MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE

Senator WHISH-WILSON (Tasmania) (16:04): It's good to hear Senator Canavan talking about farmers again, now that he's the Leader of the National Party, and not just talking about fossil fuel companies and the coal industry and attacking climate policy in this country. I want to deal with a couple of points that were made by One Nation at the beginning of this discussion.

They're happy to come here and have a whinge about the impacts of this war in the Middle East. They're happy to have a whinge about petrol prices, fertiliser prices and grocery prices and the impact on everyday Australians, and they're absolutely right—there are impacts on everyday Australians. But you support the war.

What gives? The Liberal Party yesterday did exactly the same thing. They came in here criticising the government's lack of response on fuel security, energy independence and so on and so forth, but they also support the war.

It doesn't make sense. You support this action in the Middle East, yet you come in here and have a whinge about the impacts. Australians are going to see through that BS.

They absolutely are. They want people in this place to stand up and say, 'What is the plan in the Middle East?' They are rightly anxious right now and are understanding that they are being used as pawns in a much bigger game. The Greens, every single day since the conflict began, have called out our government for its support for this war, called out the opposition's support for this war and called out One Nation's support for this war.

Australians are hurting, and it's going to get worse if this conflict continues. Yet we never hear anyone coming here saying: 'How do we end this conflict? How do we do that to save lives, including, potentially our own allied lives in the future, not to mention the lives of those in the Middle East?

How do we end this conflict to get energy security again? How do we end the conflict to actually get peace?' I'd really like to hear you guys come in and actually talk about that. If you truly cared about Australians and the impact this is having on the everyday lives of Australians then you would be talking about how to end this conflict.

Let's briefly talk about this conflict. There is no plan. Every reason or justification we have been given for this war in Iran has turned out to be a bloody lie, totally debunked—complete disinformation and misinformation.

There is no plan. The only thing that makes sense to me now is that the Israeli government is going to go to an election soon in Israel. Are we aware of that?

Are we aware that international media are talking about the fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu has mentioned he might call on early election because he is doing so well in the polls because they've attacked Iran with America? Are Australians queueing at petrol stations right now, and are farmers going broke because of the cost of doing business, because the Israeli prime minister wants to go to an election?

Is that what this is all about? How did we get to this position where we have been drawn into this war—a war based on lies and deceptions, a war that could so dangerously spiral out of control? Yes, there's a trade deal before us, the EU trade deal.

Let me tell you: this has got a process to go through from here. This won't come to parliament for ratification until next year. It will go through the JSCOT process, and the Greens are looking forward to getting more detail on this deal.

So far, we've seen selectively released information on certain areas. We've had some information revealed about tariff reductions and access to EU markets. But there are 30 chapters in this trade deal, and there's going to be a lot of devil in that detail.

You can be sure the Greens will be doing their job in this place and scrutinising this very closely, particularly when it comes to monopolies on pharmaceutical products. Big pharma, as they have done in just about every trade deal that I can remember, pushed for better deals for them to make more money, to the detriment of Australians who need medicine. There will be things in here, you can be sure, that we do need to closely scrutinise.

I commend the government for leaving out ISDS—investor-state dispute settlement—clauses. The Greens have always opposed trade deals that have had ISDS clauses in them. We have pushed this really hard, and I commend the government for leaving those out.

In my last 15 seconds, can I say that you can't come in here and complain about this war and be taken seriously if you don't oppose it or have a plan for ending at. The only party that does is the Greens.