Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

These circumstances are exactly why we need more oversight of our military interventions, not less. Once again, we are seeing Australia lining up as the well-behaved lapdog, and I know this is hard for the war party on my left, the Labor Party, to hear, but it is the truth. Instead of condemning this unprecedented and illegal act of war, the Prime Minister rushes to back the United States. The Foreign minister fails to condemn the strikes while invoking the so-called rules based international order. International law cannot be conditional. It cannot apply only to our adversaries. A rules based system that excuses powerful allies while punishing others is not a system of law; it is a system of hierarchy, which is why Australians deserve oversight of the decisions that are being made in their names and by the representatives that they elected to represent them.

Australians deserve to know whether our country has been implicated in these attacks. We deserve to know whether Australian territory and infrastructure at Pine Gap played a role in coordinating the strike. A secret committee will not give us and give Australians the confidence they need about these decisions. If Australian facilities were used, then we are not observers; we are participants. The government should immediately rule out Pine Gap's involvement in acts of war and commit to ensuring Australian soil is never used to facilitate unlawful military action.

Who benefits from this escalation and ongoing secrecy? It's not the Iranian people, who now face the risk of internal instability in a power vacuum, nor the thousands more across the region who will bear the brunt of retaliatory violence. It's not the Iranian schoolgirls—over 100 of whom were killed yesterday when a bomb hit a primary school, not a military target. Fatima al-Zahra Mohammad Ali, a nine-year-old student, was among those killed. A nine-year-old girl was killed by the US and Israel, and her only crime was attending school. As a father of a six-year-old girl killed at the school waited for her body to be removed from the rubble, he said:

I cannot understand how a place where innocent children learn can be bombed like this. We are talking about small children who knew nothing of politics or wars. And yet they are the ones paying the highest price.

We've seen this before in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya—intervention after intervention justified by the language of liberation and ending in protracted violence and civilian casualties, with children and families paying the price.

We need more oversight, not less. Why will we not learn from history? When bombs fall, it's ordinary people who suffer; it is women and children. It is not the architects of war strategy in Washington, Tel Aviv or right here in Australia, in the Australian parliament. It is not the executives in corporate war rooms masquerading as boardrooms, but there is always someone who profits. Global defence corporations, surging oil markets—there is so much money to be made in war by the right people, with the ultimate cost being human lives.

Australia's defence and foreign policy has become entangled with the objectives of the US with no public, transparent debate, and, here we are, listening to one of the war parties trying to reduce transparency even more. AUKUS is another example of absolute self-delusion and self-denial. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being committed to submarines that will never materialise, while people struggle to afford rent, health care and energy bills. You want them to have less oversight and understanding of how their taxpayer dollars are being spent.

We must do everything we can to help the struggle of the Iranian people to promote peace in the region and support their pathway to a safe and fair democracy, but we cannot and we must not become complicit in another bloody American war. We are not at the beck and call of Donald Trump. The answer to an escalating war machine isn't more decisions made in dark war rooms by the global elite. It is not Australia's automatic alignment with everything that the United States does. It is transparency and accountability. It is listening to voices from Iran and across the diaspora, but, above all, it is the bravery to put our own interests and the interests of civilians around the globe ahead of the interests of powerful warmongers. This is the bravery that the Labor government so clearly and utterly lacks at this crucial moment in time.

At precisely the moment when Australians are witnessing how quickly military escalation can occur, this parliament is being asked to endorse another structure in relation to this bill that conducts defence oversight largely out of public view. Accountability cannot simply mean a small group of insiders making decisions behind closed doors. At a time when the world is crying out for de-escalation, diplomacy and independence from powerful interests, this bill risks entrenching quite the opposite—greater secrecy, less visibility and more consolidation of power. The Greens do not support this bill. The Greens do not support an illegal war led by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. As a party of peace, we do not support outsourcing international law or the illegal violence and civilian bloodshed that is apparently supported by the war parties in this place: the Labor Party, the Liberal and National parties and One Nation. Shame on them.