Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

They say the first casualty in war is truth. Well, we've heard from Mr Albanese, our Prime Minister, as we have from the US president and from the Israelis, that their illegal strike on Iran was in self-defence to eliminate their nuclear program. Just in March last year the US security agency said there were no credible plans for Iran to build a nuclear weapon. Then, in June, Donald Trump said he'd obliterated the Iranian nuclear program, which he's repeated ever since. Yet now we're expected to believe that the justification for this unilateral strike that decapitated the leader of a sovereign nation was self-defence.

Do senators remember when this country and its government and this chamber stood up, in 2003, and said, 'We need to remove a brutal dictator who's going to use weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein'? That turned out to be a lie. And what a catastrophe it was. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of people lost their lives. We saw civil war across the region. We saw millions of people flee across Europe, escaping persecution. We saw the rise of ISIS and terrorism in the Middle East, because of this US removal of a foreign head of state and invasion of a foreign country. When are we going to learn?

The Greens immediately call on all who support Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu's war with Iran to work with like-minded countries to promote peace in the region and for the people of Iran. We call on this government to stop all intelligence and resources from Pine Gap, North West Cape and other US military assets in Australia assisting this illegal war. And we call all Australian troops seconded in the US military. We want this chamber to acknowledge you cannot bomb your way to peace.