Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Approval of Overseas Service) Bill 2020

Senator SHOEBRIDGE (New South Wales) (09:02): 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— Senator Cash: Hear, hear!

Senator SHOEBRIDGE: 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.