Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Over the last few days, on 6 and 9 August, organisations like the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the Medical Association for Prevention of War and the Australian Red Cross held candlelight vigils, film screenings and other events across Australia to commemorate 70 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that took place in 1945. Most of the quarter of a million victims died instantly, incinerated in the enormous infernos that rose high into the sky and burned the earth beneath. The rest suffered slow and painful deaths from burn and blast injuries and radiation sickness, with little or no medical treatment to ease their suffering, or they eventually succumbed to cancers and chronic diseases caused by the radiation unleashed in the two attacks.

Seventy years later there are around 16,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, including an estimated 1,800 kept on high-alert status. That is enough to render the earth's total land mass a memory. But even a comparatively small-scale, regional nuclear war involving a tiny fraction of the world's nuclear arsenal targeted only on cities would produce severe and long-term global climate disruption—apart from hundreds upon hundreds of millions of deaths.

Any use of nuclear weapons invoking a high probability of escalation poses not only a global existential threat but also is effectively suicidal. We all have a duty as parliamentarians and citizens to do our utmost to rid the world of these most despicable weapons that threaten our very survival. Any use of nuclear weapons, invoking a high probability of escalation, poses not only a global existential threat but also is, effectively, suicidal.

Australia has historically supported a policy of global proactive disarmament and the reduction of nuclear weapons arsenals. In 1972 Australia joined New Zealand at the International Court of Justice in actions against nuclear testing in the Pacific. In 1995 we established the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons and in 2008 joined with Japan to establish the independent International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament. In 2010 we partnered with Japan to establish the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative.

The vast majority of Australians understand the numbers and the implications and want their country to help end the age of nuclear weapons. Labor is fully committed to pursuing this goal as an urgent humanitarian imperative of the highest order. Our newly adopted national platform affirms our party's unequivocal support for the negotiation of a global treaty banning nuclear weapons. And we welcome the growing momentum to achieve such a treaty as a significant first step towards eliminating this ultimate menace.

Since 2013 the governments of Norway, Mexico and Austria have hosted three major diplomatic conferences on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons. Last December, at the third such conference, held in Vienna, the Austrian government issued a historic pledge 'to fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons'. One hundred and thirteen nations have, so far, endorsed the landmark document, signalling their readiness and determination to start negotiations on a ban. Australia, I regret to say, is not among them. This is despite our special interest in realising a world without nuclear weapons—as a country that has suffered and continues to suffer the dreadful effects of nuclear-test explosions conducted on our soil.

Sue Coleman-Haseldine, and Kokatha-Mula, women from Ceduna, in South Australia, attended the Vienna conference, testifying on the impact of the British tests at Maralinga and Emu Field in the 1950s and 1960s. 'There are many Aboriginal people who cannot go back to their ancestral lands,' she said, 'and their children and their children's children will never know the special religious places they contain.' She ended her moving remarks by imploring the delegates present to always keep in mind, 'The future forever belongs to the next generation.'

While Australia does not possess nuclear weapons—and never has—successive Australian governments have claimed that Australia is protected by the so-called US 'nuclear umbrella'. This military construct has appeared in all Defence white papers since the early 1990s. It assumes that the United States will use its nuclear weapons in Australia's defence should Australia ever be threatened with nuclear attack. But the United States has never publicly affirmed this policy, and it is unclear whether any private assurances have been made to Australian ministers or senior public servants.

The late Malcolm Fraser described it as 'total fantasy'. But claiming its existence, no matter how absurd, has profound implications. It says to the world that Australia considers nuclear weapons to be militarily useful, strategically necessary and morally acceptable. It prevents Australia from engaging constructively in the major global efforts currently underway to negotiate a treaty banning nuclear weapons. It denies us any authority in asserting that Iran or any other nation should abandon its nuclear ambitions or that North Korea should dismantle its nuclear arsenal. It is morally indefensible.

It is high time that Australia joined the vast majority of the world's nations in denouncing nuclear weapons and pledging its support for negotiations on a treaty banning these ultimate weapons of terror. Rejecting the bomb is by no means a radical proposition. In the words of United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, 'There are no right hands for wrong weapons.' Too often, from both sides in parliament, debate is brushed aside and parliamentary engagement is parked via reference to this being a 'complex foreign-policy matter'. It is not. It is a very simple matter.

Australia has rejected other inherently inhumane and indiscriminate weapons long before the United States, in fact

We have signed and ratified the anti-personnel mine ban treaty and convention on cluster munitions. We have never claimed the protection of a chemical weapon umbrella or a biological weapon umbrella. Those weapons Australia has rejected categorically, as it should, by joining conventions that outlaw them. Indeed, we helped pioneer the chemical weapons convention.

So why do we believe that nuclear weapons are somehow more acceptable than mustard gas or nerve agents or anthrax or smallpox? All these weapons are abhorrent. All these weapons are weapons of mass destruction. Seventy years after the hell that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, let us get serious about bringing the nuclear era to an end. Let us close the nuclear umbrella and keep it shut for all time. If Australia wants to deal with the issue of nuclear proliferation as a key priority for our national security, Australia must pursue disarmament. The only way to liberate the world from the terrible potential of nuclear conflict is to disarm, reduce and eventually abolish nuclear weapons. With nations preparing the ground for negotiations on a treaty banning nuclear weapons, Australia must stand firmly on the right side of history and join those nations lest nuclear weapons put an end to all our history.