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

Autonomous sanctions are a critical tool in Australia's contribution to international justice. They have been used to hold foreign governments and actors to account and as an expression of Australia's condemnation. It is truly vitally important that the ability of Australia to sanction individuals and groups that commit grievous harms is upheld and protected from undue interference. The Australian Greens support the intent of the Autonomous Sanctions Amendment Bill 2024, which seeks to close loopholes. This will go some way to ensuring Australia's ability to continue to use sanctions effectively and often. The bill as drafted, however, does not go far enough in ensuring they are in fact used responsibly and transparently.

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights in its second report of this year raised concerns about the compatibility of this bill with human rights. Among concerns raised was the extent to which ministerial discretion could be used in the application of sanctions and the limited safeguards and opportunities for review. The recommendation of the committee was to implement a number of amendments to the autonomous sanctions framework. These recommendations included the incorporation of a review—indeed, multiple review points—into the process, regular reporting to Parliament in relation to the application of autonomous sanctions and widening consultation when considering applications of sanctions themselves. Many of these recommendations, first made by the committee in 2016, have not been implemented. There have been too many examples of successive governments failing to provide transparency to this parliament and to the Australian people. There must be avenues for holding the government accountable for both sanctions they choose to apply and the ones that they decide not to apply.

As such, on behalf of the Greens, I intend to move amendments to this legislation. Our community deserves to know when the government chooses not to put sanctions in place. A contemporary example would be that the community deserves to have an explanation as to why the calls of the Australian Palestinian community have not been actioned by the government, why the government have failed to place sanctions upon Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, as the United States has done. One of our Greens amendments would require the foreign minister to explain why the government is unwilling to sanction these illegal settlers.

The decision to place sanctions can hold great importance to diaspora communities here in Australia and indeed across the world. The impact of the placement of sanctions must be understood by the government as part of and, indeed, before making their decision. As such, an additional amendment will be offered by the Greens, which I will move, which would require the government to set up avenues of community consultation when seeking to apply sanctions. This would ensure that there is an opportunity for the community to make their concerns and requests known and, importantly, for the government to be held to account by the community if they refuse to act. This bill as it is currently written is not even achieving the bare minimum of what is needed to improve our sanctions legislation, and the Greens strongly support going further in strengthening sanctions controls.