David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I note the interjection from the Leader of the Opposition—'Hear, hear!'—cheering on this war. It's as though the coalition has no eyes, no ears and no heart. Millions of Australians are suffering right now from this war. They're suffering when they can't fill up their petrol tank, they're suffering because they're anxious about their job and they're suffering because they're seeing yet more carnage and violence coming across on their phone and in their newsfeed. And in this chamber, when we mention it, the coalition cheer that illegal war on; they cheer on Donald Trump. And they did it just then, from the Leader of the Opposition. No ears, no eyes and no heart—that's how decisions like this are made to send Australians to war. It's time that changed.

This is not a radical reform. Democracies around the world require a parliamentary vote, parliamentary approval, before going to war. France, Finland, Denmark, Germany and Spain all require a parliamentary vote and parliamentary approval before their countries can go to war and before they can deploy troops overseas.

Ninety per cent of Australians want this reform. In fact, when you ask Australians about it—when you say, 'Do you think the parliament should have to approve Australia going to war?'—you have to get over the disbelief that it isn't already part of the system. Australians can't believe that some of the most consequential decisions for our country have no democratic oversight and are literally just made in that darkened, cigar-smoke-filled room with a phone call from Washington. They cannot believe it, and they are right to be appalled.

The last time the Greens brought this reform to the parliament, we had an extraordinary position put from the Labor Party. The Labor Party didn't pretend to be interested in democracy. They didn't pretend to be interested in asking the opinion of the Australian people. I'll read what the Labor Party's Senator Ciccone, on behalf of the government, said about what's important before decisions like this are made. He said:

But it's also important to note that in the Westminster system of government, as we have here in Australia, it is within the purview of the executive to make decisions regarding the commitment of forces to engagements, be they within our borders or overseas. It is that way because, the way our Constitution is written, the Governor-General, as a representative of His Majesty the King, Commander in Chief of the Australian Defence Force, is constitutionally vested with this responsibility.

That's Labor's answer—that the decision to send Australia to war is made by the unelected representative of the King. You couldn't make this stuff up--this bowing to a great and powerful friend, this surrender of democracy from Labor, who literally come into this place and say they want to back in a system where the Governor-General, as a representative of His Majesty the King, Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Defence Force, makes the decision to send Australia to war. That is a betrayal of our democracy. That is a hearkening back to the colonial 19th century, when Australia wasn't an independent country—when we were, at least officially, under control.

Do you know what is remarkable? The Greens reject that theory that we should be under the control of a foreign power. We reject the idea that a representative of a foreign power should be making decisions about sending us to war. But the war parties—Labor, the Liberal Party and One Nation—lean into that. They're quite happy for the representative of the King—some foreign king who lives on the other side of the planet—to be making the ultimate decision about sending us to war, and they're quite happy—in fact, they are super comfortable—with the idea that the real decision about whether we get sent to war isn't even made by our notional king; it's actually made by their mates in Washington and whoever happens to be the President of the United States.

So what does this bill do? Currently, the Defence Act 1903 has no transparent decision-making—no scrutiny or debate—in relation to troop deployment. It is a decision for the Governor-General, and, on one reading of it, it could be a decision by the defence minister themselves without even having to go to cabinet. That is a broken process. The Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Approval of Overseas Service) Bill 2020 inserts a new section 29A into the Defence Act to require that decisions to deploy members of the Australian Defence Force beyond the territorial limits be made not by one or two members of the executive but by parliament as a whole. That means a debate in both houses followed by a vote.

It is likely that, with the war parties in control, that vote would have succeeded, because they all seem to back in this war. But it would have required the Albanese Labor government to articulate what their war goals were, what they wanted to achieve from this war. No doubt they would have parroted the lies of Washington. They would have said three weeks ago—as we heard in their press releases, as we heard in their backgrounding of journalists and as we heard in the endless cycle of lies coming out of Washington—that this was about regime change, it was about democracy and it was about preventing a nuclear weapons program. And we would've seen that on the record, and those lies would've been sitting there on the record being pulled apart by reality as the war went on, and then voters across the country would've seen if their MP voted for this disastrous war or not, and they could've held them to account.

As the lies unravelled—and they've all unravelled. This was never about regime change. Donald Trump, Anthony Albanese and Benjamin Netanyahu don't care about the Iranian people. This was never about democracy, and they've all back-pedalled from that. This was never about dealing with an illegal nuclear weapons program in Iran, because we now know—and the Australian prime minister would've had access to the Five Eyes advice coming from Washington—that the entire US national security services have said that Iran did not have a viable nuclear weapons program and that it was destroyed in June last year and Iran had not restarted it. So that lie has unravelled, and it's a lie that, to his utter shame, the Prime Minister repeated just last week in a press conference to the Australian people.

And now we're getting the new lie that this endless war—this continuing war that is unravelling our economy, threatening global stability, killing thousands in the region—is about opening up the Strait of Hormuz. Well, how did the Strait of Hormuz close in the first place? It closed with an illegal war—started by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu and backed in by their good mate Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his crew in the Labor cabinet. So, as those lies unravel, there is a continuing obligation on this house to scrutinise what's happening. This bill would also contain a section which provides that, once members of the Defence Force are deployed overseas, the Minister for Defence must report in writing to each house of the parliament every two months on the status, the legality, the scope and the anticipated duration of the deployment as well as on efforts to resolve the circumstance of the deployment and on any reasons why the parliament should allow the deployment to continue—ongoing democratic oversight.

I want to thank all of the community groups: Australians for War Powers Reform, IPAN, ICAN, the thousands of Australians across the country that have backed in war powers reform. They continue to have a sense of what Australia should be. Australia should be a democracy that makes decisions like this based on international law, on basic principles of humanity and on Australia's national interest—not on the national interest of the United States and not on the national interest of Israel but on Australia's national interest. And that argument, that fundamental argument, needs to be had right here, in the centre of Australian democracy, and, if the government don't have the courage to make their argument in parliament, they should never send Australian troops to another brutal, impossibly appalling US forever war. I commend this bill to the chamber.