Keith Wolahan (Menzies, Liberal Party) | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Joint Committee on Defence) Bill 2024. I have a memory that's as clear as day from when I was in Tarin Kowt, in Afghanistan. I stood in front of a clerk and saw on the screen a debate in this place about the war in Afghanistan. It was quite a surreal moment, because I remember seeing members that I recognised speaking about it. This isn't a criticism of any member—many spoke from the heart—but it felt like there was a disconnect between what we were seeing on the ground there in Afghanistan and some of the speeches given here. The speeches felt like they were more appropriate for the time just after September 11 but hadn't moved with what had happened on the ground.

I've thought about something which has been said to me again and again. People say, 'You don't want to hear my opinion on defence or national security; I haven't served.' I totally reject that, because there is no requirement, in passing effective judgement on the deployment of men and women in uniform, to have done it yourself. There is no requirement. All you need to bring are your ears, your head and your heart, and many members in this place and in the Senate do that. Indeed, that is key to civilian control of the military.

I'm old enough to have seen the movie Starship Troopers, and maybe even old enough to have read the book! In that book, there was a requirement for the citizenship to have served. That isn't what we have here; there is no ticket to be a citizen in this country—anyone can. And we can say that while fully honouring and acknowledging those who have served. But it is the good judgement and good character of the people in this place and in the Senate that is required. I have seen that on many occasions.

This committee is a key aspect of civilian control of the military. Indeed, again and again, we have often seen that the best decisions in the national interest have been made by civilian members who have then served in this place and in the other place, and who have the best interests of the nation at heart. That's why this is such an important committee. It's an important committee because we have a lot of work to do to be where we need to be to keep our nation safe.

In many respects, and as difficult as it was, the announcement of the AUKUS agreement was the easy part. The delivery of AUKUS will be extremely hard. There will be many ups and downs and there will be many challenges. Governments will change across the three partners, some sooner than others. In fact, there are elections on this year for two, maybe three, and AUKUS needs to survive through that. This committee needs to be one that has members and senators who will serve over many terms and see that project, amongst many others, through to its completion. There is no other way for AUKUS to work without that. There is no other way.

In many projects in Defence we have seen, for want of a better word, middle management 'kill' things. You don't have to have served in defence to know how middle management can kill a project through delay, confusion and extra red tape, or just by things being put on the backburner. For AUKUS to be delivered, it needs a bipartisan commitment from this place and from the Senate to keep relevant ministers, no matter which political party they are in, and the relevant military personnel—whether they're in the civilian chain of command, in the department, or they're in the uniformed chain of command—with their feet to the fire to deliver it. That's going to be a multidecade endeavour. Indeed, a committee like this will see members and senators form relationships with their peers in the United States and the United Kingdom. They will have frank and honest discussions about the challenges in the various democracies and how we can do our best to overcome them. That takes a committee that is full of members and senators who put their priorities in this order: the national interest, and then some other interests, and down the list their party interest. Your party interest should not walk into that room at all. It shouldn't be a part of that room. As the Prime Minister quite rightly noted today, when you open up the doors in this building, from his office you can see through the Members Hall and out the entrance, to our War Memorial, with its 103,000 names of Australians who have died while serving their country. It would be doing them a disservice and a dishonour to ever put party interest—or, certainly, self-interest—above the national interest. It must never happen.

It does concern me to look at the particular announcements of a particular party, namely the Greens political party. It's important to acknowledge them. The Greens' plan, on their platform, states that they will cancel Defence contracts and cut Defence spending at a time when we need the exact opposite to happen. Their platform notes that they will:

Renegotiate the US alliance to secure a new relationship focused on making us a better global citizen

Now, that is a fine statement to make but it doesn't reflect the reality of the world that we actually live in. The platform says they will:

Reduce military spending to 1.5 % of GDP …

This is a grossly inadequate number. Finally, it says that they will:

Close all military bases that foreign militaries have set up in this country

That would include facilities like Pine Gap and the Marine Rotational Force in Darwin, amongst many others.

Great exception has been taken to that criticism by the coalition. It has been described as undemocratic—somehow, noting the Greens' position is not acknowledging the democratic reality of this place. Indeed, if the Greens were to take many more Labor seats, it might be something we have to revisit, but, in all of the parliaments to date, and in the current parliament that we have, that is not the state of our democracy, and it is not the composition that the Australian people have sent to this place.

I have been surprised, in a good way, in my interactions with members on both sides in that, on the issue of national security and defence, there are goodwill and good intentions. I can quite honestly say there are patriots across both sides, as you would expect and as you would hope for this place. This is the parliament that we are in, and this is the composition that the people have sent here. So the coalition is well within its rights to note that this particular bill, which allows for the Greens to be on the committee, would undermine the committee's whole purpose. It would undermine its purpose because the committee requires those who are on it to be exposed to not just confidential briefings but also secret and top-secret briefings. For those who have served, whether in an intelligence agency or in uniform, there are two limbs to national security documents. One is whether you have a classification, and for that committee you would presume that members and senators on the committee had been granted one, in the same way as the secretariat would require one. But the second part is the need to know. Do you need to know? For the Greens political party to make pronouncements on defence, they don't need to know the ins and outs of the most important agreement, the AUKUS agreement. That agreement will face enough hurdles and enough challenges before we consider that those who mix their politics with a form of student activism will be seeking to use the committee to undermine the national interest. To do it in that way would risk making the committee totally ineffective, because we know how the department and those in uniform would react. They would pull back from being full and frank in their disclosures to the committee, which would mean that it wouldn't be able to do the work that it needs to do. It is not a given that AUKUS will be delivered without hard work, goodwill and enormous pressure and dedication from multiple generations of parliamentarians in this place and in the Senate, and this committee is a key requirement for that to happen.

We welcome the committee. I particularly want to thank those who have recommended this in previous parliaments, including the late Senator Jim Molan. He advocated for this from a very early stage, including not just for the delivery of a great national project like AUKUS but also for the consideration of where and how this nation will deploy its men and women in harm's way.

I think back to that moment in Tarin Kowt where I stopped for a moment, looked up at the TV—at this place—and pondered about the debate that was happening so far away on the other side of the earth about the place that we were standing in. I would like to think that future men and women in uniform will one day stop to read a digital newspaper or look online to hear that a committee has had their interests at heart, the national interest at heart, and that, in particular, the parties who have had a tradition of being in government, the Labor Party and the coalition, have put their best efforts to put the national interest first, and, with that amendment, this bill is to be welcomed.

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