Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Obviously, the Naval Nuclear Power Safety Regulations allow the United States to bring their nuclear submarines to Australia as part of the toxic AUKUS agreement. Who can forget former prime minister Scott Morrison telling a lie to the French government as he did the dirty on them and instead, in one of his most bizarre thought bubbles—and, believe me, there were a number of such thought bubbles during his prime ministership—joining in the AUKUS pact with the United States and the United Kingdom. We know that AUKUS is going to put Australia at higher risk, and I want to give one contemporary example of how this is going to happen.

Cast your minds back to last week, when the United States and Israel opened up an illegal war on Iran—illegal under international law. You won't find a credible international law scholar anywhere in the world who will conclude that this is a justified and legal war, because it's not. It is an obviously and blatantly illegal war. Last week in the Indian Ocean, a United States submarine, without provocation, attacked an Iranian warship—which had just been, by the way, to India on a friendship visit—and did so with Australian submariners on board. We've heard from Labor that those Australian submariners were told, 'Stand down, knock off and have a beer, go to your bunks,' while the button was pressed and then somehow sprang back to duty later. To try and run an argument that they were not involved in that illegal act beggars belief. The survivors from that Iranian warship were abandoned to drown at sea, in direct contravention, I might add, of section 18 of the Geneva convention.

We then had the Foreign minister, Minister Wong, get up in question time and assert, with some vague proposition, that in fact that attack was justified under international law because there was an imminent danger that that Iranian warship was going to target somebody else. I'll tell you something: right through our history, humans have gone to war based on lies. We saw it in the Iraq War and we are seeing it here today in the war on Iran—the lie of imminent threat that was used by the US to start this illegal war.

We've got Australia refuelling US spy planes being used in the war and Australian submariners on board a US submarine that conducted the illegal sinking of an Iranian warship in the war, and Labor claiming they had nothing to do with it. And today we had the announcement that we are sending personnel, missiles and an aircraft into the war region on a defensive basis only. That is the next lie being told to the Australian people, because the arrival of those personnel and those assets will facilitate the raining down of an absolute firestorm on Iran and the deaths of countless innocent civilians who are paying for this illegality with their lives and their futures. The reason we can confidently assert that is that the AEW&C aircraft is a very scarce military resource in the region, and the arrival of the Australian AEW&C aircraft will allow a US AEW&C aircraft that could otherwise be used in a defensive role to move into an offensive role, thereby facilitating the illegal offensive conduct in this war on Iran. Don't believe Labor when they say this is for defensive purposes; it is going to facilitate an expansion of the war and the raining down of further horrors on innocent Iranian people.