David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

A very good reminder. I will read onto the record what Labor's defence minister Richard Marles said this morning at an international arms fair:

And here on the Expo side of it, we will be seeing an incredible display of what our industry can produce; awesome power, ingenious autonomous systems and craft of all shapes and sizes which spread, which span the breadth of the beautiful, the menacing and the extremely cool.

That's the defence minister talking about robotic weapons. That's the defence minister talking about missiles. That's the defence minister talking about artillery pieces. That's the defence minister talking about machines whose only purpose is to kill people, and he defines them as 'beautiful' and 'extremely cool'. What is wrong with Minister Marles? What is going on in his head for him to describe weapons of death in a weapons fair as 'extremely cool' and 'beautiful'? Does this reflect some Labor values that have been hidden and are now coming to the surface, where Labor salivates at a 'Disneyland' of 'beautiful' and 'cool' weapons? That's what Labor's been doing today.

Is it any wonder that thousands of young people and others gathered outside that and opposed Labor's festival of death and festival of cool killing? Is it any wonder? I want to put on the record my gratitude to everybody who came out and peacefully opposed that weapons fair. They came out and said, 'Our governments should not be investing in death and war.' I want to thank my Greens colleagues in the New South Wales parliament for challenging Chris Minns when he steps up and says, as he did today, that he wants the defence industries to be a massive part of the future plan of New South Wales.

The Greens have a different view, which is not investing in weapons, killing and death; not sending weapons into a genocide; and not promoting lethal autonomous weapons as, to quote Defence Minister Marles, 'extremely cool'. We think that the global weapons industry is a threat to our collective survival. We can see far better things to do with $375 billion than give those kinds of fantasy moments to Defence Minister Marles in his dystopian, disturbing and indeed incredibly skewed world view.

Of course, AUKUS isn't just designed to give Defence Minister Marles his Disneyland death moments. AUKUS is also designed to take Australia into the next US war with China. We should be clear about that. Apart from climate change, Labor's plans to take us into a US war with China is probably the most serious security issue facing Australia, and, saying that plainly—that the Albanese Labor government is actively making plans to take Australia into a future US war with China—shows what a risk this is. That's what Labor is doing now. War with China would be disastrous for Australia, disastrous for China, disastrous for our region and disastrous for the world. Rather than lean into it, as Labor is doing, and seek to join the US in that war, tied to the hip with the US under AUKUS, the Greens reject that analysis. We reject Labor's theory that war is inevitable. While war is far from inevitable, the Albanese government's boots-and-all commitment to AUKUS and its surrender to Trump's war-making plans does risk fuelling a foolish and dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy to drag Australia into war.

Under the guise of AUKUS, Labor has been inviting a major US military build-up on our shores. Far from keeping us safe, that escalates regional tensions. It leads in turn to more US military build-up, and that non-virtuous military spiral is where Australia's security is indeed the biggest loser. Multiple war games have shown that the war Labor's making plans for will most likely produce one of two outcomes: either the US loses, or everyone loses due to catastrophic civilian, military and economic losses. That's the war that Labor wants to take us to. That is the war that the Albanese government wants to divert hundreds of billions of public dollars to join, to fight—I say alongside but probably from behind and as directed by the US military. What makes it worse is when you realise that it'll be Australia, not the US, that will be on the new front lines of this future war. Australia is not currently part of the front lines of any war, but we'll not be put on the front lines of this war by accident. It will be by design, and, to its eternal shame, it's a design that's being approved by and largely paid for by our own government.

For the past decade, the US has begun to accept that many of its existing forward military bases in the region, from Japan south, are incredibly vulnerable to military attack if the US initiated a war in the Pacific. That has led the US to look for a sucker somewhere south—to seek more and larger bases in Australia that, whilst still in the Asia-Pacific, are less vulnerable to being destroyed in the first 24 to 48 hours of a conflict. And what does that expansion look like? It looks like AUKUS. It looks like an $8 billion US nuclear submarine attack base being built by Australian taxpayers at HMAS Stirling in Garden Island, off Perth, right next to an expanded $25 billion Defence precinct.

Debate interrupted.