Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Defence Amendment (Safeguarding Australia's Military Secrets) Bill 2024 and the Defence Trade Controls Amendment Bill 2024. I wish to echo and associate myself with comments of senators in my team, particularly Senator Shoebridge but also Senators Rice, Waters and Faruqi, and others who also have been on their feet talking about these bills today. These bills are in fact definitely part of the AUKUS deal. They are the legislative changes that are needed to ensure Australia's military systems are aligned with the US.

I want to preface this by reiterating what Senator Rice just talked about: 80 per cent of Australians do not want our primary ally to be the US, but this agreement ensures that that will be the case. We are being cemented into that place. AUKUS stops us as Australians from making decisions about who we engage with and, in fact, on what terms we engage with them. It's exactly as Senator Rice talked about. No longer an Anglo nation in the Asia-Pacific, our region, we're a multiracial, multicultural and multinational country. We're a country that should be proud of our links across our region, and not be looking to a primary ally to make all the decisions for us. We lose complete control of that through this deal, which prevents us from operating independently. This is just some of the legislation that we are seeing that is at the request of Washington. You might as well rub out the stamp on the top of the documentation, as it's coming direct out of Washington via the ambassador or whoever else their representative is over there. In this deal we are being told what to do by the US and the UK in tandem. When the UK says things to us like, 'Give $5 billion over to Rolls-Royce,' the Australian government roll over and get their bellies scratched. We roll over and hand over $5 billion, at the request of the UK government, to Rolls-Royce. That's a disgrace. The magic number here for this deal is $368 billion. Don't forget that number: $368 billion. In the middle of the housing crisis and a cost-of-living crisis—which the opposition will ask questions about during question time and the government will stand and do their dixers about the cost of living and what they're doing for every Australian—the government have $368 billion to give away for submarines. It's like kids with Tonka trucks in a sandpit. This government's priority is giving money away in sham deals like AUKUS. It's absolutely shameful.

AUKUS, in fact, is a shambles. We've spent billions of dollars ending deals, changing governments and entering into new deals. We've done this over and over again. It's actually the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome—but there is not. We see this same old thing being rolled out by the two major parties in this place. We are making legislative changes in this place to align our regulation with the US, effectively, as has already been said, making Australia the 51st state of the US.

How many submarines have we received so far? Can anyone count them? Zero. We have got none. There's even serious doubt—and I've heard this repeated constantly in all the news coverage that I've heard about this deal—that we'll ever receive any. The cold, hard facts about this is that the technology will be so old by the time they're delivered that they'll be useless. We've parted with $368 billion for old technology that you are signing us up to. You are signing the cheque to make sure that we get old stuff that's been passed along—dumped, in fact. We're like a vacant car lot down here.

People in my home state of Western Australia have been promised jobs. Every minister, including the defence minister and the Minister for Resources, who's the local member there—they all come out and want to cut a ribbon and talk about jobs and how great it is. 'We're going to build stuff.' It's all part of this deal, whether you're in South Australia, Western Australia or in Senator Shoebridge's home state of New South Wales. These are all the wonderful promises that this is what's going to happen, and, ultimately, it will be the taxpayers and the workers who will end up getting the raw deal out of this. They will get the absolute end of it, and they have just lost out on $368 billion if we continue down this path.

The Greens knew this was a bad deal from the start, and we're on record continuing to say that AUKUS is not the right move. The deal is sinking. The major parties continue this little banter between them and are so stubborn to continue this support. There's hardly sunlight between them right now. This deal will actually sink alongside all of us, because they're continuing down this pathway. It's absolutely ridiculous. In real time, we will see the destabilising of our region—the dumping ground and parking lot for UK and US nuclear submarines. We'll be painting a massive target on our backs. There's already been reports about the west coast of Australia, my home state of Western Australia, not having enough coverage. We are already a target—hello!—in the region. You go from Exmouth down to Garden Island, and there's nothing in between helping us to have any protection from what the government and the opposition are sitting together holding hands about.

We've already agreed—it's nothing new—to give $10 billion to the US and UK militaries as part of AUKUS. We've already seen that fly out the door. This is literally funnelling our taxpayer dollars to the UK and the US military. We're already doing that in real time. You will watch Senator Shoebridge do an amazing job during Defence estimates, trying to get the answers. Unfortunately, it is like question time minus the answers, Senator Shoebridge, but we continue to ask these questions.

Just last week, the US Congress passed an $825 billion defence budget. This wasn't a budget just for a singular approach. This is more than the budget of 10 countries combined, not just one. So I don't think it is unreasonable to suggest that the US don't need any more money at all, and they certainly don't need our money for their defence budget. They don't need to be bankrolled by the Australian taxpayer, okay?