David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of answers given by Minister Farrell to questions without notice asked today by both Senator McKim and me, and of answers given by the Minister Gallagher to Senator McKim.

It's now 20 years since Iraq was illegally invaded, an invasion that was predicated on a lie that was sold to the world by the United States and the United Kingdom. It was a lie that our government accepted at face value, never testing it, never bringing it to this parliament, never putting it to the Australian people; and it was a lie that produced a brutal war, the effects of which are still being felt 20 years on. Those effects are particularly felt by the people of Iraq. There were some 7,000 Iraqi civilians killed in just the first two months of the 'shock and awe' campaign, as it was described. Some 500,000 Iraqis have lost their lives since, and millions of Iraqis remain displaced, many of them refugees in their own country—all for a war based on a lie. We followed the United States into the war like a little loyal poodle. And has this government learnt the lessons from that war? Obviously not.

First of all, this government joined with the coalition to refuse to release the documents about the decision-making leading us into that war and continue the secrecy of the coalition under the new, Albanese government. But then, in this last week, we have seen just how little Labor have learned from history, because they have committed us to a $368 billion plus nuclear submarine package with the United States and the United Kingdom—the two countries that peddled those lies that dragged us into the war with Iraq. They've signed us on to a 30-year, $368-plus billion nuclear submarine program which will inevitably drag us into the United States's next war, because that's the purpose of it. It's to tie the Australian military and the Australian people intimately into the United States military—because these are subs we can't build, we can't crew, we can't operate and we won't be able to deploy without the express consent of the United States.

That isn't about defending Australia; it's about projecting force, well from our shores, into the South China Sea as a loyal sub-unit of the United States military. And that lie that is repeatedly told by the Albanese government, peddling the reheated cooked-up coalition policy that this is about defending Australia, is being learnt by millions of Australians as we speak.

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

While people are getting smashed by a cost-of-living crisis, Labor is proceeding with a quarter of a trillion dollars worth of stage 3 tax cuts for the top end and a grotesque $360 billion commitment to nuclear powered submarines. I want to issue a challenge to every single Labor Party senator in this place: go back to your communities and tell the people who are living in those communities how proud you are of your priorities. Go and tell a worker whose real wages are going backwards at the fastest rate on record how much you and Gina Rinehart need that $9,000-a-year tax cut. Go and tell the woman in her 60s sleeping on her friend's couch how you can't afford a house for her to live in. Go and tell the person starving on JobSeeker how the weapons manufacturers need public money far more than they do. Go and tell the parents who can't afford to fix their kids' teeth how you can't afford to make it any easier for them to go to the dentist. But you won't, will you? Because you believe in austerity for the poor, in tax cuts for the wealthy and in blank cheques for the military industrial complex.

The fact that both major parties are now supportive of Labor's stage 3 tax cuts for the top end and Labor's $360 billion commitment to nuclear submarines means that you will never criticise each other for those decisions. But I can tell you one thing: the Australian Greens will line up to criticise you, and we will do it every day because we want to be able to look people in the eye and say: 'Actually, we can afford to put dental and mental into Medicare. We can afford to wipe student debt. We can afford to make child care free. We can afford to raise income support.' We should be able to afford to do that because we should not be proceeding with the AUKUS nuclear sub deal and we should not be proceeding with the stage 3 tax cuts. Poverty is a political choice, and it's being made by the major political parties in this place every day.

Question agreed to.