Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We live in an increasingly fractured, polarised world, where principles and values we once took for granted in Australia are being undermined. Today, the Albanese Labor government gets away with doing things that would simply not have been acceptable in Australia a generation or two ago.

Labor may have won the 2022 election and the 2025 election with only approximately 35 per cent of the primary vote, but that hasn't made the problems Labor created go away. We still have a cost-of-living crisis, we still have a housing crisis, we still have record immigration and we have increasing debt, huge budget deficits and declining economic productivity. The Prime Minister's so-called productivity roundtable, of his sycophants, won't change things at all unless it includes people who understand productivity and business—people like Gina Rinehart, Solomon Lew, Gerry Harvey and Dick Smith. Taxpayers are still forced to foot the bill for subsidising renewable projects in the pursuit of net zero, coupled with rises in our electricity bills of more than 300 per cent over the past 20 years or so.

More recently, Labor has gambled with our national security. For decades, Australia's defence has mainly been funded by American taxpayers. America's nuclear deterrence has prevented global war between major powers. America supplies us with our military platforms and our advanced weapons. Under AUKUS, America will hand over to Australia the most closely-guarded military technology on the planet, nuclear propulsion. Yet our current Labor government is publicly appearing less than grateful for this generous support from the arsenal of democracy. Labor is ghosting our most important ally, the United States, and, to all appearances, is sucking up to Communist China, Australia's most potent adversary. China routinely commits acts of aggression against Australia as if it's entitled to do so, and it is not hiding its intentions to militarily and economically dominate our region.

America simply wants the countries with which it shares close alliances and democratic values to step up and do some of the heavy lifting by increasing their defence spending. It's called growing a backbone and taking responsibility to defend yourself instead of relying on Americans to fund your battles with their money and lives. The Prime Minister is gambling that he won't have to, and that is a big mistake. It's a purely political mistake based on arrogance. It's not principled. Labor hates everything about Trump and the Republicans. Labor has failed to appreciate the importance of America to our security, and that our relationship with the world's most powerful nation must endure beyond the current occupants of the Lodge and the White House.

It's impossible to imagine Bob Hawke, Labor's most successful and longest-serving prime minister, supporting this. He was a noted champion of the US alliance, despite the very conservative Reagan and Bush administrations being in the White House. Hawke was also a vocal critic of communist China, especially after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Hawke understood Australian principles. Prime Minister Albanese never got the memo, and now our relations with America are declining when we can least afford it. This is not in our best interests.

Australia needs a statement of binding principles to govern how we conduct ourselves on the world stage and to ensure that petty politics don't risk important international relationships that must last well beyond every three-year parliamentary term. This statement needs to say who we are, what Australia stands for and who we stand with: democracies like the US and Israel, not communist dictatorships or terrorist regimes. We stand for the rule of law, self-determination and freedom, and an international peace and order reinforced by a strong military to deter those who, like China, would disrupt that peace and order.