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

Absolutely. It's ridiculous that we are to see the sending of billions of our dollars overseas to the US and to the UK when we've got people in this country sleeping in cars, who can't afford medications, who have to choose between paying their bills or eating. That's in a developed nation like Australia, and we go, 'Hey, let's just palm off a whole lot of billions of dollars to other militaries in the US and the UK.' It's ridiculous.

The Defence Trade Controls Amendment Bill 2024 is also a precondition for Australia to receive nuclear submarines. In effect, it creates a bubble, allowing licence free exports for military and dual-use goods. Isn't that amazing? Fundamentally, this will cut us off. It will cut us off from the rest of the world, as there will be harsher restrictions on working with people outside of that bubble. If you create a bubble, you've got to stay in it. You can't just step outside of it when you feel like it and you will have harsher restrictions. This will, in fact, align Australia's scientific community, national security controls and military with the US. It will do all of those things, and it will be the people again who will suffer because of the bad choices of this government.

This bill, in its current state, would absolutely force researchers and businesses from countries like South Korea and India who've been working on technology that's deemed 'dual use' to stop and get approval from the minister or risk being thrown into prison for 10 years. You're going to go to prison because of the restrictions that are going to be put into this bill. That's ridiculous. And it will certainly and absolutely see certain sectors have to obtain permits just to do basic research. It's putting an unworkable burden on the higher education sector—I know my colleague Senator Faruqi has already talked about that—and on industry. In some cases, they are already struggling to keep up with the need to constantly apply for grants to keep up funding for their research. As the previous portfolio holder for science, I heard this directly from researchers. They don't have time to keep up with the grants, but now we're putting an extra burden on them by asking them to apply for additional permits.

The Department of Defence is unable to provide any clarity on the impact of this bill, what it might actually do and what they're going to do to mitigate any of the impacts. It's the same old thing from the Department of Defence. Indeed, the Department of Defence has also made some contradictory statements about the number of permits that may be impacted, required or exempt under this new framework. So again they continue their wonderful pattern of behaviour of not answering any questions and just sidestepping. We just needed a figure. We simply don't know to what extent this bill will impact the sector but it will impact mostly on our research and higher education sectors, which are already under stress. We know that. We are already seeing the impacts of brain drain. We are already struggling to keep our talent here because of the state of those sectors. It is competitive, and they are going overseas because of it. Now this will act as one of the biggest disincentives for most of the world to work with our Australian researchers.

The military secrets bill seeks to create an offence which, in fact, already exists. This bill seeks to introduce harsher penalties and more ministerial power—like they need any more power; they're already power drunk—to punish members of the ADF who train or work with certain foreign militaries or government entities. It's already an offence to disclose military secrets, but we want to give more power to them. This change will require Defence personnel and public servants to obtain authorisation before working with any other government entity, with a handy exemption for the Five Eyes nations of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the US. This again ensures that Australia's regime is aligned with the US. God knows how many times I've been in this chamber and heard people talk about Australian sovereignty. Australia's sovereignty is under threat under this agreement. We will never be able to make decisions for ourselves if we continue down this path.

The Australian Greens absolutely don't support this bill. It's been rushed through despite all of the significant concerns, particularly from academia and from businesses. It fails to address the very real issues with our defence export regime. It will have the most devastating impacts on Australian research and technology sectors if it is rubberstamped and passed without any scrutiny and without any change. As a place of scrutiny of legislation, we should be doing at least that.