COMMITTEES
Senator SHOEBRIDGE (New South Wales) (11:36): We can see what's happened here on this Red Lines Package. It appears the Labor Party has cut a deal with the coalition to prevent the community from even making submissions on the Red Lines Package. The Red Lines Package has come from an extraordinary coalition of civil society groups: lawyers, human rights advocates, the Palestinian community and people of good faith and goodwill from across the country who have been appalled to think that Australian law is so weak when it comes to a genocide.
They cannot believe that our government continues to allow weapons parts to go to Israel to create a genocide in Gaza. They cannot believe that we continue to allow—or Labor continues to allow—the illegal trade in products from settlements based in occupied Palestine. They cannot believe that our laws are so weak that there's basically a political veto on whether or not prohibitions against supporting a genocide are actually enforced.
I just want to give an enormous vote of thanks to all of those people from right across the country who have come together for the Red Lines Package and to the senators who co-sponsored this legislation, Senator Payman, Senator Pocock and Senator Faruqi. This Red Lines Package is an example of the community moving when this parliament refuses to, and now we're watching Labor say that they won't even permit an inquiry on it.
They won't allow Australians to make submissions on four pieces of legislation that come together to actually put some decency in our laws and have our laws respect international law. There are millions of Australians who thought that the Labor Party stood for something. Now, after five years of government, they've watched the sorts of statements that the foreign minister has kept making, saying that, when it comes to Israel and Palestine, Australia would work with like-minded nations.
Like-minded nations are now putting through laws like this red lines bill in their countries, saying that they will have total prohibition on trade with illegal settlements in occupied Palestine and an arms embargo on sending weapons into a genocide. Those like-minded nations—the UK, Canada, Ireland, Spain and France—have all moved, and now we get some new line from the Labor government about why they won't move.
We know why Labor is refusing to support the Red Lines Package. It's because Washington won't let them. It's because they are completely under the spell of Donald Trump and his team over there in the United States, and they say, 'You dare not take any action to actually put in place any red lines for the state of Israel.' It's not just in relation to weapons going to Israel; it's in relation to weapons going to the United Arab Emirates, which are being fed into the appalling civil war in Sudan and the appalling conflict in Yemen.
We say, 'No, put some red lines here,' but instead Labor is doing what they're doing on migration, doing what they're doing across the board—Labor is reaching out to work with the hard right, to work with the coalition and One Nation, to prevent this even going to an inquiry. That's a disgrace. The more that the community sees the Labor Party, the more they see them for what they are—so willing to reach across the aisle with the right and the hard right to punch down on migrants and to not take action on a genocide.
This is just another case. Senator Duniam: I ask that the Greens amendment be separated out into (a) and (b).