the Australian Labor Party can pick between, on one hand, the donations given to them by the Woodsides and the BHPs and the Rio Tintos, for which the Prime Minister is so proud to shill, and positive headlines in the Murdoch press and, on the other hand, Pacific island nations.