Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'd like to commend President Donald Trump for last night picking up the phone and having discussions with Vladimir Putin. In my maiden speech, I talked about and honoured Ronald Reagan for picking up the phone and talking to Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. They effectively brought the Cold War to an end through detente and through diplomacy. In my maiden speech I said the 21st century has been plagued 'by belligerent rhetoric and an unwillingness to seek peace'. That continued after I came into this chamber. The war in Ukraine is a result of reckless diplomacy and belligerent behaviour.

There was a violent coup in 2014 that overthrew a democratically elected government. There were two Minsk agreements, which Angela Merkel later admitted the Western powers were trying to deliberately stall. One of those agreements was that the people of Donbas could hold a referendum, and that was deliberately sabotaged. The other thing in this war that we weren't told by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which was mandated by the Minsk agreements to monitor attacks between the two sides, was that, in the two weeks before Putin invaded Ukraine, those attacks from the West increased from about 50 violations a day to over a thousand a day. That war had already started, yet none of that has ever been acknowledged.

Yet again this was a deep state ploy, instigated by the Biden crime family and the deep state Democrats, to advance imperial interests, not so much in Russia; the idea there was to stop Russia from selling gas to Germany. You couldn't have the Russians selling gas to Germany because the US oil companies in the Middle East would have nowhere to sell their oil to. It's time to call out these imperial Western interests, and it's time to put peace first.