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

I am incredibly excited to make a contribution tonight which constitutes my first substantive remarks in the area of peace, disarmament and veterans affairs as a base of responsibility I've assumed on behalf of the Green post the federal election. What I would like to do tonight is briefly outline to the Senate the grounding experiences that will guide me in this work and some of the priorities that I believe we need to be talking about on behalf of the Australian community in this space.

Many folks in this chamber and elsewhere will have heard me on many occasions talk about my close relationship with my grandparents, Len and Jean–they're probably actually watching tonight. Many of my most valued memories of my childhood are of tinkering with bits and pieces around Nan and Pop's house, particularly in Pop's study. I was always drawn, as a kid and as I am still now when I get time to go around there, to a picture on the wall of a young man wearing a military uniform who bears a striking resemblance to me. That man was my grandad's brother, Uncle Gordon as I knew him, who lost his life in 1944 on a routine U-boat patrol over the Channel. Part of his flight crew was a man with the surname of Minogue, whose name sits etched upon the war memorial in this great capital.

The loss of Uncle Gordon echoed down the generations of my family. My great grandma never got closure, because they never found his body. A lot of that grief was passed round to all of the members of the family. The absence of this man, whose diaries and workbooks I have had the opportunity to read over the years, was a profound one. You can still now go and look at his really fine detailed writing and sketching and think to yourself what more he might have done had he lived. That sense of what is lost when we send somebody into a conflict situation—the effect on them, their family and the future of that family—is something I carry with me very deeply. A desire to prevent the unnecessary loss of life that is an almost inevitable part of the profound political failure that is so often armed conflict is one that is deep within me. In fact, it's one that led me, particularly, to become part of the Greens movement. I'm very proud that ours is a party with peace and nonviolence at the core of all we do. In WA, there is a great history of this, with the great peace advocates—Jo Vallentine, Trish Cowcher Annabel Newbury-Freeman and Margaret Beavers—being at the centre of a movement in Western Australia during the eighties of particularly women who stood up against the mutually assured destruction that was at the centre of the Cold War and fought for the future of our planet against the nuclear destruction that was being borne down upon us by two great superpowers who were determined to, it seemed at the time, rule the ashes of a broken world. They came together, and they pushed back, and from that was born a political movement that came to be known as the Greens WA. That is something that sits with me also. They did that. They attended those protests. They made their arguments. They brought those arguments to the centre of Australia's political debate in the face of much resistance on behalf of the political establishment who derided them as idealists, as naive, as disconnected, only to be proven by the passage of history to be the most realistic, clear-eyed ones in the room. They were the only ones who could see that, if we did not divert from the course of mutually assured nuclear destruction, we would lose the planet, everything on it and everything worth living for.

I'm incredibly honoured to be travelling this weekend to attend the annual IPAN National Conference in Darwin where peace activists from across Australia will come together to discuss the state of the global peace movement and what must be done to bring about the reality of peace in our time not only in Australia but across the world. It's very apt that we do this in that location, for it's the very sitting that is right now playing host to the embodiment of one of the most disastrous decisions our foreign policy and defence relationship here in Australia, that being the US alliance. I don't know about anyone in this place, but I cannot think of a single family in Australia who would be happy to have their kids marched to war under a banner of regime change led by Donald Trump. Yet that is the terrifying reality of our continued participation in the US alliance. It is not a structure which suits the modern day Australian community or our international context.

I also fundamentally believe that the Australian people want us, here in this place, to take responsibility if ever we do again ask men and women to go from our shores and fight in another place, to take honest responsibility by passing in this place a war powers act, ensuring that we can never again deploy troops overseas without an honest and transparent vote of these chambers so that nobody can ever again say: 'We didn't know. We didn't have a role in this,' because you did. You voted on it.

I also fundamentally believe that the Australian people do not want to see their community, their economy, their industry, terraformed into a weapons manufacturing complex. The Australian people have higher ambitions than to become global merchants of death, and yet that is the trajectory on which the government have set the Australian economy and which the opposition have followed. We are down now to spend $100 million a day on the defence industry between now and 2035—a shocking figure that I believe would meet with so little community support as to be a laughable proposition, if it was fully understood.

What could we do? Does anybody truly believe that the limit of the Australian nation, with that kind of economic capacity, is exporting weapons of death and selling them to countries like Saudi Arabia, who are engaged in horrendous human rights violation right now? I think the Australian people have got a far higher and more moral horizon to which they would like to see us look.

Finally, I would say that the Australian people are right to expect that we, here in this place, do what we can to ensure that those forces which we do have within our services, our defence structures, are aligned with the threats which actually confront the Australian nation, which are actually those that are needed in our region—not the imagined threats of a defence policy establishment, of a defence establishment that is stuck in the past, stuck in the Cold War believing that we're going to fight the next regime change war or be a key player in the next global contest for power. The reality is for our defence forces that the challenges of our region are a challenge of climate change. Climate change is the great defence threat of our Asia-Pacific region. I intend, over the next months and years ahead as I work in this space, to outline the ways in which we can reform our forces, reform our structure, to manage that threat and play a humanitarian role in our region and ensure that nobody ever gives their life unnecessarily and that we achieve peace in our time.