Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to add my voice to that of the Iranian Australian community—to speak about the war in Iran, the preconditions that have caused this conflict and the situation that now emerges and faces the Middle East. I think it's a good segue to add that the member for Bennelong is correct about multiculturalism and Australian values, but he did not name those Australian values. And that evasion is very important.

Why do people want to come here from all different parts of the world? Why do people want to flee conflicts and war zones? Why do they want to flee hideous theocracies like Iran to come to our country? It's because of the political, social and economic freedom that our country affords and the rights that we give every one of our citizens—attached to their individuality and to who they are—through our constitution and our laws respecting society. So today I join the Iranian Australian community in welcoming the moves of our ally and friend the United States in directly removing the head of one of the most evil regimes in world history: the Ayatollah Khamenei, one of the most evil figures in Australian history. Pezeshkian, of course, is one of the most evil presidents in Australian history ever to grace the world's history.

We welcome it not because we see bombs falling in the country. We welcome the fact that those people that are oppressed under the Iranian regime, the Iranian people themselves, now have a chance for freedom. It isn't the United States imposing it from the outside. We have to remember that the population of Iran have struggled peacefully in every way they can think of, for decades and decades, to their own detriment, to fight their own government. We, in the West and in free societies, know that the government can be our best friend, but the government can also be our worst enemy. And we see the case of the worst enemy in the Iranian regime—of their own people.

When you hear the stories from the Persians who've come here, the Iranian citizens who've fled, of what happens back home, it's just like an Orwellian nightmare. And you don't have to listen to me today. You can read the words of our own Kylie Moore-Gilbert who, in her piece today in the SMH, really spells out the circuit breaker that the death of Ayatollah Khamenei represents for ordinary Iranians—decades of murder, torture and rape of people. But the morality police—imagine that. Imagine if we, in our country, said we were establishing morality police. As Moore-Gilbert says, they control the lives of everyday citizens in Iran in granular detail, down to who they can marry and who they can hold hands with in the street. The morality police control whether citizens can wear shorts and whether they can play sports. They control things like food and drink, funeral rites, child custody, the inheritance of property and permission to leave the country. Everything is controlled by the regime. Imagine life under such a regime. Of course, it is with great sadness that we see that war is necessary. But war is one of the few solutions when Iran, which is one of the greatest terrorist states and one of the grey zone actors in our world today, has attacked our own country.

I want to do something unusual and commend the Albanese government for the stance they've taken and the moral clarity that they've shown—Prime Minister Albanese has shown moral clarity on Iran—and I do welcome the Australian government doing that. It's important that we stand together with the Albanese government as an opposition, and we do, to support Prime Minister Albanese taking a very strong stand on the destabilising and terrorist state that is Iran, not only because it has attacked Australia. We saw the expulsion of the Iranian diplomats from Australia because of planned terrorist attacks and terrorist activity within our own country. But we are not alone. There have been hundreds of these incidents over decades. In France, there have been convictions of terrorists sponsored by Iran. Iran is the single greatest sponsor of terrorism of any state in the entire world today. It has taken too long for the world to do something about it. For too long, countries have put up with Iran, this 'grey zone' actor, deliberately undermining the peace and prosperity of free countries all around the world. Australia has not been immune to these actions. It's why we saw the bravery of ordinary Iranians—let's be frank, the bravery of Iranian women, who over many decades stood up to the regime at great personal risk. Mahsa Amini is a symbol—a poor Kurdish woman beaten to death by the morality police for violating dress codes. Other women have stood in their tens of thousands—while bullets have been fired at them—to stand up for their basic freedoms and rights.

This is what unites us in the west. This is what unites us in multiculturalism—that we have a rights based society that respects people as individuals, attaches human rights to them and does not take those rights away. No-one may take those rights away in our rights-respecting society. But these things do not exist in Iran. So, when we act, when we support the United States as the Albanese government and Australia are now doing, we are supporting the right action even though it comes at a great cost. For a diaspora of people, for a population like the Iranians, who have for decades struggled and protested—who in January of this year were massacred in record numbers at a protest rally—this is really the only answer anyone can think of.

The mullahs in Iran, who have deliberately suppressed the freedom of the population for their own religious purposes, are some of the most evil clerics on the planet today. This has been a grand struggle of the Iranian people for a long time. While this comes at a great cost, you can see we are not alone. When you see that almost all of the gulf states unanimously oppose Iran, you have to think, 'What's going on?' Peace in the Middle East is one of the most elusive goals for the world. What unites most countries in the world today is an understanding that Iran is a terrorist actor and a terrorist state and is against those gulf states, those Arab states, as much as it is against Australia and the United States. Thus we find ourselves acting in concert to act against a terrorist state like Iran.

I highlight again for the House, as my community and the people in Western Sydney who've come here from Iran have told me repeatedly, intelligence agencies from Iran have been monitoring and acting against people here in Australia for decades. With the amplification of those efforts, we saw that Australian intelligence linked the state of Iran with arson attacks that occurred in late 2024—one in a cafe, one at a synagogue in Melbourne—which led to the Israeli ambassador being expelled. But let's be frank, the embassy here in Australia was acting against citizens of Australia because of their background, and that had to be stopped as well.

Welcome as well was Australia's listing of the IRGC as a state sponsor of terrorism. Again, it was too late by all governments and, frankly, an admission that our own government didn't act fast enough or strongly enough. The Albanese government could have acted faster on what was compelling evidence that the revolutionary guard corps was a state sponsor of terrorism. It's a lesson for all of us.

What should we do now? Obviously we should support the United States. We should support our allies. We should support the gulf states who understand and live with Iran as a menace and a danger to their daily lives every single day. But we should also take action within Australia. The government needs to do a thorough review of anyone who is here on a temporary visa, especially those who are foreign preachers within Australia and preaching at mosques. Any of these individuals who preach hate to young Muslim men within Australia need to be deported. Their visas need to be cancelled. It should be routine. It should be happening already, yet the evidence that is coming out of some of the mosques in Western Sydney is that people are lamenting the death of Ayatollah Khamenei and that some of the preachers are preaching hate speech.

I ask a question of this government and of this parliament: why did we pass hate speech laws so recently following the Bondi terrorist attack in Australia, which was again ISIS inspired, terrorist inspired? Why did we set up 15-year penalties, if we cannot tackle the most basic hate speech being preached in mosques in Sydney right now under the guise of religious speech? Those laws need to be now put into practice. The government needs to enforce them. Our agencies need to take the actions. That's what our security agencies and other agencies need to focus on in this, because we must preserve our own society first. That means removing the dangerous influence of foreign hate preachers and those who would preach hate to our young minds. We know the effects that that has.

But I say this to the people of Iran and the Australian Iranian community: Australia stands with you. We stand with you in this terrible war, and it is necessary to do whatever we can to support the long-held aspiration of the people of Iran for a better life, a better society and a freer society.