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

I rise on behalf of the Greens to indicate we oppose the Customs Tariff Amendment (Geelong Treaty Implementation) Bill 2025, which follows on from the treaty signed between the UK and Australia on 26 July 2025 as part of AUKUS. If you want Australia to go and join the next US war, if you want Australia to spend billions of dollars trying to bail out the UK's failing meltdown of a nuclear submarine industry, if you want to see $375 billion of Australian taxpayers' money not spent on schools, housing, dealing with the climate catastrophe or making sure kids have enough to eat, if you want to hand over our sovereignty to decisions made in Washington, if you want to expand US bases on this continent and build the United States an $8 billion or $9 billion submarine base off of Perth, if you want to make Australia a nuclear target by expanding US bases in Pine Gap, Tindall and Stirling and building the US an east-coast submarine base in Newcastle or Wollongong—if you want those outcomes, then vote for this bill. That's what this bill does. It takes us down that path, to the beat of the drums of warmongers in Washington and the war parties here, Labor and the coalition.

If you want to go down the path of joining the next US war, with a lawless, increasingly fascist regime in Washington that has no interest in the so-called rules based order, that's selling out its allies as we speak and that is about as trustworthy as—well—Donald Trump, support this bill. That's what this bill does. This bill implements aspects of the UK-Australia agreement, specifically article 21 of the treaty, which requires the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Australia not to impose value added taxes, excise, custom duties and other similar charges on imports and exports of goods in connection with that treaty—basically, largely, AUKUS related stuff.

In one view, this doesn't really matter, because there's next to zero chance that the UK's failing industrial capacity will produce nuclear reactors or come close to producing an SSN-AUKUS submarine. Their own audit office says that their projects are in meltdown, their defence budget is in collapse, their economy is failing and their politics are fraying. Who would choose the UK as a partner for security in the Indo-Pacific now? Only someone who is ignorant of the reality of the UK's budget, economy and position in the world. So, in one view, this might not be relevant, because there's Buckley's chance of this actually coming into play. The problem is in the pretence that the UK can be a meaningful security partner for Australia in the Indo-Pacific in 2025. To remind the chamber, this isn't 1925, when they had an empire in this region, which was about as popular as a fart in an elevator. They got eventually thrown out by independence movements in our region, which wanted the UK out of the region and not to return—