Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator O'Neill for her question and, if I may, also thank her for her work as one of the conveners of the Parliamentary Friends of Ukraine and again welcome to the Senate our friends from Ukraine, including Dr Mykhailiuk. Thank you to you and your delegation for being here. We stand with Ukraine.

Iran's reprisal attacks have continued to escalate at a scale and breadth we have not seen before, now attacking 11 countries. The UAE alone has been forced to intercept more than a thousand drones and rockets. The Iranian regime's intensifying hostile attacks are on countries that have nothing to do with the US and Israeli strikes. Countries in the region are now being forced to defend themselves. Australia supported action that prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and from continuing to threaten international peace and security. It is clear that this conflict is now widening. Australia is not participating in the US strikes, and we have been clear that we are not sending Australian troops into Iran.

The first priority of our government is and always will be to protect Australians and keep them safe at home and overseas. We have 115,000 Australians in the Middle East, 24,000 of them in the UAE. As we have said, we have been working on contingencies to keep Australians safe and get travellers home. We've sent DFAT personnel to the region as part of crisis response teams. They are on the ground providing medical and consular support. We have already deployed military assets as part of our contingency planning earlier this week. We will continue to look at all options that we have available to us, engaging partners and taking action to support efforts to keep Australians safe. I regret that the conflict is likely to get worse before it gets better, and we call on all parties to uphold international humanitarian law and to protect civilian life. Our hope is that we will see, in the near term, a return to dialogue and diplomacy.