Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent me from moving a motion to give precedence to a motion relating to the Australia-US alliance.

During this election campaign, President-elect Trump pledged to ban all Muslims—the 1.6 billion Muslims living across the globe. He said to them, 'There is no place for you in modern America.' He attacked the family of a Muslim soldier who died giving service during the Iraq war. He has decried Mexicans as 'criminals and rapists'. He has said that a federal judge could not hear a case fairly simply because he was a Mexican. He thinks that blacks are lazy; he thinks it is a genetic trait.

He has refused to condemn the white supremacist David Duke from the Ku Klux Klan campaigning for him. He has traded in vile, anti-Semitic rhetoric. He was one of the proponents of the birther movement. He believes that climate change is a hoax from the Chinese. He is a misogynist. He accused a woman of menstruating during an interview. He has bragged about sexually assaulting women. He incites violence; at one of his rallies he encouraged an attacker and said he would pay for his legal fees.

Now, on foreign policy: he believes that Japan and South Korea should develop nuclear weapons—two countries with a history of tension between each other. And, as former Premier Bob Carr said, 'There has never been a person elected to the presidency who has had such a cavalier approach to nuclear weapons.' He has praised authoritarian regimes—Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un—and he has suggested that he does not care if there is a trade war with China. He has questioned the NATO alliance—he has questioned that.

Many Australians are now very, very deeply worried. They are worried because the US has elected a man who is sexist, he is racist, he is anti-Semitic, he is nationalist, he denies climate change and he promotes nuclear proliferation. And it is not just many ordinary Australians. Bill Shorten called him 'barking mad'—barking mad! We had John Howard saying that he trembled at the prospect of President Trump. We have had Christopher Pyne saying he was terrified. And, of course, Minister Frydenberg called him 'a drop kick'. The only people who are wholeheartedly supportive of his presidency are members of the extreme Right, like some of those people within One Nation and, of course, the extremes within the coalition.

And yet here we are, within hours of an election, and we have the government kowtowing to a man who has vowed to block any Muslims from migrating to America. We had the Prime Minister of this country on TV backing in the US alliance. We have just heard the Minister for Defence say, 'We are right behind President Trump. We are right behind him. We have fought together in every conflict since World War II. If Donald Trump picks up the phone and says, "We need your help," we'll be right behind him.' The Australian alliance with the US is now one of our greatest security risks.

Let's look at the response from other international leaders. Angela Merkel, somebody who has demonstrated in recent years that she is prepared to show global leadership, said, 'We will continue our relationship with the US only if it is built on common values.' Rather than standing up and saying, 'We don't accept your racism, your misogyny, your warmongering and your fear mongering,' we have had both the coalition and the opposition saying, 'All the way with the US.'

If there was ever a time to question our allegiance to the US that time is now. Like all important relationships, this was a relationship that was founded on common values. The time has come to assess whether it is now in our interests. We are like two people in a relationship whose values have now drifted so far apart that we can no longer continue on the same path. Given the questions about Mr Trump's temperament and policies from almost all sides of politics, now is the time that this chamber should be debating the fundamentals of Australia's alliance with the US. If not now then when? The time to follow the US blindly into another conflict is over. Let us have this debate. Let us have it now.

George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

May I take this opportunity on behalf of the Australian government to congratulate Mr Donald Trump on his election as the 45th President of the United States. I entirely disassociate the government from the foolish remarks that have come from Senator Di Natale. Senator Di Natale, you lead a party which has a substantial voice in Australian politics. With your status as a party leader and your power in this chamber comes responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is always to serve the Australian national interest. I must say to you, Senator Di Natale, that the foolish, abusive, intemperate, insulting remarks that you have just directed at the President-elect the United States of America, regardless of your personal feelings, are inimical to the national interest of this country. You, Senator Di Natale, as the leader of a substantial party in this parliament, should have the judgement and the wisdom, if you have a criticism to make of the President-elect of the United States, to do so in a temperate, reasoned and respectful manner.

As the Minister for Defence has said, the alliance between Australia and the United States has lasted for 65 years, since the ANZUS treaty in 1951—one of the crowning diplomatic achievements of the Menzies government. It is correct that Australia and the United States have fought shoulder to shoulder in every major conflict of the 20th century and into the 21st century. In that military cooperation we have been guided by common values: the values of liberty and democracy. Regardless of who is the President of the United States of America, regardless of whether it is a Democrat or Republican administration, the fundamental values of the United States of America as enshrined in their constitution and bill of rights and a long democratic tradition endure. And they are values that we share. There will be political differences from time to time, although I am pleased to say there are very few. Any Australian government, whether a coalition government or a Labor government, will work together with any American administration, whether a Democrat administration or a Republican administration, whomsoever the Prime Minister might be and whomsoever the President might be. The functionality and the strength of that relationship is one of the things that undergird our nation's security—as a military ally, which has guaranteed under the ANZUS agreement to defend Australia, and as a partner in so many ways in international law enforcement; in counterterrorism; and through the Five Eyes community in the sharing of intelligence. I can tell you, Senator Di Natale, there have been terrorist events in Australia in the last two years interdicted because of our access to intelligence through the Five Eyes community that has been shared with us by the Americans. Nothing is more critical to our national security and our strategic security in the world than the ANZUS alliance. You are entitled to have your differences, Senator Di Natale, but what you are not entitled to do as a party leader is to sacrifice or prejudice the Australian national interest for the sake of your own self-indulgence, as you have done in this chamber today.

The Australian government has already reached out to the incoming Trump administration and their transition team, and we look forward to working with President Trump and members of his administration, as every Australian government of either political flavour would do with any American administration.

Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to briefly make a few points. The first point is that Senator Di Natale moved this motion in question time without notice, I think, to any other party or any other individual. I think that demonstrates, frankly, in the context of question time, a lack of courtesy to other parties in this chamber and I think it is disappointing.

The second point I would make is this: it is true that any election of a new President is a cause of great focus and substantial discussion in the Australian community. It is particularly true, in the context of the election of Mr Trump, that there will be a focus on issues that have arisen in the course of the election campaign and a focus on policies. They are serious questions for leaders to discuss calmly in the context of the alliance. They are not matters for a stunt in question time.

My third point is this: Mr Shorten in the other place has, in a brief address, now offered on behalf of the Labor Party, first, congratulations to President-elect Donald Trump and, second, commiserations to Hillary Clinton, who we acknowledge and regard as a women who has been an advocate of equality and who has served her country with distinction.

Finally, I make this point: the Australian Labor Party remains committed, as have all parties of government, to the ANZUS alliance. It is an alliance that has served Australia well. We are committed to that alliance, but we have been willing, as history books will show, to disagree with American policy when we judge that it does not reflect Australian interests. We did so in relation to Vietnam and we did so in relation to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. From this side of the chamber, we will always pursue our interests through an independent foreign policy and defence self-reliance within an alliance framework.

Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the motion, but also to talk directly to women and girls around Australia who are watching on with sheer revulsion at the election of Donald Trump to the White House and who are wondering how on earth a man caught on tape bragging about sexual assault can ascend to the highest office in the world. I want to say to them that I share what they are feeling. I, too, worry about what sort of future awaits my daughter and all of our children. I feel deep dismay that a man who treats women like objects for his own satisfaction will soon assume the mantle of the presidency of the United States. I feel the fear about what this will mean for women who are already facing structural discrimination, controls on their right to choose and the everyday risks of being subjected to sexual harassment and assault. I feel the uncertainty about what this means for our common future on a planet that is already racked by dangerous global warming and environmental injustice that we know hits women, especially women in the poorest nations, the hardest.

People are saying Donald Trump's rise will embolden the sexists, the racists, the bigots and the homophobes. It is so incredibly important to stand up to those elements in our society and call them out, and that is what we Greens intend to do. Trump's rise will also energise everyone who stands for justice, compassion, equality and love. To defeat this particular brand of hate and intolerance, we need a powerful movement that unites calls for gender equality, racial justice, environmental justice and a fair society for every Australian. Our movement must reject the failures of free market chaos that has left ordinary people behind while making corporations and big polluters even richer, just as it must reject sexism, racism and homophobia. The conservative elements in the One Nation Party and those like Mr George Christensen and Senator Cory Bernardi, who have Malcolm Turnbull under the thumb, think this is their moment. They are wrong and this is our moment to prove to them that they are wrong.

The US and Australian are different places. We have different values, a different history and different conditions. For all of that, women in Australia still face similar rubbish, and the experience of our first female Prime Minister and the everyday lives of many women around the country are a sad testimony to that. But I also say this: yesterday, while millions of Americans voted for Donald Trump, others lined up to place stickers that read 'I voted' on a gravestone in Rochester, New York.

Government Senator:

A government senator interjecting—

Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That grave belongs to the suffragette Susan B Anthony, who less than a 150 years ago was arrested simply for daring to vote. To the women of Australia, I commiserate with you, but I also have hope.

Senator Back interjecting—

Stephen Parry (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On my right. Senator Back.

Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, there is more work to be done, but we can stand together and we can take heart in how far we have come. We can persist when old white men interject in the Senate and we can claim our equality.

Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I get it, Mr President: the Greens do not like the American election result. When there was a poll of Australians and 34 per cent of Greens supported the ban to Islamic immigration, Senator Di Natale's response was, 'We need to educate them.' It was not listen to them but educate them. We get it; it is a control response. The battle here is about freedom versus control and we see where the control is. Trump's victory is a victory for freedom. It is a victory for Americans and it is a victory for people worldwide. I know little of Donald Trump. I admire and respect the choice of 300 million Americans, and I honour their choice. I happened to live in the United States when President Ronald Reagan came into power. I watched him transform that demoralised country while the media slagged him repeatedly. I returned to this country having watched Ronald Reagan transform that country to see the media in this country completely lead the people in ignorance. Senator Di Natale seems to have followed the same media rubbish.

I have learnt that the Queensland trade minister, a Labor minister, say that she will not enter into any pacts with the Trump administration. I am aware that the New South Wales parliament in recent weeks passed a motion saying that Donald Trump is a slug. The Minister for Foreign Affairs reportedly supported Hillary Clinton's campaign. I cannot understand why we would interfere in another party's politics. The Leader of the Opposition has again today condemned Donald Trump. I oppose publicly the foreign minister's comments last week, and I have reached out to the Trump administration. There is only one party fit for governance in Queensland and to trade with Queensland and that is Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party.

I do honour one point that Senator Di Natale made: as a young man I supported Australia, blindly supported Australia, following America into war. As a more mature person, I now question some of that following of America. However, it was not American administrations that caused us to enter those wars; it was Australian administrations. It is up to us to take responsibility as to whether or not we follow any other country. It is not to blame Trump.

The next point I make about the remarkable outcome in America is that the people of America are at last waking up to the establishment—the elite establishment—that is pushing fraudulent policies like the myth that humans are affecting the global climate. The Greens support the United Nations and the destruction of Australian sovereignty. The Greens support the major banks pushing their benefit from the global warming scam. The Greens support the same initiatives that the major global corporations are presenting. And the Greens present anti-Australian policies, anti-human policies, anti-education policies, anti-science policies, anti-development policies, anti-environment policies. I speak against Senator Di Natale's motion, and I applaud Donald Trump's gracious acceptance speech last night.

Marise Payne (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wish to speak further to the motion moved by Senator Di Natale before we continue on with question time. I do want to advert to a number of Senator Roberts's observations in relation to the foreign minister. It is important to emphasise that the Prime Minister, the foreign minister and I, in any engagement in relation to the United States election, have been consistently very clear that the outcome that the people of the United States chose would be the outcome with which Australia worked. I emphasise that again today. I emphasise that by reiterating my words and my first response to Senator Di Natale, that the depth of the US-Australia alliance is our most important strategic defence relationship. It is central to our strategic and our security arrangements.

This is an alliance that is underpinned by the deepest levels of cooperation between our two nations, across an extraordinarily broad spectrum—perhaps unappreciated by many who do not have an opportunity to study it regularly. But in the very practical sense of our training, our exercises, our operations, our intelligence and our capability development, which enables both alliance partners to meet contemporary and emerging challenges, it is fundamental to how we go about business in our security environment.

The Attorney-General referred in his remarks to the importance of the ANZUS Treaty, signed in 1951, which is the formal basis for our relationship. It has historically recognised that an armed attack in the Pacific area on Australia or the United States would be dangerous to both countries, and it obliges each country to act to meet the common danger. That is the strongest possible commitment. We are committed, and will continue to be so, to meeting our obligations under the ANZUS Treaty. We have invoked it in the relatively recent past, in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A number of its indications and its history are adverted to in the 2016 defence white paper, which sets out in some detail the importance of the depth of our relationship with the United States.

What do we say, for example, in the Defence white paperour forward-looking white paper for the next two decades—about the presence of the US military, our engagement with them in ensuring security across the Indo-Pacific?

The global strategic and economic weight of the United States will be essential to the continued stability of the rules-based global order …

I quoted there briefly from the Defence white paper.

The great breadth of what we do in our capability development, in some of the key acquisitions which we are now pursuing as a nation—whether it is our future submarine development and its combat system or other strategic capabilities—is inextricably linked with the extraordinary work that we are able to use from the United States and the partnership that we are able to enjoy. That gives us an opportunity to maintain interoperability, which is essential to strengthening the ADF and maintaining its strength in what it does. These are vital aspects of the relationship and it is, I think, more than unfortunate for the Australian Greens to have chosen to traduce them in the way that they have today. We could not develop these high-end capabilities without the alliance. We could not engage at the levels that we do in terms of interoperability, we could not integrate when we work together on operations, we could not protect our own forces with the strength that we need without that valuable relationship which has been formed with the United States.

Our information security, our intelligence cooperation—as the Attorney-General said—make a real difference every single day to how effective we can be on our operations. I, for one, express my enormous respect for the men and women of the United States military, who work every day with the men and women of the Australian ADF to ensure that we are playing the international roles we need to play. We are participating together in the international coalition in the Middle East right now: in the counter-Daesh coalition and in operations moving to retake Mosul and Raqqa. They are critical to our fight against Daesh in the Middle East. Our relationship with the United States as part of that international coalition is critical to that process. I reinforce what I said in relation to these matters when Senator Di Natale first asked me this question and indicate, as the Attorney-General did, that the strength and depth of this alliance is at the core of our security, the core of our defence. (Time expired)

Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Fifty years ago Harold Holt said the infamous words 'all the way with LBJ'. Clearly, what we are hearing from the government is, 'We've gotta be with Donald T.' It is time for us in this place to have a serious debate about the nature of our relationship with the US. It is clear to many Australians that we can no longer commit to automatically being best friends with the United States of America under a Trump presidency. We cannot today, here in this place, anywhere in this country and in fact anywhere in the world, say that it is business as usual, because it is not business as usual anymore. It was a seismic geopolitical event that we witnessed yesterday afternoon Australian time.

Senator Abetz interjecting—

I will not take interjections from Senator Abetz, who was gloating on ABC Radio in Tasmania this morning about the election of Trump. Remember: this is a man who was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. Mr Trump was endorsed by the KKK and here he is the President-elect of the United States of America.

We can no longer simply lock-in behind the United States like a sycophantic little brother or sister. In the past, the cost of not questioning our alliance with the United States has been disastrous for this country. There was the Vietnam War, where thousands of young Australians perished; and the Iraq war, where not only many young Australians perished and many young Americans perished but the foundations were set for the rise of extremist cults like Daesh. These interventions, led by the US and blindly followed by Australia, have been disastrous not only for this country but for this world.

Have a look at the foreign policy of the man who the coalition and the Labor Party are lining up behind today. He promised to end Muslim immigration to the US. He wants to build a wall between the US and Mexico and then charge the Mexicans to build it. He reached out to the Putin regime, for goodness sake!

He has threatened a trade war with China. He has promised to commit war crimes, including torture and extra-judicial killings in the Middle East. He wants to undo the deal that froze Iran's nuclear program. He believes that climate change is a conspiracy created by China.

Senator O'Sullivan interjecting—

So do you? Well, good luck to you. You can stack up over there with Senator Roberts all you like, but it says more about you than it does about the overwhelming majority of scientists in this world. How can we possibly pretend that giving support—blind, sycophantic, unquestioning support—to the US under a Trump presidency is in Australia's best interest?

This motion should be supported because the government needs to act in Australia's best interest. That is the whole point of this debate that we are having today. The government has shown that it is prepared to lurch to the right to try and reabsorb One Nation voters. It has done that on immigration policy—shamefully, in many cases it has had bipartisan support from Labor—that would make Donald Trump proud in its cruelty and with its underpinnings of xenophobia. It wants to undo protections against racial hatred in a fundamental attack on multiculturalism in our country. It wants to make it easier for people to be racists in our country, exactly as Mr Trump does in the United States. Unlike the coalition and unlike the Labor Party, the Greens will not stand silently by while endorsement is given to this dangerous, sexist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic sociopath. (Time expired)

Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak against the motion moved by Senator Di Natale. I will cut straight to the nub of this issue: it is absolutely appalling for Senator Di Natale, the leader of the Greens, to condemn 60 million Americans simply for exercising their democratic right to pick and choose their President. If the Greens do not believe in democracy, perhaps they should have stated that at the outset.

Stephen Parry (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time for the debate has expired. The question is that the motion moved by Senator Di Natale to suspend standing orders be agreed to.

Question negatived.