Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The way that Australia sends troops overseas is broken. It is undemocratic. It is unaccountable. Most concerning of all, it lacks any transparency and is deliberately vague, to the point of deliberate secrecy.

In school we are taught that the Prime Minister, the Governor-General, the federal Executive Council make the decision to go to war. But the reality is that the major parties abandoned this process decades ago in favour of a system that allows the Prime Minister and the defence minister to wage war unilaterally, without any checks or balances or direct safeguards. It is this process that has lead Australia again and again into war after war without any clear goals. Without any forethought for the damage that we might cause, or the perpetration of injury that we might participate in, to both the civilian populations and the veterans asked to fight in those wars.

Millions have been killed in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria. We have helped create generational wounds for both the people that live in these places and the troops that we have sent there without a single declaration of war, a single vote of this parliament, or indeed, even so much as a proclamation issued by a Governor-General.

People in positions of power are able to do this because they make use of a vague amendment in the Defence Act which says that the defence minister has the ability to give orders on the general administration of the defence force. This amendment was passed in 1975. It was an amendment that was clearly not intended to give the defence minister or the prime minister the unilateral power to wage catastrophic wars across the world. What legal advice does either party rely upon to defend the claim that such use of such an amendment is even constitutional? If you ask them they refuse to say.

The report before the Senate at the moment is a report that for the first time—because of the weight of evidence given by community members, by academics, by legal scholars—was forced to acknowledge that this interpretation of the Defence Act is questionable. Finally, after decades, they were dragged kicking and screaming to acknowledge this tiny part of reality. In response, the report says that it is preferable that Australia make the decision to go to war in a more constitutional way and, indeed, undertake the process of consulting with the Governor-General. I don't know about you, but 'preferable' doesn't quite cut it for something so important as the decision to put our troops in harm's way and the decision to invade another country.

Reading this report, you're left with the searing impression that it is in fact a stunning example of the cowardice of the Labor members of this committee to have made an election promise to hold an inquiry into this process—an inquiry which found massive problems with the current system—and yet then to refuse to recommend any substantial changes to that broken system, regardless of the reality that a majority of submissions overwhelmingly called for significant reform.

The Greens have long held the position that the decision to send ADF personnel overseas must be made by the parliament and, by extension, by the people of Australia. If a mother has to worry every night that her child is deployed in Iraq even though that child wasn't even born in 2003, then the very least her local MP can do is take the responsibility of being there and explaining why they had to go.

It was the Howard government that last got involved in an illegal and immoral war, but it is the Albanese government today ensuring that it can happen again because of their refusal to act in a way that would prevent it when they had the chance. So the next time a Liberal government is in power and they sign us off to go to war alongside the US to create a humanitarian disaster, the blood of that conflict will be on the hands of both parties, for they have failed in this moment to place safeguards—

I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.