Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Joint Committee on Defence) Bill 2025

Mr JOSH WILSON (Fremantle—Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy and Assistant Minister for Emergency Management) (18:07): The Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Joint Committee on Defence) Bill is a very important reform, because, by creating a new parliamentary joint committee on defence, we'll have substantially increased the scope and quality of parliamentary scrutiny of Defence matters, policy, programs, procurement and budgets and the scope and quality of parliamentary scrutiny of Defence decision-making.

Those matters and that decision-making are among the most serious and consequential responsibilities of government. It's crucial that we exercise that responsibility through the best and most rigorous democratic processes that we can apply to that task, because we know that those decisions, made well, advance the peace, stability and shared wellbeing of the Australian community.

Those decisions, made well, contribute to the peace, stability and inclusive prosperity that we want to foster and share with our regional neighbours and across the globe. On the other hand, we know from experience that those decisions, made poorly, can mean Australians are less safe. They can fuel conflict and they can exact an awful toll in terms of lives lost and damaged and in terms of resources wasted.

That potential toll that can occur when Defence decisions are not made as well as they should be is captured in the age-old term of 'blood and treasure'. That's why this is such grave and consequential territory. It should be acknowledged at the outset that the first line in terms of human harm is our own Australian Defence Force.

In this place, we have a significant responsibility to ensure we make the best possible decisions out of profound respect for the women and men of the ADF, who make incredible contributions to peace, stability and shared wellbeing. Because of the risks involved and the consequences that women and men in the ADF—and of course their families and friends—experience, we owe it to them to make sure our decision-making processes in this place are as good as they can be and that we do not sit back and become complacent about them but seek to examine them and improve them at every turn.

That is what we owe the women and men of the ADF, and we owe it to the Australian community. The Albanese government understands clearly that being a good government requires not just the focused and diligent carriage of the many pressing challenges of the time but also a preparedness to look after and improve the structure and processes of our democratic parliamentary system of government.

This reform is an example of that. I was glad to hear the member for McPherson indicate that the coalition will be inclined to support the reform. They were not inclined to support it last time, which was hard to understand.

Not only are we trying again while we do all the many pressing things that are involved in delivering good government in all the critical areas of Australian life—our economy, our social safety net, housing, protection of our environment, action on climate change and so on—but at the same time we are making these systemic improvements in a range of areas. We are doing that in electoral reforms by strengthening public interest disclosure arrangements.

We have already created a National Anti-Corruption Commission, as we committed to do, and a new Administrative Review Tribunal. We take our responsibility to the Australian people extraordinarily seriously, and that responsibility is not just the focused, energised, thoughtful, delivery oriented management of all of the many complex day-to-day and year-in year-out challenges but also the recognition that our institutions and the structures of our parliamentary democratic system cannot be taken for granted.

We do see around the world challenges to those systems. We see challenges to the health, vitality and good functioning of parliamentary democratic systems, and we are absolutely committed to making sure that we make serious, meaningful, far-reaching improvements to those structures and institutions, and this bill is an instalment of that work. The bill seeks to create a new Parliamentary Joint Committee on Defence that will for the first time be established in a way that allows the committee to consider and be informed by classified material as it provides scrutiny of a range of matters, which the Assistant Minister for Defence outlined in his second reading speech: defence planning and contingency; the scrutiny of Australia's defence capability development, acquisitions and sustainment; the examination of and information about war, warlike operations and ongoing conflict; and the capacity to monitor the involvement of Australian defence agencies when they are involved in significant non-conflict operations.

For the first time, the committee will be able to do that while having access to classified information. Any Australian can understand that, unless it has access to all that of that information, the ability of a parliamentary committee to apply high-quality scrutiny, accountability, oversight and contestability—all of those elements and principles of what good and rigorous democratic processes involve—is limited.

So this is a very serious and important step forward. It creates a committee—as the member for McPherson and indeed the member for Blair, whose contribution I enjoyed a great deal, have noted—that mirrors the effective Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence and Security. I have had the privilege of serving on that committee, so I have seen how it functions and how important its work is.

The member for Canning served on the committee at the same time that I did and served on it for longer than I did. I think he knows that he certainly made some significant contributions through the work of that committee. It is important that, with respect to matters of national security and the National Intelligence Community, ordinary parliamentarians who are not members of the executive can have some visibility of those matters—striking the balance, which the member for McPherson noted before.

There will always be some areas where access to material needs to be carefully considered because of the nature of the material. But, as much as possible, we should make sure that our parliamentary system is able to do its work with the benefit of all the information that informs the proper considerations. So I go back to what I said about improving the scope and quality of decision-making in relation to defence matters, in relation to Australia's involvement in conflict overseas and in relation to the commitment of our Australian defence forces to those kinds of tasks and those kinds of risks.

That's exactly what this reform does. It creates a new committee of members from across parliament who are not members of the executive, who will have access to classified material for the first time in their consideration, scrutiny and oversight of those matters. That's precisely what we're achieving.

I go back to what I said about looking after and improving the structures and institutions of our democracy. We do that by giving this parliament an opportunity that it hasn't previously had and a capability that it hasn't previously had to, as I've said, scrutinise and contest some of the most grave and consequential matters for which government can ever be responsible.

And it's not the only improvement of this kind that is occurring under this government. I take people back to how this came about. There's been a consideration of a committee like this for some time.

The member for McPherson talked about Jim Molan and others, and I certainly think of the contributions that then senator David Fawcett made to this issue. It's been considered for a considerable time, but in the last parliament it took a big step forward because the Australian Labor Party, through our national conference and national platform process, adopted a resolution—which I moved and that was seconded by the member for Bruce—that called on Labor in government to hold an inquiry into international armed conflict decision-making.

When we were elected in 2022 we made good on that resolution. We held that inquiry through the defence subcommittee of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade. The report of that inquiry is the Inquiry into international armed conflict decisionmaking.

I recognise the chair of the committee as a whole, the member for Blair, and particularly the chair of the subcommittee, the member for Bruce, for the way that we undertook that work. I also recognise the members of FADT—foreign affairs, defence and trade—who were very active in the inquiry: the member for Fisher, the member for Solomon, the member for McEwen, the member for Macquarie, then senator Fawcett and Senator Steele-John.

We all worked together on the inquiry and the report. One of the recommendations of the report was to create this committee. It was to create a dedicated defence committee that can have access to classified material.

As I said, we weren't the first people to think about it, argue for it and recommend it. Indeed the member for Canning had made the argument before the work of that committee and so had others on the other side. All those contributions should be recognised.

That wasn't the only recommendation of the committee, and I acknowledge the spirit and responsiveness with which the inquiry report as a whole was received and acted upon by the Minister for Defence. He wasted no time in picking up a number of the recommendations. As I've already pointed out we tried, in the previous parliament, to create this committee unsuccessfully, and I hope we're successful this time.

There were other recommendations that were acted upon as well, particularly through the Memorandum on Government Conventions Relating to Overseas Armed Conflict Decision Making. For those who are interested in this topic I encourage you to go and have a look at that document. There's a recognition that there are a number of conventions that have operated in our system for a period of time with respect to the decision that the executive gets to make in deploying the ADF to conflict overseas, but the observance of those conventions has weakened over the previous couple of decades.

One of the recommendations of the inquiry report was that those conventions have some codified form. The Minister for Defence has produced this Memorandum on government conventions relating to overseas armed conflict decision making, to give a kind of codified form to some of those commitments—things like the observation that there should be a ministerial statement and parliamentary debate that occur not later than 30 days from the deployment of the ADF overseas to warlike or conflict circumstances, and that, when there is a deployment to conflict, there should be an annual statement on the deployment, its basis, its conduct, its progress and its future.

That was a practice that Prime Minister Gillard observed in relation to our involvement in Afghanistan, but it hasn't been rigorously applied throughout our history. This memorandum takes us further forward in that respect. There's also the timely tabling of Defence strategy documents.

So the creation of this committee, which this bill achieves, is important. It's not the only thing that we have done. It is, I think, disappointing that the opposition have suggested that they will only support this bill with certain conditions.

One in particular suggests that people on the committee have to somehow indicate their support for higher defence spending, per se, and their support in advance for the success of AUKUS, rather than their commitment to the proper scrutiny of AUKUS in the best interests of that arrangement. I find that strange. You cannot deliver contestability, scrutiny and oversight of an independent parliamentary kind, from members across the parliament who are not members of the executive, if you start off by saying, 'Well, before you're a member, you have to think this and you have to think that.' The member for McPherson said there shouldn't be ideology in the committee, and I agree.

So the requirement from the member for Hume that there somehow be—I don't know what—a statutory declaration or an expression of support for a particular set of things strikes me as being bizarre. It's also not in keeping with what the member for Canning has previously said, with which I do agree: that we need a defence committee where tough questions can be asked in a classified, protected space; that it's an area of urgent reform; and that, without having a committee where tough questions can be asked, our parliament can't exercise proper civilian oversight of our military.

I think that's well put. So I really welcome this reform. I acknowledge the stakeholders that contributed to the report, particularly Australians for War Powers Reform and the Medical Association for Prevention of War.

It's good to get to the point where we are considering this reform, and I sincerely look forward to the creation of this new parliamentary committee on defence.