Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the documents.

I want to note that one of the government’s responses tabled today is to a report from the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade that was tabled on 22 May last year. Going by the standards of the current government, a nine-month turnaround is actually quite prompt, but I should point out that it is well and truly outside the requirements of the standing orders for responses to committee reports from the government. Particularly given that there were only six recommendations contained in that report, I think a nine-month turnaround is unacceptable.

Nonetheless, it is appropriate to take the opportunity to note the government’s response and the fact that five of the six recommendations were agreed to or supported by the government. This flows on from some of the issues in the debate we had while taking note of questions about the nature of our Defence Force activities. The core recommendation from the committee was that:

… the ANZUS Alliance be maintained in its current form and that the treaty be viewed not just as a specific set of requirements, rather as a statement of shared values capable of being acted upon in the face of evolving contemporary threats.

Whilst I was not part of the subcommittee that drew up this particular report, even though I am a member of the broader joint standing committee, that is a recommendation I support. Indeed, I have published material, along with other Democrat colleagues, expressing support for the ANZUS alliance. Nonetheless, there are clearly significant concerns among a wide range of the Australian community about how the defence alliance and defence relationship with the United States are revolving. It is true that the ANZUS alliance is valuable and that it should be able to evolve in various directions. So, in criticising the way it is evolving, I am not criticising the ANZUS alliance or specifically the alliance with the United States but rather expressing concerns about the direction in which it is being taken or, perhaps more specifically, the direction we are allowing it to be taken by virtue of being led by the current United States administration.

Once again, under the new political correctness regime we have from this government, anybody who voices any sort of concern about specific details of our defence arrangements with the United States immediately gets slammed as being anti-American. There is an attempt to close down debate via sloganeering such as that rather than actually dealing with the substance of the concerns. Judging by the comments he made, it seems it is okay for the Australian Prime Minister to quite seriously slander the United States Democratic Party presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama, but if anybody else expresses concerns about defence issues with the United States they are called anti-American. The simple fact is that we have seen not only growing security threats but a growing lack of safety for Australia and Australians as a direct result of some of the decisions of this government, which have been driven by their uncritical application of the alliance with the current US administration.

This particular report and the government response to it draw attention to the continuing joint training between Australian and US defence forces and recommends that the joint training centre concept be codified in an MOU before the next exercise, Talisman Sabre, this year. That is coming up in a few months in my own state of Queensland. It raises one of those concerns that often manifests in the general community. I believe there is very strong support in the Australian community for an alliance with the United States, but there is also very strong disquiet about the way that alliance is manifesting itself with regard to some of the defence relationships. We have seen the bizarre situation of the huge amount of money that is being put forward for the next fighter plane and some of the very strange decision making and commentary relating to that from the government side. It is not just a matter of billions and billions of dollars being misused or misapplied; it is a matter of locking our defence forces in the long term into structures and equipment that do not maximise our flexibility and not focusing our demands and our needs where they should be.

Similarly, we had community concern about the recent announcement of the plan for a new US base in Western Australia—something that obviously, in being only recently announced, came about after this committee tabled its report. But the same question is raised. It is a question not of whether we should have an alliance with the United States but of how we are allowing that alliance to be manifested, particularly at a time when United States foreign policy is clearly so flawed, so dangerous and apparently still determined to go down a very dangerous path. It is precisely at that time that we should have enough flexibility in our alliance and our defence arrangements to be able to say, ‘We are not going with you on this one.’ The lack of ability to do that and the lack even of recognition of the need to be able to do that are core problems with the government’s policies in this area and, indeed, the government response tabled here.

Question agreed to.