Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Twenty years ago, in March 2003, I was the most angry I've ever been in my life, when I realised my country was participating in an illegal, immoral war of aggression on another nation. I wasn't alone. Hundreds of thousands of Australians and millions of people around the world marched in some of the biggest protests ever recorded in history to stop the illegal invasion of Iraq by the so-called 'Coalition of the Willing'. The 20th anniversary of that shameful and catastrophic invasion is the weekend after next. I will be speaking at a call-for-peace rally in Melbourne at the State Library at 1 pm on Saturday 15 March and then again on Sunday, the next day, on the Parliament House lawns at 11 am in Hobart, and there will be other rallies around the country.

While we rightly condemn the Russian government for its ongoing invasion of the sovereign nation of Ukraine, let's not forget that only 20 years ago we did exactly the same thing to another nation. The United Nations, at the time, said it was an illegal war, a contravention of the UN Charter. It was by any definition a war of aggression that led to the loss of millions of lives, not just directly from the conflict but also from the rise of ISIS and global terrorism, the Syrian civil war, the flood of refugees and the wave of human misery that washed across Europe as people fled an unstable Middle East. It's time to reflect on that. I wonder what we've learnt. There are a lot of things we need to do to change the way we approach war powers in this country. (Time expired)