James Paterson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to briefly put on the record again the coalition's position in relation to this issue. I understand the Greens have a principled and consistent position which is antiwar. Nonetheless, I thought a significant omission from Senator Shoebridge's five-minute speech was that he didn't even attempt to wrestle with the difficult choices required when making decisions about whether to go to war or not and didn't even contemplate for a second on the public record the crimes of the Iranian regime.

The crimes of the Iranian regime are significant. They are crimes they have committed against their own people, crimes they have committed against their neighbours and crimes they have committed against Australia. Let's start with Australia because this is the Australian Senate and we're concerned with Australia's national interest. We now know, courtesy of assessments of our own intelligence agencies, that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of the Iranian regime is responsible for at least two acts of state sponsored terror on Australian soil targeting our Jewish community. The firebombing of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne plus the attack on the Lewis' Continental Kitchen in Sydney have been assessed to be the responsibility of Iran. Our intelligence agencies say that at least those two attacks were masterminded, paid for and coordinated by the Iranian regime but that many of the other attacks over the last two years in this country targeting the Jewish community might have also been the responsibility of the Iranian regime. That's one reason why Australia should be supportive of the US and Israel's action against Iran.

Of course, Iran is a destabilising actor, particularly in the Middle East. It is the world's largest state sponsor of terror. It has used proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis to do incredible damage across the Middle East, including to civilian targets. It is responsible for countless civilian deaths across the Middle East carried out by its terror proxies, which it arms, equips, trains and directs. This is a significant crime of the Iranian regime.

But perhaps the worst crimes of the Iranian regime are the crimes they perpetrated against their own people. In their 47 years of history they have engaged in horrific repression of their own people—horrific repression of ethnic and religious minorities, horrific repression of political dissidents and horrific repression of women. It is very significant that much of the protests in recent years in Iran have been under the banner of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, which was started in response to the horrific killing of Mahsa Amini, a woman who refused to be veiled, contrary to the Islamic dictates of the ayatollah's regime. She was brutally and violently murdered for the crime of refusing to wear a headscarf, and thousands if not millions of Iranians have marched in her name ever since.

We know that, in recent months, tens of thousands of those people have been, according to credible media reports and human rights organisations, cruelly and coldly murdered by that regime, the IRGC in particular, and by other religious enforcers of that regime. This is a despicable regime and one that does not deserve any sympathy at all from any Australian, much less from the Senate, and I would have thought that, in a contribution about international law and the rights and wrongs in this war, Senator Shoebridge would at least mention that, as some of his Greens colleagues have in the past, recognising the horrific crimes that have been perpetrated against the Iranian people.

I think it's also significant, if you look at the reaction from the Iranian diaspora in Australia—it is not uniform, but it is almost uniform, almost unanimous—that they have reacted with unprecedented joy and celebration at the Israeli-US strikes against this regime. Look at the protests in the streets. Any senator who's received any correspondence from the Iranian community in Australia would know that overwhelmingly they welcome the strikes on the regime. They are very clear. These are the people who've had to live under this regime. These are the people who have had to flee this regime. These are people who've had to find a home in our country. And they that say it is a good thing that the United States and Israel have taken this action, that it is a good thing that the Ayatollah and his henchmen have been removed from power.

I think we have an obligation to listen carefully to that community, to listen carefully to those voices, particularly when they are so unanimous and so overwhelming. There are difficult choices to be made by nation states in times like this. I think it is the right thing—and that is even before we get to the degradation of the nuclear and ballistics program of this regime.