Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Independent) | Hansard source

The member for Fisher and other members of the coalition have argued that leaving an opening for a member of the crossbench on this committee would weaken it. I will take the opportunity in this speech to argue the reverse. In the current iteration of this parliament, and with the current community sentiment around Independents, leaving an opening for a member of the crossbench on this committee will strengthen it.

Peter Varghese has had a long and distinguished career serving governments, both coalition and Labor. He was John Howard's foreign policy adviser and Director-General of the Office of National Assessments under both Mr Howard and Kevin Rudd and was then appointed by Julia Gillard to be the head of DFAT. He remained in that high office when the coalition came to power in 2013. Mr Varghese has been prepared to give the political leaders he served frank, fearless and objective advice regardless of which party they came from. He was respected, in short, by all he served and was rewarded for his intellect, insights and advice. Here's what he had to say about AUKUS in the Australian Financial Review, and it's worth quoting:

The real test of sovereignty is whether you can defend yourself and credibly deter an attack on your territory.

Is that what the nuclear submarines deliver? Or would it be smarter to design a defence capability, including the best conventional submarines, which may give us less to offer in a war in north-east Asia but which may be more affordable and more effective in the defence of continental Australia?

I do not pretend to know the answers to these questions. But I would have thought that before we took decisions as momentous as the AUKUS submarines that there would be a proper and forensic public discussion about other options and their underlying rationale.

It may be odd to argue that a decision to acquire a capability which will not be fully delivered for three decades, if all goes to plan, has been made with unseemly haste. No one on the inside would think so. They have no doubt crunched the numbers and the policy options.

But decisions of this magnitude can easily emerge in an echo chamber. And the biggest threat to good policy is a failure forensically to test assumptions and weigh options. Much of that can and should be done outside classified discussions.

'Unseemly haste' and 'echo chamber'—this is not the Greens talking; this is one of the most senior and esteemed public servants Australia has produced.

Our Defence budget is currently going through its most significant transformation since the 1980s, when we formally abandoned the doctrine of forward defence and replaced it with the principle of defence of Australia. It was an assertion of sovereignty, an assertion that we should be as self-reliant as possible. Now, almost overnight and with no debate at all, the previous government, with the acquiescence of the Labor Party, agreed to an entirely new approach which, as Varghese points out, reduces our sovereignty and ties us even closer to the United States.

To be clear, I'm not saying AUKUS is necessarily the wrong prescription but that very real and important questions remain—not least the question of whether it's right to put all our eggs in one basket for the next half-century, with a price tag of no less than $360 billion. These questions need rigorous analysis. As Varghese says:

What defence capabilities are we not getting because we have set aside some $360 billion for nuclear submarines?

We, the people, were never let in on this discussion, let alone debate, and it's not surprising then that the public should be ambivalent, at best, about AUKUS. A recent poll conducted by the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney found that 42 per cent of those polled thought that the AUKUS submarines are not worth the cost. At the same time, 46 per cent thought AUKUS is good for creating jobs. A poll conducted by the Lowy Institute got a different result, but still found that 32 per cent of respondents, a significant number, were opposed to the acquisition of nuclear powered submarines.

What I've outlined goes directly to the importance of bringing the public into our confidence, especially when it comes to defence and national security. It goes directly to the importance of setting up a committee and getting it right. More than 30 per cent of voters in this country no longer support a major party, and there is no sign of that trend ending—as much as the major parties would like to wish it away. Even polling today further indicates the entrenchment of this trend. That makes it even more important that this committee, which I regard as an excellent idea, reflects the way the nation votes and the composition of this parliament. Therefore, I would argue that the government has done a good thing by leaving the way open for a crossbencher to be a member of the committee. This is as it should be. I noticed that the shadow minister, in his second reading speech, dismissed the idea that it was legitimate for a member of the crossbench to be a member of the committee, and I note that the member for Fisher, who spoke earlier, did the same.

I'm a member of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Joint Committee. I've reported on conflicts, civil unrest, displacement and national security across the world—in Africa, in South-East Asia, and indeed, on geopolitical matters in the United States—for decades. Why should I, or other crossbench members—reasoned, considered and professional people—be denied the possibility of being a member of this committee when major party members get an automatic slot? My colleague the member for Clark was a member of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security from 2010 to 2013 and behaved, by all accounts, impeccably—nothing leaked. The only question that has emerged in recent history has come from the coalition benches, when questions were raised about information received on an official committee trip to the United States and then raised under privilege in this House. Whether the information was in the public interest is not in question; the question is whether the material should have been used in this way. It also raises the innate question of a double standard in this debate.

Defence is a common theme among my constituents. Many of them raise the issue of AUKUS with me and they would like a full public airing about the way our defence budget is spent. From that point of view, my strong view is that this committee should accurately reflect the make-up of this parliament. It is also important to note that the legislation does not specifically allocate a position on this committee to a member of the crossbench. All it does is not prevent the Prime Minister from choosing to allocate a position on the committee to a member of the crossbench. Again, my strong view is that to allow that is to strengthen, not weaken, the committee.

I would also like to go to the member for Fisher's point, suggesting that a position on this committee could be used as a form of transactional politics in the event of a hung parliament after the next election. With respect to the member, I think that is an outrageous suggestion—to consider that a member of the crossbench would somehow trade away their independence in order to get a seat on that particular parliamentary committee. Unfortunately, I think the very suggestion goes to a culture of politics in this place that perhaps doesn't exist on the crossbenches and perhaps does in other parts of this House. For a member's mind to even go to that says a lot about the mentality in this place, the ethics of members and the kinds of considerations that they might consider when making decisions.

I would also make the point that one key issue during the campaign in the lead-up to the 2022 election in my electorate of Goldstein was fragmentation of public trust in political leaders. I think that the key reason that members of the crossbench were elected at the 2022 election—and, indeed, before, in the member for Indi and also the member for Warringah—was that people wanted direct representation from their members and a degree of politics done differently. So for the coalition to be suggesting that members of the crossbench are in some way less trustworthy—more likely to leak information from a committee as it relates to national security—is downright offensive and I think would be seen as downright offensive by members of our communities who have elected members of the crossbench as Independents to represent them directly. The reason it is critical, I think, to have a member of the crossbench on a committee like this is so that the bipartisan groupthink on defence that currently exists between the major parties is not allowed to progress unfettered.

As a former journalist, my strong view—apart from not leaking—is that questions need to be asked. This is critically important in a committee like this. The coalition's suggestion that it is more trusted than members of the crossbench is a bit of a joke, quite frankly.

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