Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I want to associate myself with the comments made by the other members of the Greens Senate team, Senator Shoebridge, Senator Cox and others who have spoken today on this legislation, the Defence Amendment (Safeguarding Australia's Military Secrets) Bill 2024 and the Defence Trade Controls Amendment Bill 2024. I stand here proudly as a member of a party that is committed to peace and nuclear nonproliferation, unlike the Labor government and the coalition, who are standing together to increase our participation in the military industrial complex. I think I stand here on behalf of the majority of Australians, who do not want to see us go down the path of committing ourselves to war rather than working for peace.

It's a great shame that we're being told what legislation to pass and when by a foreign government. As my colleagues have said, this legislation will enmesh Australia further into the US regulatory system. Already the cost of AUKUS sits at an eye-watering $368 billion—a figure, I might note, that seems to increase every time we get an update. These are public funds that are being funnelled into foreign military industries. To date, the failure of AUKUS has been profound. We are giving billions of dollars to the US and the UK; we have abandoned an independent foreign policy; and, as Senator Cox has said, we are simply turning Australia into a parking lot for US weapons. For what? For nothing.

The United States has shown little interest in maintaining their end of the deal. The legislation that was passed by the US in Congress doesn't even guarantee Australia the sale of nuclear-powered submarines and, as Senator Cox has said, it's questionable whether we'll ever get them. Given the US currently can't build enough nuclear submarines to meet its own needs, let alone Australia's, this surely has to be a poison pill for the AUKUS deal. I think the United States is taking Australia for a ride, and I'm amazed that the coalition and the Labor government cannot see that.

In the same week that Labor are trying to ram through legislation written by the gas industry, they're also doing the bidding of the US military establishment. So much for governing for the people! These bills tie us to the United States for good. We hear a lot of talk in this chamber about how we have to make decisions for future generations. I question whether our future generations want to be tied to the United States. Think about what that means. Think about what that might mean being tied to. We can either have an independent foreign policy or nuclear submarines from the US but we are in the going to get both. The ALP's own backyard is crying out against AUKUS, with one Labor group calling for a freeze on AUKUS so as to stop 'underwriting the US Navy industrial shipyards'.

My colleagues have also talked about the fact that, in terms of research, as part of this AUKUS package, the bills that are before us today are going to cut Australia off from the rest of the world. This will make it easier to exchange scientific ideas and technology with the US and the UK, but it's going to put up barriers against us doing that with every other country. If this legislation is passed in its current state, researchers and businesses working with people from countries like South Korea or India on technology and research that does have a dual use, they'll have to stop and will have to get approval from the minister. Do we really want that to happen? Do we really think that that is going to improve the research output of this country?

We hear a lot of talk about how we want to revive manufacturing and we want to be the country that starts to really take control of the way we look at industry, and here we are signing ourselves up to a situation where, if it's not with the US and the UK, the minister gets to decide if it's going to be a problem. This has rightly drawn widespread criticism from industry and the higher education sector. They have raised real concerns that this bill will force them to apply for thousands of new permits to do basic research and product development. It hardly seems a way to improve our economy.

It's a moment of political irony that this bill is touted as part of Australia's national security response yet, in fact, will make Australians less safe while stunting both our academic and economic growth. In a time of global multifaceted problems facing society, locking down research works against our best interests. Australia should be doing everything in our power to seek out strong scientific and research relationships with the rest of the world, not cutting them off. The inquiry into this bill painted a disturbing picture of the national research brain drain that will follow if these bills proceed. All of these concerns are being swept aside by Labor and the coalition with their uncritical cheerleading for AUKUS.

AUKUS, all round, is a bad deal for Australia. We are giving billions of dollars to foreign militaries and the defence contractors and the lobbyists and the consultants that circle around them. We are ploughing ahead with a defence policy conceived in the boardrooms of the defence industry in Washington. We should ask ourselves why Labor and coalition politicians are queueing up to kiss the hands of foreign defence industries. Could it have something to do with the soft landing that many of them and their staff take with these firms when they leave politics?

Thank you, Senator Shoebridge. On the other side of the world, our future and our best interests barely register on the radar of US and UK defence establishments. We are kidding ourselves if we think that they are sitting over there worried about us. We are pursuing a jingoistic defence strategy without a clear-headed idea of where this ultimately leads. Again, I repeat, research shows us that the majority of Australians do not want our primary ally to be the United States. AUKUS carves our relationship with the US into stone. It locks us in permanently with a foreign power that will walk away from us the moment it is politically expedient to do so.

In the past few weeks we have discovered that not only are we on the hook for the $368 billion; we are now going to prop up the flailing British defence industry with a $5 billion subsidy. Let me say that again: $5 billion—dropped like we found it down the back of the couch. The United Kingdom barely had to flex their diplomatic muscles for our government to fall over itself to throw money at BAE. This is the same British defence company that has blown out the build of the Hunter class frigates by $20 billion. So let's not pretend that they are not going to come back with their hands out again in another six months.

AUKUS is a bad deal all round, and the Australian government is getting fleeced from both directions. It also goes beyond just being a bad deal. The pursuit of AUKUS is actively against our best interests as a nation. We are allowing ourselves to be treated as pawns in a geopolitical game. We have our own interests, our own beliefs and our own future. We have seen the United States uncritically backing Israel's war in Gaza, pouring billions into Israel while threatening to sanction the international bodies who govern our rules based system. It's an incredibly risky time to be tying ourselves forever to the United States. The US government has rejected and in some cases threatened the existence of the international institutions that are working towards peace. The actions of the United States in supporting the Israeli government in this time of escalating humanitarian catastrophe, while we see war crime after war crime after war crime broadcast from Gaza, risk destabilising Australia. It is well past due to examine what exactly our shared interests with the United States are in our defence strategy. We should be even more critical, as we head into a possible change of the US presidency, of who we are being tied to. We are at genuine risk of being stuck at the end of a bad deal with an unstable authoritarian US commander-in-chief pulling our strings.

We are escalating tensions in the Asia Pacific rather than diffusing them. The world is facing an unprecedented climate crisis and rapidly expanding wealth inequality, and the solutions to these rely on global cooperation. We should be focusing on the true existential threat to the future of this planet—global boiling. Rather than building up an industry for weapons, we should be fostering our renewables industry. And we should be going out to our neighbours and doing everything that we can to help bring down global emissions. That is our real moral obligation to the region and to our neighbours.

These bills lock Australia into the whims of foreign governments in the United States and the United Kingdom, and the Greens oppose them. It is disgraceful that this is what the Labor government has decided to prioritise. And, as Senator Rice said, this is about choices. We currently have a situation where nearly every single public school in this country remains underfunded. Kids cannot get the resources that they need to reach their potential. We also have people in our community who are being punished and kicked down by a punitive welfare system. We have people who can't afford to put food on the table, to pay their rent, to buy their kids the stuff they need for school. And we have renters facing exorbitant rent increases and people right across the country in housing stress.

My office is below the department of housing in Gladstone. Every day we have people coming into our office, who've been told there is nowhere for them, who are an incredible distress. These are the things this government is choosing not to spend money on, instead giving that money to the UK and the US for nuclear submarines—presuming we get some. Why is it that this is what the Labor government treats as an urgent priority, signing over our research, our regulatory systems and just more money to the US government.

At the end of this fruitless exercise is a wasteful AUKUS deal. AUKUS is a self-fulfilling prophecy of antagonism and conflict. It is not a recipe for cooperation and peace. It is throwing in the towel to build constructive relationships with our neighbours. We are seeing, increasingly, around the world people taking to the streets. They are speaking up against the war preparation economy, the military industrial complex. They are starting to question why governments continue to prioritise and funnel money into defence while people in the community need government help and support. The Greens are proud to stand with every single person who is against the AUKUS deal and who wants our government to work for peace. We reject the wasteful AUKUS plan and we reject these bills today.