Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the motion put forward by the member for Cowan on the situation in Iran and the dire threat that Iran is to the international community. Let it be said that my friend and colleague the member for Cowan was a major in the Australian Army. He knows what the military repercussions are of Iran's threat to international peace and stability. I would also like to thank my colleague the member for Mitchell for speaking on this important motion.

On 29 January 2002 George W Bush, the then President of the United States, said in his State of the Union address that there was an axis of evil. He was referring here to three countries: North Korea, Iraq and Iran. We know what transpired in Iraq, we know the threat that North Korea is to the world with its proliferation of WMD, and today we talk about the clear and present danger that Iran poses to the world.

Let us remember: Iran is a terrorist state; it imprisons journalists; it has political prisoners; it supports Hezbollah; it has links to al-Qaeda and Hamas; and it continues to support the despotic regime in Damascus led by Assad, which has led to the deaths of more than 60,000 innocent people. Iran continues with its clandestine nuclear weapons program, and its President calls publicly for the destruction of another UN member state, namely, Israel.

It does not matter what happens at these elections on 14 June this year in Iran; Iran will continue to pursue policies which are antithetical to the best interests of the world. We have a responsibility to speak out. We have a responsibility to use our chairmanship of the United Nations sanctions committee to do more to stop Iran—financial sanctions and sanctions about dual-use technology on both individuals and entities are critical. The facts that Iran's economy is in shambles, its rial has fallen to one-fifth of what it was and its oil and exports have been cut by half are good things.

On Iran's human rights record, a tribunal at The Hague found that the Ayatollah and his co-conspirators in the early eighties were responsible for the death of 20,000 political prisoners. More than 500 people of the Baha'i Faith have been arrested and some have been incarcerated for more than 10,000 days. There is no free speech; there is no free press—in fact, bloggers have been imprisoned.

When it comes to terrorism, we have only learnt in recent days from Bulgaria that Hezbollah has been linked to the killing of five Israelis and a Bulgarian bus driver during an attack on Bulgarian soil on 18 July last year. There was an arrest in Cyprus of a Hezbollah operative. There has been a bombing of the Israeli defence envoy's car in India. Attacks have been thwarted in Thailand, Azerbaijan, Georgia and elsewhere, and all have links back to Iran. And, as I said, in Syria more than 60,000 people are dead.

What concerns me most is the weapons of mass destruction program that Iran is undertaking. There is its sophisticated ballistic missile program; its serial non-compliance with successive UN resolutions, and its space program, which seems to be moving ahead in leaps and bounds. The danger if Iran gets a nuclear weapon is that it can carry through its threats to destroy another country. What is more, this will led to proliferation in the region, in Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, all of whom will seek to get weapons of mass destruction—not to mention the instability in the Gulf states and the Straits of Hormuz, through which so much of the world's shipping and oil exports go.

There is a way forward. The P5 plus 1, which involves Germany, is one method, but know what is said—that a military solution is not off the table. It is time for Iran to come to the negotiation table, come clean with its nuclear weapons program and be a proper citizen of the world.

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