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

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

Today, the Greens introduce a bill that will require both houses of parliament to vote before the Australian Defence Force can be sent overseas to engage in warlike actions.

War power reform bills have been proposed by the Greens for over 20 years and have been routinely rejected by the war parties—the Liberal Party, the Labor Party—over those two decades. With Australians being sent into another illegal US war, without any democratic debate or input, the Greens today are reintroducing the Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Approval of Overseas Service) Bill, introduced by my colleague Senator Jordan Steele-John in 2020. I want to thank Senator Steele-John and the community groups that he and his team worked with in developing this bill and presenting it for the parliament then.

There is extraordinary support from the community for these reforms. A 2023 poll found that 90 per cent of Australians support war powers reform. Let me repeat that: 90 per cent of Australians want this legislation to pass, and they want a binding parliamentary vote before the deployment of Australian troops and military personnel into overseas conflicts.

The announcement from the Albanese Labor government that it's sending more than 80 military personnel, an RAAF E-7A Wedgetail aircraft and medium range air-to-air missiles directly into another US forever war in the Middle East shows how easy it is for a handful of empowered individuals in the executive—the Prime Minister and the defence minister, maybe with a nod to the Foreign minister, but it's not required, so literally two people can make the decision to send Australia to war. That's what's happened in this latest announcement: the decision made in a closed room by a handful of cabinet members—not even the full cabinet—with zero parliamentary oversight, zero public engagement and not even the pretence of asking the opinion of the Australian people. Labor's defence minister has actually now finally admitted that this most recent deployment of Australian troops came after multiple requests from the United States.

Once again, we find that the war parties in this place don't listen to the Australian public, don't ask the Australian public, don't listen to the Australian parliament and don't ask the Australian parliament. Who do they ask? They ask whoever is in charge in Washington: Donald Trump, son of Trump—whoever is in charge in Washington, that's the person who has the say over whether or not Australia goes to war. That is a gross failing of Australia's national interests—a surrender of Australia's national interests.

When a handful of people in a darkened, smoke-filled room get a phone call from Washington and then send Australia to war, that's not democracy. That is a disaster waiting to happen. We know that that's how decisions have been made for decades and decades. That's how thousands of Australians went to Vietnam—hundreds were killed in Vietnam. That's how thousands of Australians went into a never-ending conflict in Afghanistan—which was apparently to depose the Taliban—only to return after two decades of appalling violence in Afghanistan. Millions of people from Afghanistan were displaced and hundreds of thousands were killed—so much suffering. That decision is never democratic—that decision made by a handful of people in a dark room in Canberra.

Take the Iraq war. You would think that, at moments like this, when Australia is doubling down on deployment into another illegal US war in the Middle East, there would be at least an echo, a memory, of the disaster that was the last time that Australia deployed troops into the Middle East, sending Australian forces into another illegal war, based on lies, in Iraq, and of the utter chaos that that produced for the people of Iraq, and then, as Iraq imploded, the chaos that then echoed throughout the region, with the ripping apart of Syria and the spread of conflict from that US war. And yet, none of those historical lessons have been learned by Labor.

To their shame, the coalition brought a motion into this parliament to congratulate Donald Trump on this war. The faux debate that happened in this chamber between the war parties of One Nation, Labor and the coalition was about whether we congratulate the United States and Israel for commencing this utterly destructive war, or whether—