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

At the outset I want to place on the record my appreciation for the work of Senator Shoebridge and his team in leading the Greens in relation to the National Security Legislation Amendment (Comprehensive Review and Other Measures No. 3) Bill 2023. In considering this legislation, I think it is important to place it in context. I will go to the context in a moment. But I want to first place on the record a few key concerns that I and my colleagues share on the legislation before us this afternoon.

The legislation as currently worded would include expansion of the exclusions that are provided for those with spent convictions to enable ASIO to use, record or disclose other pieces of critical information related to spent convictions. This has been raised as a concern by the human rights committee inquiry into this bill. The bill also reduces oversight by excluding ASIS, the general Geospatial Intelligence Organisation, the Australian Signals Directorate, the Office of National Intelligence and the Defence Intelligence Organisation from the Commonwealth Ombudsman's jurisdiction. Does anyone seriously believe that these entities require less oversight, that they are organisations with track records that would lead a reasonable legislature to believe that they can be trusted to go off on their own? This is a deeply concerning aspect of this bill. We do not support these changes, and we'll propose amendments to retain the ombudsman's oversight and remove what we believe is the inappropriate use of spent convictions.

The context of this bill is important, and it is this: this Labor government has recently completed the prosecution of David McBride, the whistleblower without whom the Australian public would not know that our armed forces in Afghanistan were murdering Afghan civilians—were torturing Afghan civilians, were burning their homes to the ground—and that this was not an isolated incident but a pattern of behaviour. It occurred again and again and again across multiple deployments. Crimes were perpetrated by senior squadron leadership—individuals who had been placed on the highest moral pedestal by both the Australian Defence Force's senior command and Australian governments of both Liberal and Labor leadership.

Without David McBride, the public would not know. Because of his actions, the public gained insight into what was being done in the community's name. This was a courageous act by this individual, who I have met. In the face of pressure such as none in here can possibly imagine and risk to which I hope none of us in here are ever subjected, he decided to do the right thing and tell the truth. And the response of this government is to send him away for more than five years. It is disgusting. It is a disgrace. Not only have they sent him away; they have failed to act on so many of the issues which he was attempting to bring to the attention of the public.

As we sit here now, we have had the Brereton inquiry deliver a report that has led to some initially very tepid consequences for a few individual perpetrators on the ground—some of them. Let us make no mistake: it is vital that the individuals who pulled the trigger—who kicked innocent civilians off the edge of cliffs and then came down to the bottom and shot them in the back of the head—be held personally responsible. And it is vital to understand that, in an organisation such as the Australian Army and the Australian special forces, there is a chain of command and a chain of responsibility. If those individuals commit those actions within a certain operation or theatre of war, the senior command must also be held responsible. That has not occurred to this day.

The Australian government, dragged kicking and screaming by the work of individuals such as David McBride, has begun some accountability measures against some individual perpetrators, but the systemic issues remain. Those at the top of the chain of command were in posts of responsibility during the times when the SAS squadrons would go outside the wire of the base and travel into the Afghan countryside and murder and destroy and shoot disabled people as they fled helicopters. While those actions were being perpetrated, those in the position of senior command either knew and did nothing or did not know when they should have. Neither outcome frees them from responsibility.

That is just the military leadership. But we have a defence minister in this country with extraordinary powers. Across the time of our some-20 years in Afghanistan, defence ministers were appointed by both the Labor and Liberal parties, and not a single one of them has been held responsible for the fact that organisations under their responsibility ended up enabling individuals to carry out these crimes. In fact, a ridiculous political silence has settled over this issue, where both sides pretend that they had never heard the stories around the bars of Canberra, that they had never had the side conversations with the defence ministers who had come back from Afghanistan after having been to the illegal bars on base and heard the stories from the troops who were deeply concerned—let's put it politely—with the culture of what was occurring on the ground in Afghanistan. It wasn't so much an open political secret in this place as an open military secret within the structures of the Australian senior armed forces command. This is ridiculous.

This lack of accountability has enabled individual perpetrators to frame themselves as the victims of a scapegoating exercise. It has allowed these individuals who did perpetrate these disgusting, disgraceful, hateful crimes to paint themselves as the victims because those above them in senior positions of command have not been held responsible. Through this entire process, as members of the Liberal Party argue about unit citations and as Labor try to pretend that they weren't in government and didn't have a defence minister—in fact, multiple defence ministers—appointed while these crimes were occurring, the community that is ultimately forgotten is the Afghan people who have had their lives destroyed either as a direct result of these crimes or as a broader result of our presence in Afghanistan. And then there are the families of those individuals who perpetrated the crimes. Those individuals who perpetrated the crimes, who returned to Australia shrouded in untouchability, in a sense of superiority, in the procedural protection and cultural cloak offered to them by both the armed forces and the Australian political establishment, were then allowed and enabled to perpetrate terrible abuse against their own families. And when those families and individuals sought help they were often treated in a way that in no way matched the urgency, sensitivity, care and impartiality that they should have been able to expect in that moment.

This entire sorry saga would have remained hidden in a vault somewhere in the Department of Defence, without David McBride and whistleblowers like him, who, faced with the choice between silence, complicity and action, decided to act—decided to risk their freedom, in the belief that if the public knew then politicians would be forced to act. Well, the public knows now. And the politicians did act.

What David did not expect—as he and so many had hoped that that action would be against the perpetrators—was that that action would be against the whistleblowers. Or maybe they did expect that of the mob over here, the Liberal Party, which contains so many individuals who like to cosplay as though they will join together at some point in a new national security state where every area of policy is run through a Department of Home Affairs and a Department of Defence that are completely interlinked, that will allow them to know personally what every member of an opposition group is up to at any particular point in time, and who fantasise about a world where individuals in the community with free thought and action are protected from the results of that free thought and action by a super state that keeps the people of Hobbiton safe. Who does that remind us of?

They certainly did not expect it from a Labor government elected on a platform of improving transparency in Australia and protecting whistleblowers. Every day Labor have been in government, they've had the power to drop these charges against McBride and instead to acknowledge his bravery and the bravery of so many other whistleblowers who have brought these issues to light, to celebrate them, and to hold the chain of command responsible. Instead, they have continued with the coalition's prosecution, and now they have condemned this man to over five years in jail. It is a shame upon them all.