2026-03-25
WE SAY NO TO U.S. FOREVER WARS
By Senator David Shoebridge
As you will have already seen on your TV screens and social media feeds, the US and Israel earlier this month launched an illegal war on Iran. It is a devastating escalation, particularly for people across the Middle East who for weeks now have been subjected to continuous bombing.
This should be a moment for Australia to take a clear stand. To stand on the side of humanity and international law and make it clear we do not support Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal war.
Instead, the Albanese Labor Government, cheered along by the Liberals and One Nation, has committed Australia to another disastrous US-led forever war.
By deploying Australian personnel to the Middle East and deepening our involvement, Labor is repeating the same catastrophic mistakes of the past. For decades, we have seen the consequences of being tied to the United States’ military machine. Iraq. Afghanistan. Vietnam.
Wars that promised security and delivered destruction. Yet the Labor government remains unwilling to learn from that history.
Rather than charting an independent defence and foreign policy grounded in peace and de-escalation, they are choosing to double down on military alignment with the Trump-led US.
And that alignment runs deeper than many Australians realise.
Australia’s integration with the US military and the US industrial base has gone further than most people would expect. We host US bases on our soil like Pine Gap and NW Cape that are critical to US global warfighting. We buy billions of dollars worth of US weapons and have designed our entire military to be “interoperable” with the US.
We have hundreds of Australian personnel embedded throughout the US military. This includes three Australian personnel on the US nuclear submarine that sank an Iranian frigate and left the survivors to drown. Labor plans to have Australians make up 10% of all personnel on US nuclear submarines by 2030, allegedly as preparation for AUKUS.
That is the reality of AUKUS. It locks Australia’s military into the US chain of command and draws us into US military actions before the public, or even Parliament, has had the chance to have a say.
Which raises a simple question. Who decides when Australia goes to war?
Right now, it is a decision made behind closed doors by a handful of politicians. In fact Australia can be sent to war with the decision being made by just the Prime Minister and Defence Minister.
That is why the Greens’ push for war powers reform is more urgent than ever. We have introduced a new law that would require a vote of Parliament before Australians are sent into any overseas conflict, and we forced it to be debated in parliament this week.
If lives are on the line, it should be the Parliament that millions of Australians elect, not a handful of government Ministers, who make that call.
At the same time as conflict abroad escalates, the Labor government is closing Australia’s door to people who are desperately in need of protection.
In a stark display of tripartisanship, the war parties of Labor, the Liberals and One Nation have come together to pass laws to refuse up to 7,200 Iranians who already have valid Australian visas from coming to Australia. The express reason they did this was so none of them could do what members of the Iranian women's football team did, come on shore and make an asylum claim.
It is the height of hypocrisy.
As all this chaos rolls out, instead of calling for peace, Labor has cheered the war on and sent 85 military personnel and hardware into the US warzone. Then they change the law to prevent people fleeing places like Iran from finding safety here. These measures go so far as to block people of certain nationalities from even applying for a visa, punishing individuals for the actions of regimes they are trying to escape.
We must not be a country that profits from and promotes conflict abroad, then turns its back on those displaced by it.
The Greens are the only party in Parliament willing to stand against this approach and speak and vote for peace not war. We are the only ones calling for a foreign policy grounded in human rights, international law, genuine independence and the core needs of the Australian people.
We say no to US forever wars and the war parties. We say yes to peace and cooperation. We say no to secret decisions to send Australians into conflict and yes to giving the Australian people a say over this war and every other war. We say yes to a defence policy that defends Australia and does not threaten our neighbours, as part of a broader commitment to genuine human security that is far broader than just guns, bombs and missiles.