Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The world is at a critical turning point. War has broken out not as a result of a miscalculation but because of a deliberate strategy by the Islamic Republic of Iran regime to grow their own power through fear. The Western democratic world needs to recognise and adapt immediately to these tactics, which are being successfully used against us to undermine our security and our interests.

Iran is a case study in how appeasement of evil regimes does not work, and it's a case study in how Western governments are being easily manipulated by authoritarian regimes. Those of us who have been warning about the danger of the IRI regime for a long time have lost count of how often we've heard officials say that their diplomatic approach was working and that it wasn't strategic to take strong diplomatic action to isolate the regime and reduce their ability to leverage and threaten violence.

The IRI regime doesn't want the IRGC listed as a terror group, and here in Australia our government has told us that it wasn't strategic to list the IRGC as a terror group. Now we have IRGC terrorists helping Iran-backed groups fire rockets and drones at our allies and at civilian ships. The IRI regime wants to be able to exert influence over the United Nations by being appointed to leadership positions, and yet our government told us it wasn't in our interests to oppose the election of that regime to all UN bodies. The IRI regime wants to be able operate in secret, and we were told that our government couldn't or wouldn't tell us how many senior regime officials or IRGC operatives were in Australia, for privacy reasons.

There is nothing strategic or diplomatically skilful about failing to take difficult diplomatic decisions until you find that you are forced to take military decisions. How could an authoritarian regime intent on using fear as a weapon be anything other than emboldened watching Western governments avoid holding the IRI regime accountable out of fear of their response? Those who stopped tough diplomatic action because they were worried about how Tehran would react are now relying on airstrikes to respond to deadly attacks by Iran-backed terrorists. And still we hear this commentary, often from anonymous officials, downplaying Tehran's involvement in the very attacks that they funded and provided the weapons and intelligence for.

We hear officials claiming that Iran doesn't want a war, despite the fact they've deliberately started one. The truth is that what they don't want is consequences. When they didn't see diplomatic consequences for their abhorrent behaviour, they judged that it was safe to go even further. The reality is that trying to appease and negotiate with the IRI regime has resulted in nothing but that regime growing their influence, expanding their violence and moving closer to achieving their aims.

If our governments don't learn the lessons of failure on Iran right now, we are going to see this pattern repeated over and over again as authoritarian states elsewhere move to grow their power through coercion, threats and war. We need to pay particular attention to how the propaganda of a dangerous regime has infected our public debate, media commentary and even the decision-making process of our institutions.

As citizens of a democracy, we are entitled to the plain truth from our governments about the risks that we face to our safety and security. And yet, as the world has grown increasingly more dangerous over the last two years, we are fed more and more inane talking points designed to be acceptable to authoritarian governments. We've witnessed a self-defeating cycle of responding to bad behaviour, whether that's violence or economic coercion, by measuring our response so as not to upset the perpetrator. We cannot continue to sleepwalk through the most dangerous security environment since the 1930s by acting as if we can avoid trouble by using the right words and incentives.

After the failure to foresee the 7 October attacks, we cannot rely on previous assumptions that we will have several years warning of conflict elsewhere, including in our own region. We need to learn and understand very quickly the ways in which the IRI regime and Russia have manipulated the international community to create space for their violent pursuit of power. If we don't learn these lessons, we can guarantee that they will not be the last regimes to use these tactics against us.