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Hello. Hello. Thank you so much for having me in Australia — Adelaide. IPAN brought me out here, the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network. You guys really need to all become members if you’re not already, and really support their work. It’s absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for bringing me out here.

I spent the last six years making a film called Earth’s Greatest Enemy. It’s a documentary about the environmental costs of history’s biggest empire, the US empire. And that’s why I’m here in Australia — that’s why IPAN brought me out here, to tour this project and to help people rally against militarism and US base expansion.

The film makes the argument that the world’s greatest polluting force is not just the industries we’re all very familiar with — big oil, big ag. It’s actually the one that’s driving the most pollution, that’s enforcing this global domination at the barrel of a gun. The one we never question. The one we’re taught to never question: the military. In particular the US military, which has its tentacles across the planet, including right here in little old Adelaide, Australia.

On the boat today, David said something that struck me. He said Australia is going to be the next front line against the impending US war with China, after places like Okinawa and Guam are destroyed. And that’s the real reason — beyond all the rhetoric, that’s the real reason the US is investing in the base expansion here with AUKUS. So they can use this beautiful land, and all the wonderful people in it, as expendable pawns on their imperial chessboard. Shame.

I went to Guam, where the Indigenous Chamorro people have watched more and more of their island consumed by military expansion. The island is just one entire base. Nowhere is safe from military dumping, burning, testing, poisoning. They’ve taken it all. They’ve destroyed it all. Ancient limestone forests. Burning munitions out in the open on Indigenous sacred land — because they can. Because they operate above the law.

In Hawai’i, Native Hawaiians continue resisting on the lands they never willingly gave up. They never surrendered their lands. The military occupies 25 per cent of O’ahu. They’ve taken over entire islands as bombing ranges. They assault the land and the water continuously with war games. They treat Hawai’i as their playground.

And in Okinawa, an island smaller than the size of the tiny state of Rhode Island hosts 32 US military installations, with more being built. Because let’s face it: once the US sets up shop, they don’t leave. They expand, and they destroy as they expand.

Henoko Bay really reminds me of the beautiful coral reefs I just saw in Australia as I was touring around. Henoko Bay — one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet, one of the most biodiverse, beautiful coral reef systems in the world. It’s literally being buried under concrete. Under concrete, to build another US military base, despite decades of local opposition. This is a habitat of endangered dugongs being destroyed because military planners decided that place mattered more as a runway than as a living ecosystem.

The Okinawan people have done everything in their power to fight against the pillaging of their land by the Americans. But Washington simply says: we’re building it anyway. You know why? Because this isn’t a partnership with Japan. Japan’s a vassal state.

Guess who else is a vassal state? Do you think this is a strategic partnership? You think the US considers Australia partners and allies in this imperial plot? No. Your politicians have a gun to their heads: do what the US says, or else. And I guess you guys don’t want to wait and find out what the “or else” means — in a world where we’ve seen the lengths, the crimes, the atrocities, the scale the US is willing to commit with its criminal cohorts. Because they can. Because no one’s stopping them. Because Australia has become the doormat for the crimes and atrocities we’re seeing unfold.

And just like in Okinawa, this expansion is going to come at an astronomical price. Not just to the land, but to all of you, all of your children, all of the beautiful human beings and animals that live on this land. Because military contamination is not the exception. It is the rule.

This isn’t just happening at wartime, as we see the intentional targeting of oil depots and infrastructure across the Middle East. That’s not going to be contained over there. It’s going to be generational and global.

This is the rule. Jet fuel leaks in relative peacetime. Nuclear radiation, chemical testing, depleted uranium, burn pits, unexploded ordnance — and most importantly, the immense amount of chemical contaminants used just to clean the engine parts, to maintain the arsenal of B-52 bombers, F-35 jets, Boeing Pegasuses, Bradley fighting vehicles, to make them mission-ready to fly around on pointless patrols. Why? And what is it doing? Consuming as much fuel as the average Australian or American driver does in 20 years — with one mission, one flight.

Nearly every military site around the world is contaminated with PFAS, so-called forever chemicals that don’t disappear easily, do they? The military is one of the biggest users of PFAS in the world. And guess what — there are safe alternatives. There have been for decades. But they continue to use them intentionally, because it’s cheaper and easier.

The environmental destruction at these bases and installations is built in. Every base that houses deadly contaminants around the world, from nuclear waste to jet fuel, is a ticking time bomb. What incentive do they have to maintain the infrastructure, to make sure it’s safe? They don’t care, at the end of the day. These people are here for a couple of years and they leave. You guys are the ones who are going to feel the brunt of whatever does happen — because it will be an inevitability.

And I think the biggest, most insane thing of all is: why? What have we been told is the justification for this? Why is it necessary to house nuclear submarines here for the US? Why? To protect us from — from who? China. China. What has ever happened here that has made any Australians feel threatened by China? What has China ever done to threaten Australia?

Because funnily enough, everywhere I go around the world, communities are living in fear — not of China or Russia, but because of the US military base next door. Because of the soldier with a gun who’s raping their neighbours and running people over in the street. Because of the armed settler being backed by our tax dollars to kill with impunity. That’s why. Because of the genocide that’s been normalised. Because of shredded children being the status quo on our phones, and our leaders saying, “Yeah, that’s a price we’re willing to pay.” That’s why people are terrified around the world.

US bases here don’t only toxify the air and water — they endanger all of us. We know that. We’re constantly told that AUKUS is about peace, about deterrence. That’s what every empire claims, right? This isn’t new.

But who decided? Who decided Australia should host this? Who decided Australia should become a target for nuclear war? Certainly not any of you. So you guys are pulled into the complicity of my insane, neofascist, con-artist criminal leader — his war crimes, his belligerence, his arrogance. You’re all complicit. You’re all pulled into this.

But can you imagine if that wasn’t the case? Can you imagine if Australians stood up and said: no. No, we’re not going to normalise this. No, we’re not going to reroute our tax dollars away from health and education to hosting nuclear submarines. No. No.

And you know what? There’s a silver lining here. Because even though the world is becoming dark and dangerous very rapidly, it’s also becoming very clear, isn’t it — who our allies are, who the enemy is. It’s very clear, because they can only invert reality for so long. They can only gaslight us for so long. We see it. Everyone sees it. And it’s become obvious what we must do.

The US empire is not inevitable. AUKUS is not inevitable. Militarisation is not inevitable. The future has not been written yet. Australians have a choice, and that’s a profound choice that can lead the world: continue allowing this country to be another operating base for empire’s crimes, or sovereignty — real sovereignty, independence, the courage to say no. And movements across the Pacific are building and mounting that resistance and showing us the way. Now it’s Australia’s turn.

No AUKUS. Free us from US imperialism. Free Australia from US imperialism.

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…what they have said, and how they have structured what we’re going to talk about today. I’m going to change gears another way and take the great risk of telling a joke. There’s somebody in the audience I’m going to blame if this doesn’t work. The only defence is that almost everything I’m about to say in that joke is true.

Three American generals walk into the officers’ club at Pine Gap. One of them is Admiral John “Lung” Aquilino, the head of Indo-Pacific Command, who controls US forces and the force projection capabilities throughout the Pacific. He looks around and says: what’s really extraordinary is, this is just a really suitable piece of real estate. It’s really quite amazing.

The second general — General Charles “Tuna” Moore; these are real people, by the way, and they did meet — head of Cyber Command, or actually, correction, deputy head, looks at all the secret National Security Agency equipment lying around at Pine Gap, just ready for offensive cyber operations out of Pine Gap towards China, and says: it’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s amazing how all this stuff is given to us by these cooperative natives before we even ask them to do it.

And then comes the third general, General James Dickinson, the head of Space Command — and that’s really important these days, as we know — who climbs up to the top of one of the giant radomes, looks out to the north and just says: location, location, location.

And he really did. I mean, not climb the radome. That’s the lie. But this really did happen. These guys came to Australia, they met in Sydney, and then they went off to find out where the serious work was being done.

What I really want to talk about — and I’d better be quick about it — I’m putting under the heading of: can Australia manage strategic risk? Abby’s given you one very clear picture of that, and I’m pretty sure David is going to give a very rich version of it as well. But I think this is a really extraordinary time.

We know there are four great sources of strategic risk that Australia has to deal with, and of course hasn’t a clue about. The first, made very clear, is the United States. The second is China — not China the fantasy of racist Australian memories about China coming to get us, but China the China bomb that we know about, which is going to be extraordinary. The third is climate, and we really are beginning to go backwards there. For a little while it looked like we were making progress, but we are not. In Australia it’s very serious; in America it’s catastrophic; and even in Europe it’s now wavering very seriously. That’s to say nothing about the rest of the world, which is put in the category of suffering climate change.

All four of those have political, military and economic dimensions, and of course consequences for our life world as a whole — it’s too soft to say environment.

So can Australia — the kind of Australia in the parliament that David sits in — to his great difficulty, very clearly — can Australia deal with it? That’s not usually the way peace movements talk about strategic risk. By strategic I don’t just mean military. I mean everything that directs the system, that affects those politics, those economics, the military, and the life world that we all live in.

War abounds at the moment. It is stunning just to casually look through the media — you don’t have to search very hard. I start with Gaza every day. I start with Iran every day. I look at Ukraine. I look at what’s happening on the Korean Peninsula. I look at what’s happening in the Horn of Africa, in Yemen. And of course I think about the real possibilities of war between the United States and China — by miscalculation, by intention, whatever way. It’s not unreal to think about that.

I mentioned the China bomb. That’s used in lots of ways today, but I want to draw it out, because it’s particularly important for Australia — we have enormous difficulties talking about China. Kellie quoted some of the data about the shifts which are beginning to happen around the world, courtesy of Mr Trump, in terms of the pulling apart of automatic support for the United States. But there’s a great deal more to be said about that.

I think that China is an extraordinary country. It’s not just a story of growth, which is pretty obvious. It’s not just a story of extraordinary innovation — political, economic and industrial. Look at the AI contest now between the United States and China. It’s a kind of game, we kind of think, except it has existential consequences. But what’s really important is that the way China is dealing with it is very different from the capitalist version in the United States.

Can the PRC — this is political risk for them, strategic risk for us — can China manage the twin risks of the inequalities being generated by that fantastic growth? And can it manage to avoid war? Of course, that’s not entirely a matter of choice for them. This is extraordinary: the idea that everything China has done since 1949 could be wiped out by the wrong choice, or by the Americans, who of course have a fantastic nuclear dominance over China. The Chinese can build some more nuclear weapons, but that’s not really the story that’s going to happen in terms of that inequality.

But for Australians, the most important part may not be obvious to some people who come from other countries: it’s the deep Australian pathology about China. Whether an Australian government — indeed all of us — can in fact overcome the fear of China that arises not from any deep knowledge of Chinese wickedness, of empires past. They come and go, some good, some disastrous, whatever it might be — plural empires. But rather from a very deeply rooted cultural denial about China, rooted in the fact that the English invasion of Australia, and the two centuries that have followed from 1788 onwards, coincide with the only period in recorded history when East and Southeast Asia — and by extension the Australian continent — have not been within a Chinese sphere of influence.

That’s not a disastrous future. It’s a future to be managed, however it comes. And I look to countries like Vietnam, which have learned to come to terms with living with a China next door. Can our governments imagine a world where we could live securely in a Chinese sphere of influence? But no — that gets translated as dominance and imperialism. Can we work out how to balance risk and opportunity?

The American response to all of this has been basically catastrophic. Let’s start from the Force Posture Agreement, signed by Julia Gillard and President Obama. I’m sorry to say this about Gillard, but it has been catastrophic, and far worse than we imagined for a very, very long time.

How are we going to do this? That FPA coincided really with the beginning of the end of the Obama period. Trump One, Biden — was there a difference? I’m not sure. And then Trump Two: yeah, there was a difference then. And this is extraordinary, that we are seeing this at the moment. We are seeing the American response flowing from Obama’s time onwards. Remember the Pacific pivot? Well, it didn’t work out quite like that. It became a Pacific avalanche of rebuilding in-place bases — from Japan, South Korea, Okinawa, Guam, the Philippines, and of course Australia. And David will say much more about that later on.

Trump is dissolving the European alliance with America. That should be no comfort, because — location, location, location. They love Australia. We are, as David said beautifully on the boat today, just in the right place: far enough away for them to be able to mount their forces to attack China, but not so far that the Chinese can easily attack us, the way they can Guam and Yokosuka and Busan, for example.

Australia is locked in path dependence, as sociologists call it, in all the ways we’ve been talking about. We know about Pine Gap, North West Cape, the DARC facility — the Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability just south of North West Cape. Now, a hugely important innovation in enabling space warfare. That’s at least as important as the nuclear capabilities of the bombers they’re going to put at Tindal, and in a couple of years on the submarines that will be coming to Stirling.

They are American bases. Australia has some access. Oh, we own them — that’s great, isn’t it? But we don’t have any influence. We have access to them.

And then there’s a whole raft, which I’ll be talking about tomorrow in the workshop, of Australian facilities with US access — US military access, US corporate access. Now, corporate is important, because we’re not talking about some small company. We’re talking about the biggest armament companies in the world, bigger than many countries. And if we changed the adjectives and talked about Australian bases with Chinese corporate access, I think we know what the answer would be. In other words, just because it has the words “trusted partner” written on the contract, it doesn’t really change the problem.

So Australia is locked in, in all sorts of ways. I’m going over time, so I’m just going to finish by talking about what we need — an independent and peaceful Australia. How do we manage what is a rapidly accelerating militarisation?

American sociologists — I have a confession: that was me, a long time ago — talk about dependent alliance, dependent asymmetrical militarisation. Because it is asymmetrical. We can have half of the people running Pine Gap, but if we don’t have a voice in what it does, that’s the wrong way around. A lot of that, and it’s getting worse and worse, is in the work I’m going to talk about tomorrow. It’s been stunning to go through 160 Australian defence facilities and to find, in a very large number of them, that American access — and that combined with, and facilitated by, in the case of the corporates, the Australian government spending phenomenal amounts of money. Extraordinary amounts of money. Not just AUKUS — we keep hearing, what was it, $348 billion, $368 billion, whatever fantasy figure it was — but there’s another one […]. Another extraordinary stream of money.

And the important thing for IPAN to be aware of is that that money, most of it, of course goes to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics — the primes, the defence primes. But as particularly Kellie and Michelle Fahy have shown us in the case of the F-35 supply chain, there are large numbers of smaller Australian companies which are building their business models quite literally around plugging into that. And that creates a political constituency which will work against everything that we are saying and talking about.

I think that there have always been empires. I think one way or another there always will be. I’m not a great believer in historical progress, but I am a great believer in historical change. The two constants of empires: one, they will sometimes be there; the second constant is that they will pass. They may not pass today. They may not pass in our lifetime. But they do pass.

And the important thing — and this is where I come back to the name of IPAN, an independent and peaceful Australia — can an Australia, a government which is in, putting it mildly, not just political disarray, but as David has been telling us with his emphasis on the corruption in defence, in terms of the extraordinary lack of oversight of this defence spending — can an Australian government imagine a way where there’s a pathway to resist, to manage risk?

I know that sounds very managerial, but the revolution won’t happen tomorrow. So what do you do in the week before the revolution?

Audience member: Get ready for it.

Get ready for it. That’s right. And make sure the government wakes up, and searches for that pathway — it will not be obvious — to autonomy and to sovereignty. Thank you.

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Hello, everybody. I’m Sue Haseldine. I’m from Ceduna, on the west coast of South Australia. I’ve just been travelling around all over the place, fighting for justice for Country, people and animals. Anything that’s going to destroy those things, I will take on.

I’ve just come down from Pine Gap, where I went up and supported those people against the American takeover there — AUKUS. But I’m here now supporting people who don’t want that American takeover again.

And down on my Country at the moment, we’re fighting a rocket company called Southern Launch. They have an American company that sends their rockets off in California and lands them back on my Country, because it’s too dangerous to land them back in America. So I don’t know what’s the matter with our stupid government — but, you know, it’s okay to damage us, our animals and our land.

I’m sick of the American takeover. I’m fed up. Everywhere I look, everywhere you hear: America’s doing this, America’s doing that — and it’s all in our country.

And we’ve got to remember that whatever America does to us, it’s going to affect everybody. The fallout from Maralinga, for instance, didn’t just stop there at Maralinga. It went everywhere — Australia-wide, Tasmania — and it didn’t care whether you were black, white or brindle, rich, poor or in between. It was a great equaliser. It would get anybody and everybody.

And the waste dump, as far as I’m concerned, that’s just another atomic bomb waiting to go off. A leak from that — what happens? It won’t stop in one place. It’ll go all over the place. Just like the American arms are going all over the world, protecting America by using other nations for their arms and their stupid submarines and, you know, anything they want. And Australia gives in. I don’t understand this.

Why are our Federal Police out there protecting American interests against Australian people? Yeah — that’s what I thought when we were at Pine Gap. There was no trouble. It was a fantastic rally, and the people there were well respected. There was some stuff that happened afterwards, but it wasn’t involved with the Pine Gap Convergence.

I don’t know what more I can say, but: keep up the fight. And it’s probably going to sound nasty, but — Yankee, go home. And take your machines with you.

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Well, thanks so much for that generous introduction. I first want to thank Uncle for the gorgeous welcome to this country, to Kaurna Country. It is a magical part of the world. We are so privileged to spend time on it. And thanks to Aunty Sue too, for the ongoing solidarity, and for that recognition of how much this struggle is grounded in First Nations struggle.

We were just up, barely a week ago now, on Arrernte land — walking in solidarity with traditional owners there, walking up to shut that base, to shut Pine Gap. As you walked up with elders, it was one of those moments that sends a chill down your spine: walking together with elders and traditional owners whose family connections went back generations and generations and generations. As you did that walk and you confronted the facility there at Pine Gap, you realised just how shallow the roots of the American empire here are, just how shallow the roots of Pine Gap are, and how deep the roots of traditional owners and First Nations peoples are on this country. Let’s remember that.

And as we start with our acknowledgement, let’s remember who’s been on the front line of this. Who was on the front line of the Montebello explosions, and Emu Field, and Maralinga? First Nations peoples. They’ve seen their land and their country poisoned. They’ve seen their families poisoned. And they have been the ones, too, fighting against nuclear waste dumps — sometimes alone, sometimes with allies. So let’s acknowledge that at the core of this is a First Nations struggle.

And you’ll be pleased to know that Sue whispered to me when she finished her speech — when she said “Yankee go home”, she whispered to me: you can actually stay. You can actually stay. Thank you so much for the presentation. You’re welcome anytime.

Sitting here — or standing here — and looking at a room full of people who actually seem to want a future of peace: to have a country that controls its own destiny, that doesn’t turn a blind eye or even be complicit in a genocide, that isn’t feeding war and conflict. We’ve got a room full of people here who want this country to be better and the world to be peaceful. That is something to celebrate, I’ve got to tell you. Thank you for coming.

And when I compare standing in front of you to sitting in front of a room full of generals and defence officials and Labor members and One Nation members and Coalition members in the federal parliament — I just want to say thank you. Thank you so much.

But sometimes you’re sitting there, you’re in the room, and you’ve got people whose entire careers, highly paid careers — they’ve got the gold braid on their shoulders and the superannuation and the pensions, and the room is full of them — and you sometimes think: am I losing touch with reality? Because they have a plan. They actually have a plan. It seems crazy, it seems unbelievable that that is their plan, but they have a plan.

And their plan is to enmesh our industrial base, enmesh our research base, enmesh our military, and make it — in their terms — interoperable with the US military, so that when we build or pay for or create weapons of war, they can just slot into the US war machine and fight anywhere on the planet with them. And they have a plan that our strategic direction and our role in the world won’t actually be directed by Canberra, but that we’ll just follow along with what the US tells us to do, in a sort of mixture of awe and fear. It’s this weird position where they’re both in awe of the United States and fearful of the United States, and they follow along.

And when I think about how pathetic our government — and worse — has been on Gaza, watching this real-time genocide happen: for me, and for billions of people across the planet, the mask of the US military and the mask of Western military has really been ripped down. We’ve seen it raw there in Gaza, at an obscene cost to the Palestinian people. But we’ve seen it. And if you want to know why we keep putting weapons parts into it, and giving the Israeli government cover, and refusing to sanction their war industry, and putting armoured steel into their war industry — why we’re part of that comes back to this same thing. Our relationship with the United States. Our toxic, mendicant relationship with the United States.

If we want to be a voice for peace in Palestine or Lebanon or Iran, if we want to speak out against war with China, if we want this planet on the right trajectory, the thing we need to do here in this country is free ourselves from the United States. And it starts with ending AUKUS.

I am going to travel across some of the ground that both Abby and Richard have taken us across, because I think it’s important to realise what this means for us now. The plan with AUKUS — we see the nuclear submarines and almost $400 billion. Think what else we could do with $400 billion. We could do pretty much anything amazing with that: wipe out HECS debt, build a home for everyone who needs it, get dental into Medicare. We could do all of that with the $400 billion. It’s extraordinary. But we’re pumping it into these nuclear submarines.

And will we get them? Won’t we get them? That could be a whole day’s conference on the bizarre unlikelihood of that actually ripening. And in some ways, as awful as that is, it’s almost a distraction from what’s really happening here. It’s an obscenely expensive distraction — because what’s actually happening is in many ways far, far worse than that. It’s this enmeshing of Australia, in an irreparable way, in a project and a plan and a footprint that is too big to fix. Enmeshing us in this next US war.

And the next US war that those people in that room — with the gold braid and the high salaries, paid by the public to be guardians of our country — the war they want is that next war with China.

What does it mean? What’s it looking like on the ground in Australia? Well, it looks like us spending eight and a half billion dollars of our public money to build the US a nuclear submarine base just off Perth. That’s going to be up and running next year, by 2027, to have five US nuclear submarines stationed there, notionally as a joint facility. But we don’t own any nuclear submarines. We’re unlikely to have any. And it’s up and running.

Why does the US want that? The US wants that because a base in WA is like having a couple of free submarines. They put five of their nuclear submarines there, they’ve got a shorter trip up and down to make war with China, and instead of having to schlep all the way across the Pacific from San Diego, wasting all that time in travel, we give them some free real estate here and ready access. That’s why they want it. That’s why we’re building it. It’s not for Australian submarines. It’s going to be serving its end purpose from next year, 2027. And did I mention that the Labor government is spending more than $8 billion of our money to make that happen? It’s obscene.

But it’s not just that. It’s RAAF Tindal, just over 100 kilometres south of Darwin, which used to be an Australian RAAF base but has been expanded at significant cost — extending the runway, building the aprons out — so that the US can bring their B-52 bombers and their B-2 bombers here, which are all nuclear capable, and position them here, so that they’ve got a flight just over Indonesia to go to war with China.

And our government has the courageous position on that of — when we say, well, why are you breaching the Treaty of Rarotonga, why are you allowing nuclear weapons in this country? — they say: how dare you politicise this. They say to you: how dare you politicise this. You know our position. It’s a very principled position: we don’t ask the US if they have nuclear weapons, and they don’t tell us. That’s our government, on our air base, in our country. What the hell is going on here?

And Pine Gap — which we know about not from what our government has told us, but from whistleblowers who have come out and told us afterwards. Pine Gap has been critical in bringing the intelligence together from the US’s global surveillance scheme, getting the targeting information, crunching the data, and then feeding it back to the US and Israel for their targeting and their war in Gaza and Lebanon and Iran. And we apparently do it with “full knowledge and concurrence”. There are all these bullshit terms that our government comes up with. Pine Gap happens with our full knowledge and concurrence. What does that even mean? What it means is: the US tell us what they want to tell us, they keep their secrets, and we better shut up and keep paying the bills. That’s what it means in Pine Gap.

And you heard about North West Cape and the spaceport outside North West Cape. But North West Cape — near Broome in WA — its principal role up to this point has been as the primary communications base with submerged US submarines in our part of the world. This whole half of the world. So when Trump, or the son of Trump, or whoever, at some point presses the button to end the world as we know it, we will be the handmaidens of that message — because it’ll be pumped into Pine Gap, sent off to North West Cape, and then beamed around to their submerged intercontinental ballistic missile fleet, and the world will end. And why are we the handmaidens of that message? What the hell is going on here?

Darwin: two and a half thousand Marines. Bandiana, in rural Victoria: prepositioning US military equipment. Up in Townsville: marine equipment kept there permanently, ready to go to war with China.

Why is it happening in Australia? Well, it’s happening in Australia not because the US is showing regional strength or global strength. It’s happening in Australia for the reason that Abby touched upon. The US recognises, when it does war games, that it has significant regional weakness in the Western Pacific. Its bases in Okinawa and Guam, Japan, Korea, the Philippines — in their war games they get knocked out in the first 24 hours or so of a war with China. Their bases there, their missile stocks, their military positions: wiped out.

And as Abby said, the people of Guam didn’t ask for this. They oppose it. They want their country back. No choice. The people of Okinawa want their island back. They don’t want to be destroyed in a US war they want no part in. They want their island back. I wouldn’t mind our continent back either, by the way.

But the US see that. They can see it. And so they’ve come to us and said: right, you are now the front line. If we lose all of that, if that all disappears, we want to have our prepositioned military here. We want our bases here. We want our submarines here. We want our fuel depots here. We want our Marines here. We’re going to fight the war from here, and you are going to be the front line.

Now, I can understand why the US would say that. That’s their global interest. I think it’s an obscene thing for the American people to be paying for this war, and I support every American who comes up and resists their war machine — good credit to them for the work they do and the struggle they do, everyone blowing a whistle in Minnesota pushing back against that war machine in the US. We need allies there. But the US military has a plan, right, for them. What on earth is our government doing delivering it for them?

And I sit in that room and I look at them and I see them delivering on this plan, to make us an unwilling part — from the Australian people’s point of view — but from their point of view a willing participant, in the next US war.

And will we have a choice in it? No. Absolutely not. In fact, Richard Marles, 18 months ago, at a conference sponsored by those nice people at News Corp where he felt very comfortable, let out a little slip. He was asked: if the US goes to war with China, what will Australia’s position be? And he said, well, look, have a look around, look at all these US bases, look at our position — we will inevitably be involved in that war. He actually said it. This little accidental truth slipped out. And it’s what they’re building and planning for.

And AUKUS submarines — let’s assume their optimal pathway number two comes good, and we get three second-hand, sorry, in-service Virginia class submarines by the end of next decade. That’s their three submarines. What the bloody use is three submarines to us as a sovereign asset? Three submarines: at any point one’s in dry dock, one’s on the way back, and maybe you’ve got one in position. One submarine. That’s what the plan is over the next decade.

Obviously it’s not for our defence. It’s not intended to be for our defence. It’s not a useful asset. It’s to slip into a US deployment in the South China Sea, to be one of a number of US assets that sits there and follows Chinese submarines, tracks them, and sinks them in the first 24 hours of a conflict. That’s what we’re paying for. That’s what that thing in Osborne is for. That’s what the thing’s for.

Who would be doing this? And as you watch it and you see it, I sometimes think: have I lost track of reality? And then I remember — this is our reality. And our reality has been distorted by the US, and by our political leadership, and by our defence. And we need to change that reality.

We have a country to take back — and maybe take back for the first time ever — and do it together, in partnership with First Nations peoples. We have a future to secure. We have a war to not be a part of, and a war to avoid. And we want to reimagine our defence policy: one that extracts us from the United States, stops us spending obscene amounts of money to join their next war, and instead gives us a defence force that is about genuinely defending Australia, at far less cost, not threatening our neighbours, and creating a de-escalation in our region, not an arms race in our region.

We call it the Echidna strategy, and we’d love to talk with you more about it. A strategy about defending Australia and not threatening our neighbours, and creating this amazing, I think, positive future where our region sees Australia comfortable in our region — not wanting to go to war, not feeling threatened by our region — reducing and removing the US force projection from our country, reducing our force projection, and saying to our neighbours: this is our defence strategy. It’s about defence and not offence. Can you make that your strategy? I’d love that to catch on in our region, with a great reduction in arms spending. It could be a world-leading thing that Australia can do.

So let’s end AUKUS. Let’s get back our country. Let’s do it in partnership with First Nations people. Because we have a country to save, a future to save. And as Abby said — the future’s not written. Thanks very much.

Lightly edited for readability.

Wow — what an honour to kick off this amazing conference with all of you. If anyone was there last night, it was really a stellar event. Thank you so much to IPAN, the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network, for bringing me to Australia. It’s amazing to be here, and a profound honour to be here with all of you, fighting for a world that we know is possible.

As I travel around the world with Earth’s Greatest Enemy, something that binds our humanity, I think, in the last couple of years is the international solidarity with Gaza and Palestinians. Seeing the iconography, the keffiyehs — it just resonates that we are all family, we are all fighting for the same thing, even though we’re living in an extremely dark and dangerous moment.

People ask me every day: how do you stay hopeful? And honestly, there are days when it is incredibly difficult, because we’ve been watching genocide for three years — nearly three years. Every morning you wake up: another journalist hunted, hunted with their family. Another child starved to death, while our wealthy governments tell us there’s nothing we can do.

And then we find out — no, they haven’t just been sitting there on their hands. They’ve been providing the intelligence through Pine Gap. They’ve been facilitating and subsidising the genocide. Every morning you wake up: another neighbourhood razed, gone.

The profound loss of life is so hard to wrap your mind around. How do you wrap your mind around this? Twenty thousand children. How? Especially when I look in the eyes of my children, and the guilt that comes along with that — to know you’re safe, for now, only because we’ve externalised the barbaric savagery and violence for said safety in our respective countries. Subjugating billions of people under our boot, brutalising millions of people every day, in order to rationalise said safety.

It’s so much trauma to unpack on a daily basis. The assault on our lands, on our environment, on our bodies — the psychic assault. It’s an assault on our minds. It’s a war on reality. And it does feel like we’re watching civilisation unravel in real time. In a way, we are — because the mask has fallen. Finally, there’s no more pretence about human rights and democracy. We all see very clearly what the rules-based order exists to do, and who it exists for.

And yet every institution that claimed to uphold these values has stood by silently, or actively enabled the destruction of an entire people. Gaza changed the world forever. It exposed these contradictions so nakedly that people can no longer look away.

I want to give you some insight from the belly of the beast — from the imperial core, as an American citizen who’s been engaged in movement building for twenty-plus years — as to why I’m hopeful in this dangerous and dark moment.

I came into politics protesting the invasion of Iraq. I remember marching with millions of people and watching the war happen anyway. But I was told Palestine was too controversial. Palestine was a different issue. Don’t include it in the messaging.

Then came Occupy Wall Street. Suddenly millions understood that capitalism was producing the inequality as designed. But Obama was still off limits. He was still worshipped. Even though “the 99 per cent” became this popular phrase in the millennial lexicon, Obama was still off limits. I remember protesting Obama’s drone war — a few dozen of us in the streets in DC, thinking: how do you not see it? Why don’t you care that people are being obliterated thousands of miles away by remote control? How are you sitting there accepting this?

But fast forward to today. Palestine exposed every single lie simultaneously, didn’t it? It exposed the rank hypocrisy of neoliberalism, of Western governments, of the ruling elite. They don’t care about international law or human rights. They care about free markets, and they care about equality for them. They care about open borders for them.

Gaza made the corporate media irrelevant. It made the Murdoch media irrelevant. We all watched the barbaric savagery unfold while corporate media told us black is white, up is down. It exposed the lie that colonialism is something confined to the history books. But most importantly, it exposed how interconnected our struggles are — after decades in which neoliberals have hamstrung us, told us these things are atomised, isolated, siloed us into our corners. Environmental destruction, militarism, Indigenous dispossession, economic exploitation, police repression: they’re not separate. They’re all expressions of the same system.

And that’s why I’m extraordinarily hopeful in this moment. Because even though it doesn’t always feel hopeful, something has broken. Something has ruptured irreparably in the global order. Once the empire functions out in the open, you can’t go back to thinking this is normal. It’s full of possibility. And a moment full of possibility is so unpredictable. Anything can happen.

One of the most profound things I’ve witnessed is happening inside my country — because for the first time, millions of Americans identify with people they’ve never met. American exceptionalism only exists on the pillar of propaganda that only your lives matter, that you are supreme, that you have the ordained right to dictate other people’s futures and sovereignty and to undermine that sovereignty. And for the first time, I’m seeing Americans say no — they resonate with Palestinian children. They understand that those children are no different from them.

That’s the monumental shift. They’ve lost the propaganda war. And that’s why the repression is so fierce — in Europe, in my home country. You’ve all watched students be beaten and expelled, journalists repressed and threatened, peaceful encampments dismantled. Governments claiming to defend democracy, instead emboldening an apartheid state that’s rogue and nuclear-armed.

People ask where the movement’s gone in America. They don’t see the movement in the streets. They don’t see the activism we saw for the last two years. Why? Well, they were protesting relentlessly under a liberal administration — just like Albanese. I mean, Biden bypassed Congress a hundred times to sell weapons to Israel.

It’s not a failure. Of course there’s exhaustion. Of course people are exhausted, and they’re scared. But that’s not a failure. That’s not defeat. That’s the consequence of confronting an empire that has shown its changed face — that will ignore public opinion, ignore international law, ignore its own citizens, and continue funding mass slaughter. People are just shifting tactics. They’re strategising, just like in this room. We’re figuring out what’s next. What do we do now?

And that’s exactly our role now. That’s why our role is more important than ever before — our role as educators, as peace activists, as representatives of this growing peace movement, the connective tissue all around the world. It’s not the moment to retreat. It’s the moment to advance. It’s the moment to organise with greater clarity than ever before, because we have tools now that we didn’t have before.

That’s why I made Earth’s Greatest Enemy — not because I thought a documentary could change the world, even though I think it can, but because movements need political education. They need organising tools. They need something that helps people connect the dots, that shows why corporate media is spending billions of dollars to obfuscate what’s right in front of our faces. The truth you can’t ignore any more.

So show it to people. Show it to people who believe that militarism protects them. Show it to people who don’t understand how these things are connected — that endless war is inseparable from ecological collapse. And then they’ll be left with no choice. Then they’ll be left with no choice, because the status quo is long dead. You’re either in or out. So what are you? You’re in. We’re all in, right?

Donald Trump has made our work easier. And your leader here can’t hide behind the language of neoliberalism, because it doesn’t convince anyone any more. That creates an extraordinary opportunity for agitation and mobilisation. And that’s why I refuse to despair.

History is not over. History can change very quickly. It changes right now — because every empire has convinced itself that it’s impenetrable, that it’ll last forever, until suddenly it doesn’t. Until it falls. The question isn’t whether the brutal imperialist order will break apart. It already is. The question is: do we have the courage, do we have the imagination and the discipline to build something better, before it all drags us down to hell?

Australia has the most profound choice in this. Do you want to play a role in reimagining the new world? You can continue to allow this country to be the vassal state. You can continue to allow this country to be the building blocks and a launchpad for US crimes and atrocities. Or you can choose something different: to stand proud as an independent state, a sovereign people, one that forges a peaceful, independent, nuclear-free path that dares to defy barbarism. Set an example for the rest of the world to follow.

And it will, and you will — because I’m here, and I see it, and I believe it. And it starts right here, with all of you. Now: free us all from US imperialism. And free Gaza. Free Palestine.

Lightly edited for readability.

I wasn’t sure how much of my bio would be read to you, so I’ve just very briefly summarised who I am at the beginning.

Twenty years ago I commenced writing on Latin American politics for the small online lefty rag New Matilda. Since 2006 I have completed a PhD on Venezuelan foreign policy, worked as a Spanish teacher and academic, and been interviewed by just about every major media outlet in Australia. I even completed a small independent documentary with journalist Nicholas Ford titled Venezuela: The Cost of Challenging an Empire. I also have a small bimonthly newsletter on Latin America, which is available to the public through Patreon.

My passion for Latin American politics is not simply a niche intellectual endeavour but also deeply personal. Both of my parents were persecuted by the US-backed military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, with my father being incarcerated and tortured by military intelligence for over two months. My story is simply one of thousands of Chileans who were allowed to enter Australia as either political or economic refugees in the 1970s and 80s. Prior to the coup d’état in Chile on 11 September 1973, Australia had no major presence of a Latin American diaspora community.

In mid-2021, thanks to the efforts of UNSW Professor Clinton Fernandes and his legal team, the Australian government for the first time declassified documents confirming that Canberra had sent Australian Secret Intelligence Service operatives — at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency — to Chile in early 1971, to support its efforts to overthrow the democratically elected administration of socialist president Dr Salvador Allende.

In 2019, thanks to the dedication of several members of the Chilean-Australian community and their allies, the Pinochet intelligence operative and accused torturer and murderer Adriana Rivas — on the run from Chilean authorities and working as a nanny in Bondi, Sydney — was finally arrested in order to be extradited. She’s still fighting this, and obviously has a lot of financial backers, because she continues to take the case to the next level. I think she’s now in the Supreme Court, or the High Court.

With these small exceptions, which did obtain some media coverage, Latin America does not receive anywhere near the attention it merits in the Australian press. As I said, I’ve been interviewed by a lot of media outlets, but other than the ABC many, many years ago, I’m actually rarely published. I get published in the alternative media.

And I think there are some good reasons for this. For a start, too much coverage of Latin America might shed light on the nefarious power of our closest ally, the United States. A conclusion might be reached that we have never really supported an international rules-based order, but rather a brutal imperial one, in which Australia itself plays the role of a sub-imperial power. Another reason coverage of Latin America is marginalised might be that this part of the world constantly provides examples of people organising themselves against insurmountable odds and fighting to defend their dignity.

On the first point, let me discuss the examples of Venezuela and Cuba, which are pertinent to the region’s contemporary political landscape.

On 3 January this year, the Trump administration attacked the sovereign state of Venezuela with 150 military aircraft, killed over 100 people, injured dozens more, and — under bogus drug charges — kidnapped its head of state and first lady, Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores.

Since 1999, this South American country was witnessing one of the most interesting political developments in the region, known as the Bolivarian Revolution. Originally led by President Hugo Chávez from 1999 to 2013, Venezuela played a key role in creating regional bodies like the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). These organisations, which unfortunately were never consolidated over several years, sought to economically integrate Latin America, reduce poverty, and establish greater political autonomy from Washington’s coercive hand.

During its own tenure, the Maduro administration made some poor economic decisions and became less tolerant of legitimate criticism. However, it also built five million apartments for working-class Venezuelans. Last December, according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Venezuela’s economy grew by 6.5 per cent in 2025 — the highest in the region — due to its trade and economic agreements with China, Russia, Turkey and Iran. Venezuela also began to establish food sovereignty. I witnessed this myself in 2014, because I went around several markets and had a look at products, and they said hecho en Venezuela. Big contrast to the first time I was there, in 2005.

In just two hours and 28 minutes, the US military operation on 3 January destroyed much of the Bolivarian Revolution and stole the sovereignty of the Venezuelan state. Since the signing on 9 January of Executive Order 14373 — “Safeguarding Venezuelan Oil Revenue for the Good of the American and Venezuelan People”, that’s the actual name of the order — all foreign payments destined for the Venezuelan state have instead been channelled into a foreign government deposit fund created by the US government.

Speaking from Mar-a-Lago in Florida in the wake of Operation Absolute Resolve, Trump told the press, quote: “The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot. They now call it the Donroe Doctrine.”

Even before the US military assault, Venezuela was subject to a harsh economic blockade, which froze billions of dollars in state assets after President Obama in 2015 declared the South American country posed a national security threat to the United States. This was absolutely laughable at the time.

For the small Caribbean island of Cuba, the impact of the US blockade has been even worse. Established in 1962, it is one of the longest-running comprehensive economic sanctions regimes ever imposed by a major power against a smaller state. According to Cuban authorities, the blockade has caused cumulative economic damages of more than US$168 billion at current prices, or more than $1.66 trillion when adjusted for the depreciation of the US dollar against the value of gold.

Since 1999 I have travelled many times to Cuba. Getting to know Cuban society over these years, I have concluded that despite the revolution’s imperfections — and it has many — Cuba for many decades was one of the most equitable and safest societies in Latin America, producing world-class medical experts, educators and athletes, among many other professionals.

The winner of five consecutive gold medals at the Olympic Games, making him one of the greatest athletes in modern human history, is the Afro-Cuban man the size of a gargantuan refrigerator called Mijaín López. The literacy program Yo, sí puedo — “Yes, I can” — which is used in remote Indigenous communities in Australia, was not developed in a Nordic country but by Cuban educators. Cuban scientists, through the island’s biotech sector, have produced several important internationally recognised vaccines. I’ll add that I started watching Abby’s documentary on Cuba last night and I was quite impressed. I’ve seen a lot of documentaries on Cuba, so I would point you to that documentary, Cuba After Castro.

Today Cuban society is in grave peril. The safety average Cubans once enjoyed is disintegrating, while piles of rubbish accumulate throughout the country’s cities. In Havana, only 44 of the city’s 106 rubbish trucks are still operating, while millions of Cubans go up to 18 hours a day without electricity because of the fuel blockade imposed by Trump.

Were more Australians aware of the United States’ atrocious imperial record in Latin America, and educated to view the region’s people as real flesh-and-blood human beings rather than extras in a Netflix film about the drug trade, they might take the path of Don Sutherland. He is an Australian citizen and a representative of the Cuban Children’s Hospital Fund. Don is currently in Cuba to witness the effects of the US oil embargo and to support solidarity aid projects with the cardio-paediatric centre at the William Soler University Paediatric Hospital in Havana. The Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples sends a warm greeting to this IPAN conference, in the conviction that another world is possible.

In the small landlocked country of Bolivia, another contemporary political development has been taking place — one it would be dangerous for Australians to become aware of. There, Rodrigo Paz, a right-wing pro-Trump candidate in the 2025 presidential elections, promised capitalism for all. As the effects of Trump’s war on Iran began impacting the global economy, Paz moved to abolish much-needed fuel subsidies, sell off state enterprises, restore relations with Washington, and prioritise, quote, “mining, energy, financial and agro-industrial interests”.

According to Bolivia scholar Forrest Hylton, in response — and with soaring inflation — Bolivia’s trade unions staged a national strike that crippled the country for 53 days and cost US$50 million per day. In the end the Central Obrera Boliviana, the country’s main labour confederation, obtained several concessions, including — and pay attention — one, compensation for motorists and businesses whose vehicles were damaged by adulterated fuel that the government acknowledged had entered circulation; two, the introduction of price controls on essential goods; three, consultation on major legislation; four, an assurance not to privatise strategic state enterprises; and five, a review of the cases of over 3,000 incarcerated demonstrators.

Although not all of Bolivia’s trade unions signed on to the government’s partial settlement, and Paz soon declared a 90-day state of exception, I have little doubt that Bolivia’s trade unions and civil society will once again take to the streets should Paz renege on his agreement.

Only a few years ago, Bolivia’s Movimiento al Socialismo — MAS — governed the country for close to 20 years, making important strides to establish greater social equality. Under the government of the country’s first ever Indigenous president, Evo Morales, Bolivia expelled the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, and in 2006 nationalised its natural gas.

If these achievements can be obtained by citizens of one of South America’s poorest countries, surely we in Australia can do better in standing up to our corporate masters and the US empire. Thank you.

Lightly edited for readability.

Thank you, Kellie. It’s great to see so many people here — it’s really encouraging, and it’s very inspiring.

I’m on the unceded country of the Kaurna people, and I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. I stand in solidarity with the First Peoples in the struggles against colonialism and oppression, for their liberation and self-determination. Always was and always will be Aboriginal land. I’m from Naarm, Melbourne, from the country of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation.

I firstly want to thank IPAN South Australia and PACOA — that’s the Port Adelaide Community Opposing AUKUS — for putting together this amazing conference. The work that these South Australian people have done really deserves lots of claps.

This is a very, very brief ten-minute overview of a topic that would probably take pages and books, so I apologise if there are gaps or things are not elaborated properly. It’s difficult to cover US domination of Australia and what needs to be done in a ten-minute talk, but it will be more deeply discussed throughout the two-day conference.

We’re in the midst of a global economic and environmental crisis. Increasing tensions between big powers and the threat of nuclear war hang over the entire world. Corporations compete for control of the world’s natural resources, markets, cheap labour and advanced technologies, purely to maximise their profits.

Since World War II, the US and its corporations have dominated world economies, and this has been advanced and protected by its massive military machine. China’s economic rise now challenges their dominance, and this is driving the march to imperialist war, led by the aggressive US empire desperately clinging to its economic supremacy and spheres of influence.

The race for bigger profits is driving the destruction of the environment and intensifying the exploitation of workers, with a tiny handful of corporations and their billionaire owners holding 99 per cent of the world’s wealth and power on a scale never seen before. And at the same time, as poverty and inequality deepen and spread, there is a glut of unsold, overproduced commodities. What a contradiction. Democratic rights are attacked. Racism and the ultra-right are bankrolled and promoted by the billionaire class.

This is what’s behind many global conflicts — coups, sanctions, trade wars and hot wars around the world. It’s behind US aggression against Venezuela, Iran and Cuba, and America’s massive military and financial support for Israel’s colonial occupation and genocide of Palestinians. Israel would not be able to survive for as long as it has without being propped up by the US empire.

And this is driving the rapidly increasing US militarisation of Asia and the Pacific, including Australia. Trump expresses the desperation of a dangerously decaying empire, boasting that the planned US annexation of Greenland is to prevent China’s access to that region’s rich natural resources and geographically strategic position. Behind Trump and US governments stand powerful US corporations — I think most people know who they are, and many are operating in Australia. The US empire is in decline, but it still wields global power through its military alliances like Five Eyes and NATO.

And where does Australia sit in this world, and what are the impacts? Well, from the beginning — and I’m doing a bit of history here, so most of you are probably aware, but I think it does fit into the overall picture. From the very beginning of the 1788 British invasion, occupation and genocide of this continent’s First Peoples, Australia has been a loyal, subservient dependency of big powers. First the British colonial empire, and after World War II a vassal state of US imperialism. A sycophantic US deputy sheriff, guarding and enforcing US economic, military and strategic interests in this country and in this region, upholding US global supremacy — which is what the current Albanese government is doing.

Large sections of our natural resources industries and banks are owned and controlled by multinational corporations and financial institutions: ExxonMobil, Rio Tinto, Chevron, BHP, Woodside, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase. And local corporations like Gina Rinehart’s Hancock and Twiggy Forrest’s Fortescue are dependent on foreign capital for their operations locally and overseas.

These overseas and local corporations wield enormous political power and influence over this country’s economic, environmental and industrial relations policies through the powerful Business Council of Australia — and again, some of the main ones are Boeing, Blackstone, BHP, Citibank and the Commonwealth Bank. These corporations ensure Australian governments and institutions serve and protect their economic and strategic interests in this country and region.

The US-UK orchestrated 1975 dismissal of the popular Whitlam government — a bloodless coup, which is more appropriate to call it — is just one example of US political interference, and there are many others.

In 2009 the US shifted its global strategic focus to the Asia-Pacific to contain China’s rapid economic rise, calling it the US pivot to the Asia-Pacific, with 60 per cent of US military forces based around the world relocated to our region — turning Australia into a major US military base and launching pad for US-led war with China.

In November 2011, Hillary Clinton, the then US Secretary of State, visited Australia and announced the new US policy titled, quote, “America’s Pacific Century”, unquote. She declared, quote, that one of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will be to lock in substantially increased investment — diplomatic, economic, strategic — in the Asia-Pacific region, by forging a broad-based military presence. And this is, in a nutshell, what America is doing in this region now: protecting its economic and military strategic interests.

A few days later, standing in Australia’s parliament with a fawning Prime Minister Gillard beside him, the then US President Obama announced the permanent stationing of thousands of US Marines throughout Darwin, and opened up Australia to deeper military integration into the US military machine.

Today this country is being turned into a major US military base under the boot of the world’s most aggressive and crumbling empire. The 2014 Force Posture Agreement formally gives the US unrestricted access to Australia’s military facilities and Commonwealth land — a second invasion and occupation of this continent.

The size and operations of Pine Gap and Five Eyes intelligence and spy operations have multiplied many times over since the 2003 Iraq war. More than ever, they are critical to Israel’s genocide and occupation in Palestine, and instrumental in US-instigated military and political coups, assassinations and occupations of other countries. It is no small feat, Pine Gap. Peter Cronau’s latest Pine Gap article in Declassified leaves no doubt that Pine Gap is fully controlled and operated by the US.

Numerous US bases, military infrastructure and thousands of US military personnel are now permanently based across the country. I draw people’s attention to IPAN’s very, very comprehensive booklet on the US military footprint on Australia — I think you’ve all got it in your show bags.

AUKUS Pillars I and II deeply integrate Australia into the US military and war machine, and will automatically involve us in a US-led war with China. High-ranking US military and political advisers and personnel are embedded in Australia’s military and defence departments. Multinational weapons corporations are embedding themselves in our schools, universities and sections of the Australian economy and industries. The financial, economic, social and environmental costs are an enormous burden on the people — and again, there’s no time in this short talk to list them all; they’ll be discussed throughout this conference.

Most recent — and I need to mention it because I’m from Naarm, Melbourne — is the permanent US Marines weapons stockpile facility to be built at Bandiana, near Wodonga in north-east Victoria. It’s the first and biggest of its kind on this continent, even bigger than the one in the Philippines. It will be temporarily based in Melbourne for the next two years whilst Bandiana is being built, and it will have rockets. There is concern that there will be some nuclear weapons involved too.

The $368 billion on AUKUS and nuclear submarines will not revive our manufacturing industries and create thousands of jobs. Australian people are being locked into paying half a trillion supporting the US military machine and its imperialist wars.

As Paul Keating recently said, Australia’s main foreign policies are made in Washington and the Pentagon. In the United Nations, Australia echoes and rubber-stamps just about every US motion to legitimise US global aggressions, occupations and invasions.

In 1981, Malcolm Fraser, the former Liberal Prime Minister, told Americans that no nuclear-weapons-capable aircraft or warships would be allowed in and around Australia. In 2023, Penny Wong, the Labor Minister for Foreign Affairs, told the Australian people that her government respects the US policy of neither confirming nor denying US military carrying nuclear weapons in Australia or around Australia.

Along with broader attacks on people’s democratic rights, and on the right to protest and speak out against injustice, the federal government recently created a new AUKUS command unit within the Australian Federal Police — that’s the highest level of the police — to suppress protests against AUKUS, nuclear waste dumps and war. So they are preparing for massive opposition from the people of Australia, and it will grow.

There is urgency to build a broad and united people’s movement to break free from the US, for a genuinely independent Australia. People from all walks of life are coming together, uniting in campaigns to close Pine Gap, cancel AUKUS and the Force Posture Agreement, end the US alliance and the genocide in Palestine, against war and for peace with justice. This is all part of the broadening and uniting movement for peace and independence that Abby referred to as taking place right across the world. We should be so encouraged and optimistic about the future of this country and of the world.

We must nurture and support people’s organisations and alliances on the ground in communities, workplaces, unions, schools and universities. Raise awareness, organise and mobilise, as IPAN and other grassroots organisations have been doing for years.

Australia’s people have a long history of uniting and organising in mass numbers against imperialist wars, for justice and peace, in solidarity with the First Peoples of this country and in solidarity with people across the globe. Again, there’s no time to list them, but we should highlight the massive mobilisation of millions against the Vietnam War and the Iraq war, and there are many others. These mass organisations and mobilisations grew out of deep connections with people from all walks of life — raising awareness, organising in workplaces and across all levels of the community.

For over 100 years, workers and the unions here in Australia have been in the forefront of struggles against wars and injustices, organising under the “Peace is Union Business” banner. Peace is Union Business is also one of the main sessions at this conference, as well as a workshop.

The fight for sovereignty of this continent started by the First Peoples in 1788, and it continues today. We must empower everyday people as the agents of change, with a vision to free the country from the US and to oppose domination by all big powers and profit-hungry corporations.

And finally: millions of people around the world are inspired by the Palestinian people’s resistance to the Israeli-US colonial occupation and genocide. Our fight here to end the US alliance, cancel AUKUS and the Force Posture Agreement, close Pine Gap and end Australia’s support for the Israeli-US genocide is the Australian people’s contribution to the Palestinian struggle — and will be a significant blow against US global domination.

Delivered via Zoom from Guåhan (Guam). Lightly edited for readability; the talk was given alongside slides, referred to throughout.

Håfa adai, and warm greetings, friends. My name is Naek Flores. I’m calling in from Guåhan, or Guam — we are an island in the Mariana archipelago, in the region of Micronesia.

It’s really important to mention that our islands have experienced two super typhoons in the last few months. In April we had Super Typhoon Samaku, which really impacted the whole archipelago but specifically the island of Saipan, which was battered with winds of over 150 miles an hour. And just a few weeks ago we had Super Typhoon Bobby, which devastated the island of Rota, directly north of Guam, with winds of over 180 miles an hour. These are two category 5 typhoons within just a couple of months of each other, so we’re still in a serious recovery period.

Unfortunately, the first responders are often the military and the federal government, which complicates a lot of our work and makes it much more challenging. When the first responders are the US military, it really does make our resistance a lot more difficult. We are military colonies of the United States.

After Typhoon Samaku, our islands suffered power outages for several weeks. There was serious, serious damage to our utility infrastructure, and a lot of water outages. And within the last few months we’ve also been inundated with war games, war drills and exercises — including Valiant Shield, which always leads up to the Rim of the Pacific exercises in Hawaii every other year, and also a comment period for the Marianas Islands Testing and Training Area, which is the area approved for these war games in the region. Of course, none of this is with our free, prior and informed consent, and it’s in violation of our human rights and our Indigenous rights.

Here on the left is an article where Boeing is boasting about the use of its Ghost Bat on the island of Rota — the same island that was devastated in Super Typhoon Bobby. And just like the Rim of the Pacific exercises in Hawaii, they conducted something called a SINKEX exercise, where they dragged an old ship out into the ocean, bombed it, attacked it with submarine torpedoes. And just like the issues in Hawaii, the wreckage is left in the ocean. There’s no remediation, there’s no cleanup, and so it’s contaminating our ocean with PCBs, TNT, RDX, lead and many other hazardous contaminants — PFOS and PFAS.

Not to mention that in the Rim of the Pacific exercises in Hawaii there are 31 countries participating. This is the largest military exercise; it’s considered the Super Bowl of military exercises. In these war games, thousands and thousands of gallons of fuel are burned through, hundreds of thousands of dollars are wasted that could be used for people’s needs. At the same time it’s exacerbating our vulnerability to the climate crisis. As the oceans continue to warm, and as we’re seeing a super El Niño year, we’re going to see more frequent and more violent storms hitting the Pacific.

Part of the trauma of the storms is the long recovery that follows — the economic impact, and the true security impact of having clean water, safe shelter, and access to food and health care in these times. So we really have to wonder — or rather, we know — that these actually make us more vulnerable in the climate crisis.

This is a map I show often that shows the island chains in the Pacific. All the way up here at the right is the United States. In the third island chain we have Hawaii, American Samoa and New Zealand. In the second we have Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Yap and Palau.

It’s really important to mention that Palau has about five military projects happening right now for the US military, including radar facilities being built — a lot of these in violation of Palau’s environmental protection laws. In Yap, the US military is trying to expand the airport for refuelling and aprons for their warplanes. And in the Northern Marianas we’re seeing war drills — the CNMI Joint Military Training exercises taking place in the islands of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, in Tinian, and also on Farallon de Medinilla, or FDM, where there’s constant bombing happening.

The Marianas Islands Testing and Training Area is almost a million square nautical miles of ocean. There was a comment period, and our islands couldn’t even participate in it because we had no power, no internet. But the comment period pushed forward, and that comment period was over increased activities of sonar, munitions and things like that.

And then of course the first island chain: Japan, Korea, Okinawa, the Philippines, Taiwan, Singapore and Indonesia. And all the way here, sort of in between all of these chains, is Australia. All of this is under the US position that war with China is inevitable, and these are all parts of the Pacific being used as sites for US force projection and occupation in the Pacific.

This is a map of submarines. Guam is the blue spot — it’s the only permanent submarine base, and that includes nuclear-powered submarines. All the greens are rotating, and as you can see there are at least three on this map. This is a Newsweek map. So again: the island chains, and the presence of US submarines throughout the Pacific.

Something else we’re dealing with now is the colonial resource grabbing in the territories, including American Samoa and now the Marianas. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has identified an area of interest flanking both sides of the Marianas archipelago for deep-sea mining. This is the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument — the area in red — and the blue indicates areas of interest.

This resource grabbing is directly connected to the military-industrial complex. The United States is claiming that they’re going to take these minerals for US prosperity and for national defence. And of course that’s going to AI technology and weapons development. As I mentioned earlier, this is a map of the Marianas Islands Testing and Training Area, so there’s definitely an overlap. This is FDM, and this is where the US military bombs regularly.

Throughout the Pacific we have all of these issues of contamination, including Agent Orange, PFAS, dioxin, lead, oil spills, unexploded ordnance, negligent hazardous waste disposal, nuclear radiation and contamination, and fallout from tests in the Marshall Islands. The US has a lack of legal obligation. The agreements they enter into with various sovereign nations have limitations, and US laws themselves prevent some remediation from happening. For instance, the US can create a lot of military hazardous waste in these areas, but their own laws prevent the transport of this waste — including the nuclear waste in the Marshall Islands — out into the United States.

And of course we have all these joint military war games: REFORPAC, Freedom Shield, Pacific Vanguard, Cope North, Valiant Shield, RIMPAC, Talisman Sabre, Exercise Sea Dragon, Pacific Dragon, Resolute Dragon, Freedom Eagle, Bushido Guardian, Balikatan and more. All of these are in areas where people are also protesting the presence of the US military and the harmful impacts of these exercises. All of them are made possible through coercive relationships and agreements with the United States that allow the US to occupy the lands and seas of these sovereign nations for their military, or their war games.

A lot of the language used to justify Israeli occupation and the genocide of Palestinians is also used to justify this weapons testing in the Pacific. For instance, Iron Dome is something that is constantly brought up, again and again, with the building of the missile defence system for Guam — to defend Guam from China, to defend the Marianas from China. And of course, the same weapons manufacturers generating profit from the genocide are connected to the military expansion and buildup here in the Marianas. A lot of the weapons, like the drones used to murder innocent people around the world, are being tested in our region.

This is a picture of the airfield in Tinian, the divert airfield. This is the same airfield the nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were launched from. And the United States is rebuilding it again, so that if Guam is bombed they can quickly transport personnel and weapons to Tinian.

So what we need to do is demand genuine security. We need to demand an end to these war games. We need to demand decontamination, remediation, removal of bases, and land return. We need to demand justice for military sexual violence, which increases in all communities where these war games take place. And we need to demand justice for war crimes. We need to fight for decolonisation in our occupied lands. And we need to resist AUKUS and deep-sea mining.

I thank you all for listening to me today, and look forward to ways we can strategise and work together to fight this beast, the military-industrial complex. Saina ma’åse’ — thank you so much.

Lightly edited for readability.

Thank you. Thank you, Kellie. Clearly, people who try and be inconspicuous often end up being conspicuous.

It’s a pleasure and an honour to be here. Australian Friends of Palestine is a strong supporter of IPAN. IPAN is about the future of the planet. War is the great destroyer of civilisations. We know that. We’ve seen it up close with what’s happened in Gaza — what war means. IPAN is doing great work, and we want to see IPAN grow, as we want to see the Palestine solidarity movement in this country grow. The two issues — international peace, and the settlement of the issue of Israel and Palestine, getting rid of apartheid — are intertwined.

I watched a video yesterday. In fact I watched a couple. One was of a grown man holding up the dead body of his child, like that, and his anguish was just incredible. You can imagine that. Another was of a mother carrying the body parts of her child in a bag. Another was of a young girl — she mustn’t have been more than five or six — shrieking in distress at the dead body of her brother next to her. We’ve seen this for three years. This absolute slaughter of the innocents, without any military justification in any way.

October 7 didn’t happen in a vacuum. Years of siege, years of dispossession, years of slaughter, years of massacres, years of invasion of neighbouring countries. But for the media, for our government, for the supporters of Israel, there was nothing before October 7, and there was nothing after October 7. There was no context. There’s no basis for Palestinian resistance. And after the Israelis went into Gaza, there has been no genocide.

Now, we’ve seen — not just through social media, which has been fantastic and has been changing things, but through the mainstream media — we’ve seen what Israel has done and what they’ve said. We’ve seen Netanyahu and his ministers stand up and call for genocide. Destroy Amalek. Kill Amalek. Kill everyone: man, woman and child. Kill the animals. Destroy everything. We’ve seen that. We saw it. It’s public. It’s out there. The ministers keep stating the same thing. There are no innocents. We like to see dead babies. Gaza must be destroyed. Drop a bomb on them.

The statements of the leaders are on the record. The actions of their military are on the record. It’s seen. It’s done. The estimate of the dead, according to those who could be identified, is in the 70,000s. The estimates of the likely dead go to 200,000 or 300,000, out of a population of 2.3 million. Most of the housing in Gaza is destroyed. The hospitals are destroyed. The water supply is destroyed. The solar energy installations are destroyed. The desalination is destroyed.

Israel went in, and they went in to destroy and to kill, because they have had a policy of ethnic cleansing since 1947. October 7 gave them the same excuse they had in 1947, and the same excuse they had in 1967 during the Six-Day War, when another quarter of a million people were dispossessed. They’re doing it again now.

This has been seen by the entire world. This has been the first live-streamed genocide — where the individuals being shredded can be seen, where the journalists being tracked and killed can be seen, where the hospitals can be destroyed and seen on TV.

We’ve all seen that. We’ve lived with Gaza for three years. I can’t drive down a street at night without seeing that ambulance in Gaza driving down to rescue people — the convoy of ambulances with their lights on, and the young man talking into his phone to his mother, saying they were going to this, and there were shots by the Israelis, who could see that they were ambulances. Saying goodbye to his mother on the phone, saying, “I’m sorry, Mum. I just wanted to help people.” Murdered — the ambulance drivers, the medics, as they do so often. They destroyed the ambulances. They buried the evidence. And then they lied, which they do constantly, and they’re not picked up on it.

Doctors get murdered. Paramedics get murdered. Aid workers get murdered. Journalists get murdered. Murder is Israel’s core business. Murder is Israel’s response. “Kill Amalek” was absolutely the right thing to describe what they were going to do.

We’ve seen that, and it’s changed the world. It’s changed people’s understanding of what war is like. It’s changed people’s understanding of the conception of justice in this world — that the UN couldn’t stop it; that the US is nobbled by this bloody Israel lobby; that they will pressure the UN and they will pressure us; that the genocide can be live-streamed for two years and not be stopped.

This is the world we’re in. And this is why the solidarity movement is so important. This is why IPAN is so important.

We saw every aspect of this genocide broadcast to us in real time. We saw the starvation while the Israelis denied it. We saw the hundreds of trucks blocked from Gaza. We saw the dropping of munitions on people. Go over there, it’s a safe zone — bomb them, and then destroy the hospitals. So you kill people, you shred them, you starve them, you destroy their hospitals, you assassinate their doctors, you deny them the medical supplies. We all saw that. What we didn’t see was the response that was appropriate to a genocide.

Previous genocides haven’t been done in the open. This one was done in the open, proudly announced, proudly defended by Israel and its lobby.

And what we saw was Biden — the coward, the Zionist, the supporter of Israel — draw a red line for Rafah when Israel was still going south. We saw that was meaningless. We also saw that the weapons, the bombs being dropped to slaughter innocent people every single day, were being funnelled by the Americans constantly.

In our own country, we saw the incredible cowardice of the Australian Labor Party government, who could not condemn what Israel was doing. The weasel words of our foreign minister Penny Wong about obeying international law, taking note of humanitarian considerations, being concerned, and then severely — or seriously — concerned. These mongrels have stood by and watched a genocide for three years, which is ongoing. How is that defensible? How is it defensible in this country?

There have been three forces holding back the government. There has been the American government and its pressure. There has been the mongrel Murdoch press, which is the voice of Israel in this country. And there has been the Israel lobby. All of these are the enemies of peace and the proponents of genocide.

I know we’re running out of time, so I’ll speed up.

Ordinary people responded to the slaughter of ordinary people, to the torture of ordinary people, which continues to this day. Ordinary people responded. The opinion polls showed it. The 300,000 over the Sydney Harbour Bridge showed it. But at every step of the way the Labor government was constrained. It was constrained by the lobby, constrained by Murdoch, constrained by the Americans, constrained by their cowardice.

The movement in support of Palestine was global. In Australia, sympathy for the Palestinians had skyrocketed, and the understanding that they deserved peace and a state. And then came the Bondi massacre in Sydney. Fifteen people were slaughtered on a beach in Bondi. And before the blood was dry on those people, the Israel lobby swooped in and announced that this massacre of Australians on Bondi Beach was a result of antisemitism — and that the antisemitism was a result of the anti-war movement. That is, you people.

That’s what they did. And the spineless government that we had gave way when this evil, evil lobby said: we must describe the anti-war movement as antisemitic, we must proscribe them, we must set up a royal commission. The Albanese government, the sovereign government of this country, for a few days resisted a royal commission — because it was a security and police investigation matter. But it didn’t last long.

And the royal commission was not into Bondi. It was into antisemitism, in the context of a genocide where our government did nothing, where the UN failed, where the Israel lobby is the supporter of genocide. The royal commission is about antisemitism in this country, which amounted to crimes that were covered by existing laws — laws against graffiti, laws against arson, laws against assault. But we needed a royal commission into antisemitism.

And this spineless government caved. How much is it their spinelessness, and how much is it the power of this lobby? The lobby must be named. The lobby must be confronted.

Instead of our country having an independent foreign policy, instead of it standing up against a genocide that everybody can see, we will now be on a witch hunt — for you, for us. Everybody who criticises the genocide is an antisemite. They vilify us as racists because we condemn a genocide.

All of the movements around the country were not antisemitic. There was nothing antisemitic about it. They were against a genocide. They were criticising the genocidal actions of a foreign state. And the Israel lobby is here to protect the genocidal actions of a foreign state. The Israel lobby, like Israel, is a great, great threat to peace in the Middle East and internationally.

We must oppose them. We must name them. We must fight them. We must face reality. They exist, they have power, and they cannot be ignored. It’s only beginning. It’s only beginning. The royal commission findings will constrain our civil liberties even more. Freedom is being lost to protect a foreign apartheid genocidal state, pushed by the Israel lobby. We have to say no.

Facilitator: The wonderful thing about truth is that you recognise it when you hear it. And it is very easy to see how Mike was able to mobilise 100,000 people in Adelaide. Well done, Mike.

Lightly edited for readability.

Good morning. I think it’s still morning. Right — Southern Launch. That’s a real thorn in my side at the moment, because all through the years of fighting, it’s been miners. Now all of a sudden we’ve got these rocket launchers, and returns coming from America. So in their way, they are helping the American war machine. We don’t know what’s being returned from California to land on our country.

And I’m very grassroots. I don’t even fight with the government much. I just go and sit on Country and tell them all to get lost. They’re not going to take it. I’ve never let them have it before, in the past, with mining. And I’m not going to bow down now.

There’s a lot of people behind me. Even though I’m the one standing up the front, there’s a lot of people behind me — I wouldn’t be able to manage and fight the way we’re fighting without them, because I won’t take government funding. I get funded by my friends and family. Because if you take government funding, you’ve got to give them something back, and it’s always: give us the land, your stories, and stuff like that. And I’m not prepared to do that.

I’m not prepared to give the land to the government to use as a connection between America and Australia, and bring back all your rubbish from America, dump it on our country and help this thing. I can’t understand why we even have to have it. I’m still trying to work it out, because we don’t need it. We don’t need it in our Great Australian Bight there, where it can be threatened — and if anything happens there, all our seafood’s gone. It’s scary. We just don’t need them at all.

We don’t need it, like Pine Gap. I’ve just come back from there. What they’re doing with our country there is linked up with Pine Gap, which is then obviously linked up with AUKUS. And we really do need to tell them — shall I say it again? — Yankees, go home.

But yeah, that’s about it. But there’s some Yankees that I want to keep.

No, I don’t know what we’re supposed to do except stand up, fight, go on Country. Because like I said, I won’t argue with Native Title, which is something I absolutely hate. I won’t argue with them. I won’t argue with the government. I’ll just tell them: get lost. It’s not your country, not your land. You’re not having it. Thank you.

Lightly edited for readability. The talk was given alongside slides, referred to throughout.

All right, good morning. How we going? I flew down this morning from the home of the Yuggera and Turrbal people, and I’d just like to acknowledge all of our First Nations people, who for 60,000 years have managed our land somewhat better than what we have since European settlement.

I spent 24 years in the Australian Army. When I separated in 2019, I’d come to the conclusion that serving in the Australian Defence Force was not about defending Australia, but rather about serving the interests of the US empire — as Abby said earlier, the likes of Chevron. And that didn’t sit well with me. That conclusion has been reinforced quite significantly in the years since I left the army.

This time yesterday I was actually in a paddock in Moree, northern New South Wales, taking soil samples for a project. And from the vantage point of someone with both military experience and as a soil scientist, I’m far more concerned about the state of our environment than I am about any military threat that Australia faces or could foreseeably face — and certainly any threat that would justify the AUKUS extravaganza the government’s taking us on.

Today I hope to achieve two objectives. The first is to describe the context in which AUKUS and the Force Posture Agreement came into being, because I think we need to understand this broader context and make more of it if we’re going to move along in getting these two initiatives sunk. The second is to highlight the many angles, or many vectors, through which we can achieve that — because there are numerous. I’ve listed a few of them, but there’s many more we can take as well. Because we’re not going to get change through rational decision-making by government. That’s abundantly clear. It’s only going to come when the mass of the community demands change. And I think AUKUS actually provides us an opportunity to achieve that.

So if we look at the big picture: for much of the last 2,000 years it’s actually been the eastern world, dominated by China, that has been the major power in the world. The dominance of the western world is really only two or three centuries old, and it coincides obviously with the period of colonialism and a host of Western empires — most notably the United Kingdom, and the current empire being the United States. Whilst short in historical terms, from a human lifespan perspective it is sufficiently long that western dominance has become associated as being the natural state of affairs, particularly amongst our western leadership, ruling elites — the Epstein class, if you will.

This is an idea that was encapsulated by Francis Fukuyama’s end-of-history triumphalism: that the liberal democratic model of government was the final form of government we would see. But Charles Krauthammer put it differently, arguing in 1990 that what we’re actually seeing is an international system that had entered a unipolar moment, where one power — that being obviously the United States — dominated the global system. And Krauthammer rightly warned that this period would be temporary.

Despite that being a logical conclusion, as anyone with any history of empires would understand, the United States committed itself to a policy of primacy, overtly stated in the Wolfowitz Doctrine of the early 1990s and continuously demonstrated every year since, including what’s happening around the world today. Maintaining primacy at a global level was a fool’s errand. It could only end in one sort of outcome, and that’s growing resistance from those on the receiving end of US power.

Actually, I’ll just pause there. In 2012 I got an article published in the Australian Defence Force Journal about three dangerous assumptions — and this is well before I was really thinking seriously about this stuff. One of those was our reliance on the US. Back then, I guess, it was far enough in the future that relying on the US probably wasn’t seen as too much of an issue; they let it through. In 2016 I tried again, a bit more expansive on that topic. In 2018 I tried again. Neither time did it get published. So obviously I was hitting a bit close to the bone.

By late 2021, when AUKUS was actually announced, it was clear that Western power was in serious, significant decline. I argued at the time that AUKUS was actually a sign of desperation and weakness, and I think that’s pretty well accurate. It’s a desperate rearguard action, if you will, by three of the leading countries in the Anglosphere, in a desperate attempt to minimise the rise of what’s now commonly called the multipolar world.

The decline of Western power is basically something we don’t hear discussed by our politicians or our legacy media, but it’s driving so much of what we see in the world today. It’s basically the core of what’s happening in so many places around the world. The western elites, led by the United States with the full support of the United Kingdom and the European Union, are seeking to restore the dominance of the United States in the international system. The empire is not taking its decline lying down. It is doing everything possible to maintain — or more accurately regain — its hegemonic position. And as the empire’s position becomes weaker, which it is day by day, it’s becoming more belligerent, more dangerous, and taking ever bigger risks. We can see just what’s happening against Iran at the moment.

I describe this as a crusade against multipolarity. There are three major campaigns in this crusade. The first is the war in Ukraine, where a proxy war is being fought against Russia through the sacrifice of Ukraine. The second is the war against Iran, which is a linchpin in the multipolar world given its geographic position linking east and west, as well as being a power in its own right, as it’s demonstrated with how it stood up to US and Israeli aggression. And the ultimate objective of this crusade is to take down China. That’s the big target. And that’s where AUKUS and the Force Posture Agreement come in.

So where does Australia fit into this? If we judge rationally the commentary of our leadership, our prime minister, our foreign minister, you couldn’t explain the incoherence and the hypocrisy of the language that comes out and the actions that are taken. But when you realise that our political establishment is firmly entrenched in and firmly supportive of this crusade, then the behaviour of our leaders starts to make sense. Not excusable, but at least we can start to make sense of it. It explains everything from how we’ve been complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza through to lining ourselves up in a war against China, a major source of our prosperity. And of course the Force Posture Agreement and the AUKUS deal are physical manifestations of this.

Just as a concrete example: you may remember early March, the prime minister was I think the first world leader to actually support the United States in its actions against Iran, which was clearly an illegal war of aggression. Yet we get more angst out of a test missile fired by China last week or two weeks ago into the Pacific, that harmed no one — we get more angst on that than on a war of aggression that’s caused an awful lot of heartache around the world as well as in Australia, and has much potential to cause much, much more economic calamity in the weeks and months ahead.

Okay. I think most people here are pretty well aware of what AUKUS and the Force Posture Agreement are, so this is just a brief summary. A lot of money — up to $368 billion. I like to think that is a unit of account; it’s going to cost way more than $368 billion. That’s the headline figure. I think the AUKUS $368 billion is a unit of account. It’ll cost two or three times that much.

We’re supposedly going to get some submarines, and I’ll talk about that in the next slide. We’ve got Pillar II, which is all about advanced technology such as AI. Then we have the Force Posture Agreement, which was signed in 2014, and that’s a legal framework in which the United States can have its forces in Australia — continue its occupation of Australia — where the Australian government has basically handed the sovereignty of Australia over to the United States. The key part of that is providing unimpeded access to the United States. What sovereign country provides unimpeded access to their terrain, to their sovereign lands, to any other country? That’s a joke.

And then we have a number of initiatives which are how that Force Posture Agreement is actually implemented — the examples being the Marines in Darwin, and the B-52 facilities being built at RAAF Tindal. What are they there for? Nicely out of range, or potentially out of range, for a strike on China. And then the recent announcement of Bandiana, and the logistics base for the US that will be built there.

This is my last slide. What we need to do is get broad public support to end these ridiculous arrangements — to end AUKUS, to end the Force Posture Agreement. This is not an exhaustive list, but there’s 15 up there. I’ve put 15 different — I’m calling them vectors — different angles we can take to encourage greater public support. Because I think if you look at pretty much every Australian, bar those who are grifting off the money that comes out of AUKUS, or who are just beholden to the US empire or the Israeli lobby, for 97 or 98 per cent of Australians there would be two or three of these different vectors which would grab their attention and get them up in arms. For some it’ll be a whole lot — you people in this room, probably most of these things are things that get you fired up. But for the everyday public, who isn’t really into this sort of thing or doesn’t think about geopolitics too much, there’s something in there for everyone.

I haven’t got time to go through all of them, but: we’re lining ourselves up for a war with China. Just stop and think about that. We’ve put ourselves in a lose-lose position. If we go to war with China, we lose whether we win or we lose. If we have a successful military campaign against China — I can’t even think what that would look like — we’ve just cut the legs out of our economy. So that’s a Pyrrhic victory at best. And then if China, which is most likely, comes out victorious: well, we’ve gone to war against the source of our prosperity. That cannot end well in any way, shape or form for Australia.

Risk management — this is for those who might be a bit nonplussed about everything. On the risk management side of it, there is no way on earth we’re actually going to get nuclear submarines, certainly not the Virginia class. Almost every week there’s a new report. Peter Briggs, who’s a former senior officer in the Royal Australian Navy, put out another article just a couple of days ago: the United States — and the UK is in an even worse state — cannot physically build enough submarines to provide them to Australia. It’s impossible. They’ve got to almost double their production rate, and if they could do that, it’s going to take decades to do it. Decades. So it’s never going to happen, and we’re paying all this.

And then if we do get them — this relates to sovereignty — if we do get them, we’re only going to get them because we’ve sacrificed our sovereignty, because they’re only going to give us those submarines if they think we’re going to do what they tell us. And what’s that going to be? It’s going to be sitting off the coast of China, probably trying to track those submarines that fire the ballistic missiles, if and when the United States decides to go to war with China.

Opportunity cost is another great one. Every day we hear about the cost of living crisis. I’m a soil scientist. The Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists put out a report, Restoring Australia’s Landscapes, a couple of years ago. It would take a fraction of what we are investing in AUKUS to actually fix our landscape, to fix our waterways, to fix our environment, to fix our agriculture, so we can be sustainable over the long term. When we spend this money on submarines, which aren’t going to fix anything, that’s the cost we’re bearing. And you can apply that to health, infrastructure, energy, climate change, social services — you can apply it to anything. It’s an enormous opportunity cost.

So just in conclusion: I actually think we have a bit of an opportunity, because yes, the world is in a dire state at the moment, but people are seeing it, people are realising it, and we have to make the most of that opportunity. Through looking at all these different things, we can engage, I think, with almost every Australian on why we need to ditch this ridiculous deal we call AUKUS and, more importantly, repeal the Force Posture Agreement which enables it to happen.

So I think there’s an opportunity. And also — we’re a young country as far as European settlement goes, and we haven’t come to terms with our past, with our pre-European past, and we certainly haven’t come to terms with our position as a predominantly European populace in Asia. I think until we come to terms with that, we’re always going to struggle to actually be a part of our region where we can be both prosperous and secure. So I think it’s an opportunity, where we’re at with AUKUS, the Force Posture Agreement and everything else, that we can actually address some of these issues and set Australia up for the 21st century so it can be both peaceful and prosperous. Thank you.

Facilitator: Thanks so much, Cameron.

Delivered via Zoom. Transcribed from the conference recording and lightly edited for readability.

Thanks so much, Sue. Thanks for the love. Thanks so much for having me, and I’m sorry I couldn’t be there in person.

I have been asked to speak about US cultural impacts, but what I wanted to cover was the links and the exchanges between Australia and the United States, and the way there is an increasing gap between the Australian government’s approach to our alliance with the United States, and how the public are feeling about that relationship and where they want it to go in the future.

We’ve been doing quite a bit of research at the Australia Institute on public sentiment — not just around the Trump presidency, but the alliance and the relationship more broadly, and on the AUKUS submarine deal specifically. What that shows us is that there really is an increasing gap between the Australian government doubling down on the alliance, doubling down on its relationship with the Trump administration in particular, and how Australians are seeing that relationship and how they’re feeling about it.

We’ve done some repeat polling research around that public sentiment, and one of the headline findings is that more than half of Australians now see Donald Trump as the biggest threat to global security — with very good reason. I don’t think I need to explain why to this particular audience. Over half of Australians see Trump as the biggest threat to global security, compared to 17 per cent who see Vladimir Putin as the greatest threat, and only 16 per cent who see Xi Jinping.

That is in step with research done by other think tanks in Australia, and with international polling research. Pew, for example, released a poll in the last couple of weeks around global sentiment on China, and in the 36 countries they surveyed, in almost all of them, what they describe as the favourability gap between the United States and China has reversed. So there is significant change underway in public sentiment around the United States and its role in the world — not just in Australia, but internationally, and especially across the historic allies of the United States.

In that same polling research, we found that 59 per cent of Australians — a significant majority — now support a more independent foreign policy over a closer alliance with the United States. If you know anything about the history of that relationship, of that alliance, which many of you do, you will know that’s a significant shift in public opinion. And I can keep going through the numbers: 13 per cent of Australians now see the United States as a very reliable ally, which is in step with European polling, where 11 per cent of Europeans see the United States as a reliable ally. We can keep reeling off these numbers, but what all of that research is telling me is that there’s a seismic shift underway in how Australians view the United States.

What I think is really important is to look at how that polling is framed, especially in Australia. What we find other think tanks doing — the Lowy Institute, for example, has just released their big poll — is talking about how Australians are separating the Trump administration, Trump’s America, from their views of the broader alliance. So Australians are entirely capable of seeing that Trump’s America is one version of the United States, but not the only version.

I think we have to be sceptical of that framing. Because while it is true — while Australians know that this is one version of America, not the only version, and that an America with which we share values, values such as democracy and the rule of law, absolutely does exist — as Aunty Sue just said, there are some Yankees that we don’t want to get rid of. We do have this sense of solidarity with Americans who are under siege, Americans whose democratic institutions are under siege. And I would always argue that the polling we are seeing doesn’t necessarily represent a wish on the part of Australians to abandon the United States. It’s reflective of a deep concern and a deep sorrow at what is happening in the United States. That important nuance is often skated over.

But what also happens is that think tanks and public figures with an interest in the alliance existing in a certain way will say that Australians are separating Trump from their support of the alliance, which is rock solid. And certainly some polling does say Australians support our alliance with the United States, that they think the United States is important to our security. But I am somewhat sceptical of that framing, because I would argue what it does is conflate the alliance — the capital-A alliance that Cameron was talking about, that military-industrial complex integration — with that broader relationship. It’s conflating Australian support for Americans, conflating our solidarity with Americans who are under siege, with support for deeper military integration with the Trump administration, or whichever administration is in charge. I think it’s really important to push back on that framing, and to note that Australians are particularly interested in solidarity with our American friends who are under attack.

We heard Christopher Pyne at the AUKUS Public Inquiry say something very similar the other day: that the alliance is bigger than prime ministers or presidents. Again, that’s true — the alliance has survived for 75 years, of course it’s bigger than prime ministers or presidents. But that, to me, is used as a get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s used as cover for doubling down on the Trump administration. And from our perspective, as many of you will know, that is deeply risky and deeply dangerous for Australia.

What this doubling down actually does — this intense fear of making Trump upset, and of the potential for him to abandon AUKUS — is blinker the relationship so badly that not only is it ignoring the rest of that relationship and the shared values upon which it is supposed to be built, it is horribly undermining that relationship and our broader solidarity with the United States, because the government is so deeply focused only on the Trump administration.

As far as we can tell — admittedly from the outside; I’m not in the government, I don’t have any kind of special access — the government is only talking to the Trump administration. It’s not talking to or engaging with its progressive allies in the United States: people who have a deep interest in the survival and the thriving of American democracy, people with whom we should share interests, and certainly a Labor government should share interests. Strategically, for me, that’s bewildering. How is it that a Labor government in particular is not engaging with its progressive colleagues in Congress?

Strategically, I think that’s potentially a disaster — because it’s entirely possible that this version of the United States will go away, and that progressive forces and the left will help to revitalise the United States, as Mamdani is doing in New York. It’s entirely possible that, just like when Trump was elected the first time, if the Democrats return to power, if there is a revitalisation of American democracy in this way, the Australian government will be left scrambling. And do they think that progressive allies in the United States won’t remember that Australia didn’t engage with them for the entirety of the Trump administration?

So my great concern is the way that broader relationship, the way our shared values of democracy, are being catastrophically undermined by the government’s approach — and the way that is also undermining faith in a Labor government, faith in progressive politics here in Australia as well, when that gap is so big between what the public is saying and what the government is doing.

From the perspective of pushing back on this alliance, and pushing back on AUKUS in particular, we have a huge opportunity now because of that gap. To continually remind the government, and to continually remind Australians, that the last federal election in Australia was at least in part a referendum on Trumpism in Australia. Peter Dutton lost his seat in part because he attempted to be Trump-like — or a Temu Trump, as my colleague Amy Remeikis likes to say. And Australians delivered a very clear message on that front. That election result was a clear endorsement of keeping Trumpism, keeping that kind of politics, out of Australia.

I think we have a huge opportunity to really lean into that — to lean into the best of the shared values that we have with the forces of democracy and democratic accountability in Australia and in the United States. In that sense, I think that Trump and AUKUS, as Cameron said, offer us a huge opportunity.

So I’m really glad to be talking to you about that today, and to be taking part in this show of solidarity alongside the ALP National Conference. It’s such an important piece of work, and I’m really grateful to IPAN for doing it. I’ll leave it there and look forward to our discussion.

Delivered via Zoom. Transcribed from the conference recording and lightly edited for readability.

Thanks, Sue, and thanks everyone for being here. I apologise that I can’t be there in person — I was scheduled to travel to Alice Springs tomorrow to make sure I’m in court on Monday morning for a couple of very brave Palestine defenders who blocked the entrance to the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap last year. That case has now been adjourned, so I’m in Sydney and not in Adelaide.

Today I want to speak about the crackdown on our civil liberties and how that affects the movement opposed to the US alliance. It’s a topic which I think will be of increasing importance in the coming years, as a result of the significant political shift taking place in this country and in the West generally. I don’t have time to speak about that shift in any real detail, and I’m sure there are people much better placed at the conference to do so — but I’m referring to the rise in opposition to US militarism, and a growing recognition that our relationship with the US actually makes us more vulnerable to harm rather than protected from it.

For decades we’ve been told that the alliance with the US is necessary for Australia’s survival, and that without the protection of the world’s only superpower we would be overrun by any number of hostile countries. It’s this argument that has been the primary justification for Australia’s participation in US wars of aggression around the world, and for our government granting permission to the US to have military intelligence bases on Australian soil.

Over the past few years we’ve seen support for the US plummet amongst Australians. There are various reasons for this, which we’ve just heard Emma speak about with some very useful insights, and I’d agree with her that it’s definitely not just limited to opposition to President Trump, but rather opposition to the alliance in general — and a broader realisation amongst the public that US militarism is a principal source of instability and harm in the world.

In addition, this year we’ve seen the Iranian military shatter the myth that US army bases bring security to the countries which host them. Iran’s decimation of US assets and military bases in countries across the Gulf — including Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq — as well as its attacks on those countries’ infrastructure in response to US-Israeli attacks on its own, have made clear that these bases are a liability and not an asset.

It’s now clear that in the event of a US war on China — which, as Cameron spoke about, is definitely in the pipeline, and may have been a not-too-distant reality had the Americans not failed so miserably in Iran — Australia would be a primary target. And would be subjected to death and destruction like it has never seen before, with the obvious exception of the genocide of Indigenous people that took place here during colonisation.

As more and more people in this country wake up to this reality, more and more people will seek to join the political movement calling for an end to the alliance with the US. However, their ability to effectively organise and mobilise against the alliance will be curtailed as a result of the unprecedented crackdown on civil liberties currently taking place.

So let’s talk about that crackdown. Since the start of the Gaza genocide, the federal and state governments have passed various laws which undermine our democratic rights, including freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and freedom of association. This crackdown has accelerated rapidly since the Bondi terror attack, and we’re now witnessing the most aggressive assault on our civil liberties in living memory.

Nearly all of these laws have been passed at the urging of the Zionist lobby, and they’ve primarily been used to stifle criticism of Israel. However, these laws, and this crackdown more generally, will still have a very significant impact on our ability to oppose the US-Australia alliance and to push back against US domination around the world. This is for three key reasons.

Firstly, some of the laws passed over the past few years are capable of being used to stifle political opposition to US domination and the US alliance, for reasons I’ll explain shortly. Secondly, the crackdown we’ve witnessed has now set a precedent and normalised the idea of stripping away fundamental rights that we’ve long taken for granted — making it more likely that similar laws will be introduced in future that undermine opposition to the US alliance. And finally, the line between the US and Israeli military has become increasingly blurred. We’ve seen the US partnership in the Israeli genocide in Gaza, with the US being a fully fledged participant or co-conspirator, and now joint wars — a joint US-Israel war against Iran. Furthermore, we have the US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, which was passed by the House in the US two days ago. Therefore, laws which prevent us from speaking freely or protesting about Israeli militarism will simultaneously prevent us from speaking freely or mobilising against US militarism.

I want to speak quickly about how our civil liberties are being undermined. I’ll start with freedom of assembly. We’ve seen various laws that restrict the right to protest in this country, in several states. The most draconian of those were introduced by the Minns Labor government in New South Wales late last year, which effectively stripped away long-held rights of protesters where a public assembly restriction declaration was made by the Commissioner of Police.

To go back to what I said earlier about how these laws — even though they’re brought in at the urging of the pro-Israel lobby, and in reality are designed to target and stifle protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza — they are ostensibly neutral, and therefore have the ability to limit protests against US military action as well. We saw that in New South Wales. For those who don’t know, I was the lawyer involved in the constitutional challenge against those laws, and thankfully they were declared invalid, so they’re no longer on the books. But while they were in operation they were used to repress various public assemblies in New South Wales, including a protest held at Sydney Town Hall against US military intervention in Venezuela.

In Victoria we saw laws passed last November to expand police powers. They were also declared unlawful. And in Western Australia there is a bill introduced in February which will also increase police powers and allow them to effectively block or refuse a protest permit in the event that the protest is likely to promote hate. As I understand it, those laws are still under parliamentary review.

In addition to the passing of these laws, we’ve also seen increasingly aggressive policing of protests: pre-dawn raids, where doors are smashed in and phones and other electronic devices are seized. This has most commonly been taking place in Melbourne, but also in Sydney. One of my clients who attended the protest against Israeli president and war criminal Isaac Herzog was subjected to a pre-dawn raid while they were half-naked in bed. Door smashed in, phones and computers seized, required to provide the passcodes — stuff that you would never really think would happen in Australia, or any country that claims to be a democracy, but is now becoming increasingly normalised.

We’re also seeing police imposing bail conditions on protesters which limit their ability to participate. Going back to the Herzog protesters, nearly all of them were initially subjected to bail conditions which prohibited them from going into the city or participating in protests. And in Melbourne there was the action in March of this year at the US Consulate, where some protesters spilled oil and blood across the entrance. At least some of those protesters were the subject of forced-entry raids, they were charged, and conditions were placed on bail preventing them from leaving the state. As I understand it, in at least one of those cases it was directly in response to police anticipating that the protester was going to travel to the convergence against Pine Gap.

Moving on to freedom of association. We’ve long had laws in this country at a federal level which limit our ability to engage with certain organisations. These are proscribed terrorist organisations, many of which do engage in acts of terrorism — I don’t think there’s any denial about that — but some of which are organisations involved in resistance against occupation, most notably in Palestine and Lebanon, which pose no threat whatsoever to Australia, but do pose a threat to Israel and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the US.

This year we saw a similar regime of laws introduced to proscribe what are called hate groups, which are so broad and vague that they allow the federal government to outlaw any organisation it’s not happy with. So far it’s only been used against two groups that are pretty much on the fringe and don’t have popular political support. But this could of course expand in future. We only need to look at what happened in the UK with Palestine Action.

And finally, we have laws that limit our freedom of expression — laws which ban us from reciting or displaying prohibited slogans. We’ve seen that in Queensland with the phrases “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada”. There are laws that criminalise offensive language: just yesterday we saw someone charged because they referred to Alex Ryvchin as an evil Zionist. And we have laws that ban the public display of prohibited symbols — symbols of organisations proscribed as terror groups, many of which again don’t, or at least didn’t, pose any threat to Australia, but were in opposition to Israel and/or America.

There are a host of other laws I could refer to, but I note the time, so I don’t want to impede the next speakers. All I’ll say is that in addition to this criminalisation of political expression, we’ve also seen the stifling of free speech in other ways — whether that’s the weaponisation of racial discrimination laws to wage lawfare against people critical of Israel, or, as Sue mentioned earlier, the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which largely conflates most criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish conduct. We’ve seen that adopted by the national health regulator and a bunch of other government agencies in recent times.

How do we respond? It’s a multi-pronged approach, both legal and political — but organisation is key, and so it’s fantastic that we’ve got such a big turnout at this event. IPAN is one of many organisations that will play a crucial role in pushing back against the US alliance and the empire’s crimes in general. Thank you very much.

Delivered via Zoom. Transcribed from the conference recording and lightly edited for readability.

Thank you, Sue, and hello everybody. I’m joining the conference from the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and I just wanted to acknowledge traditional owners, and that sovereignty was never ceded.

I was asked today to talk about AI, and specifically some of the dangers, so I’ll be focusing on a few key things that span AI in the military and warfare as well as in civil and society domains. I do want to emphasise at the outset that AI does bring real opportunities and positive applications — uses of the technology that are helpful, or beneficial, or even somewhat benign — but that there are also risks, especially in certain domains, that we really need to be alert to.

I also come to this not with a technical background in data science or software engineering. My background is in international relations and working on disarmament issues. It was doing this work that concern was emerging among experts, civil society and the international community more broadly about the realities of AI being incorporated into weapons, and development towards autonomous weapons.

Autonomous weapons — weapons that use sensor data, things such as facial recognition or heat imprint, to determine what or who to attack — cross a fundamental moral red line. They also introduce distinct security, ethical, humanitarian and legal risks. It’s for this reason that the majority of states, the Secretary-General, the International Committee of the Red Cross, AI experts and global civil society have called for new law to address autonomous weapons: some sort of new treaty, for instance, that would contain specific prohibitions as well as obligations.

Talks have been carried out to date primarily within the UN, at the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the CCW. This year, the dedicated group that deals with autonomous weapons is tasked to agree on elements of a potential instrument, and that’s part of the current mandate. But there is a strong call that this really needs to lead to urgent negotiation of a new treaty.

Australia, though, has been part of only a small handful of countries resisting the notion of having specific international law surrounding autonomous weapons. These countries include Russia, Israel, India, the US, the UK and Australia.

At the same time, Australia is also advancing autonomous capabilities within defence. There are some really large projects that some people might be aware of, including Ghost Bat, the autonomous aircraft developed by Boeing, and the autonomous submarine Ghost Shark, which is a contract with Anduril.

We’ve heard a little bit about AUKUS and the mention of Pillar II and capability sharing. As part of AUKUS there have been joint military exercises and trials. Maritime Big Play was a major one of these series, and there was an autonomous focus on maritime capabilities hosted by Australia — Exercise Autonomous Warrior — which included Ghost Shark and other capabilities in a joint trial with the US and the UK under the auspices of AUKUS.

There really needs to be clear limits to autonomy in weapons and how it’s used, particularly around autonomy in targeting and those key functions. Australia should be welcoming new law that would delineate what is not acceptable in terms of autonomous weapons.

Increasing autonomy in weapons is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of AI being used in warfare, as well as elements that cross over into other parts of society. AI tools are being used more broadly in conflict, and most alarmingly there are concerns around targeting — an area of particular concern due to the dehumanising nature of AI in targeting, but also the likelihood of error, and how it escalates humanitarian harm.

US commanders have confirmed that in the war on Iran there has been use of a variety of advanced AI tools — nothing specific, but that this is used in the processing of data in the conflict. There were reports that emerged that the United States has used Anthropic’s large language model, Claude, to assist with target recommendations in their strikes on Iran. The tech firm Anthropic, which did hold a $200 million contract with the Pentagon to use its technologies in military applications, then refused to allow its technologies to be used in autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance — Anthropic saying that it couldn’t be used safely or reliably for those purposes. So indeed, there is precedent for tech companies taking strong positions about how their technology can be used.

We have also seen AI target generation systems emerge — for example, systems such as the Gospel or Lavender, which have been reported as used by the Israeli defence forces in creating kill lists with minimum human oversight. The use of these systems accelerates killing and civilian deaths. Lavender reportedly generates ratings from a person’s activity: communication patterns, social media connections. These are blunt tools, and there can also be false equivalencies. Aside from the humanitarian harm and civilian killing, there is also an acute example here of digital dehumanisation.

Digital dehumanisation is the reduction of people to data points based on some specific kind of characteristics. These can also be things like ethnicity, gender, weight, gait. So this is a real concern across a range of emerging AI uses, and it’s the dangers there that I’m going to focus on for the remainder of my talk.

Digital dehumanisation is particularly concerning in cases where we have what’s called automated decision-making emerging — where AI systems or algorithms make particular decisions, recommendations or determinations. This is especially troubling where it can lead to harmful effects against people, to adverse consequences. It’s relevant across areas like recruitment, banking and loans, healthcare, and criminal justice.

In all of these scenarios, AI bias is a major risk, which leads to harms — in particular towards already marginalised groups, due to the way that AI systems replicate and exacerbate discrimination. This is a real risk that needs to be mitigated, and we really need to think about the particular uses of certain AI systems. Recruitment algorithms, for instance, exhibit gender discrimination, racism, ageism and so on. In healthcare, as just one example, digital triage systems that are trained predominantly on middle-class white populations struggle to recognise particular health indicators expressed by different cultural groups. There is a real danger where we have algorithms making determinations about people that potentially result in harms to that person, without proper human assessment or interrogation of those particular decisions. It’s the adoption of AI in these cases that’s a real danger we need to safeguard against.

Australia’s current approach to AI governance reveals significant gaps. The National AI Plan introduced late last year missed an opportunity to really take into account the risks of harms related to AI technologies, and to implement strong regulatory measures in response — strong regulatory safeguards, specific prohibitions or obligations, particularly around things like algorithmic bias in AI systems, or the use of AI in high-risk settings.

There is a new AI safety institute, and among their goals is to analyse and test new AI models and applications, and to support regulators and agencies in responding to emerging AI risks and harms. That’s a welcome body, but it doesn’t go far enough in adopting clear policy to safeguard against harms from certain applications of AI, and in really outlining the applications of AI that Australia finds to be unacceptable and that should be regulated against.

The benefit of having advancing technology is really being able to explore how it can be used for good — but also putting in place limits on where it shouldn’t be used. I think Australia has a long way to go to do this effectively and conscientiously, particularly with how rapidly things are changing. I’ll leave it there.

Lightly edited for readability. The talk was given alongside slides, referred to throughout.

Good afternoon, everyone. Arthur, I thought when we had that planning meeting, you said if I bought you a beer I could have 12 minutes.

Arthur Rorris: I’m still waiting for the beer.

I promise you. I promise you.

Also in our planning meeting, Arthur said at the time he might ask the speakers to say one sentence at the start of their talk which gives you an idea what it’s really all about. Well, I can do that — but I’ll do it in a poem.

Our land abounds in nature’s gifts,
in beauty rich and rare.
But the United States has its grip on it,
and our government doesn’t care.

That we Australians are under the military, economic and cultural domination of the United States is a fact of life, and to our great disadvantage. But whilst much has been written and talked about AUKUS and the Force Posture Agreement, much less has been said about US economic domination.

Oh — skipped a slide there. Okay. It’s all right.

That economic domination helps to explain why a wealthy country has so many poor and homeless, and workers struggling to keep their heads above financial water, and one in six Australian children living in poverty.

Now, I must acknowledge that much of the material I’m giving you today came from Professor Clinton Fernandes, and I recommend his book Island Off the Coast of Asia — it’s well worth reading. So I do thank Clinton for this. We owe him something.

Concern about the depth of foreign ownership and control of Australian industry and resources was arising back in the 1970s. Len Fox, in his book Multinationals Take Over Australia, which was written in about 1980, provided the following information — which you can see up there on the PowerPoint — of the foreign ownership of Australian industry in the late 1970s. It was becoming a great concern, and it was the Australian Bureau of Statistics that provided that information.

Now, the Fraser government at that time decided to encourage more foreign investment in Australian industry and resources. And so little Johnny Howard, his treasurer — whom my brother-in-law calls the cockroach — stopped the Australian Bureau of Statistics from collecting any further data on foreign ownership of Australian industry or resources. And it’s never been restored ever since. So there’s a gap. There’s a gap in our knowledge of that situation.

We’re indebted to Clinton Fernandes, therefore, for doing the research much more recently about the situation. He says, and I quote:

“Right now, US corporations eclipse everyone else in their ability to influence our politics through their investments in Australian stocks. Using company ownership data from Bloomberg, I analysed the ownership of Australia’s 20 biggest companies a few days before the 2019 federal election in May. Of those 20, 15 were majority owned by United States investors, and three more were at least 25 per cent owned.”

And that list included the following… It doesn’t work. I’ll use the arrow. Okay. Well, anyway — we’ll come back to it. Okay, I’ll read it out.

He gave the following figures. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia, once the people’s bank, but following privatisation is now 62 per cent US-owned. No longer the people’s bank — it’s an American bank. Westpac Bank is 64 per cent US-owned. The National Bank of Australia is 63 per cent US-owned. And the ANZ Bank, 54 per cent US-owned. The four big banks, all owned by US investors. Woolworths is 66 per cent US-owned, Rio Tinto 65 per cent, Wesfarmers 56 per cent — and so the list goes on. The Australia Institute has also produced similar figures, but with even higher levels of US ownership than that.

Clinton says the Australian Stock Exchange’s top 20 companies make up close to half of the market capitalisation of the stock exchange.

One might well ask: how does US economic domination affect the Australian people? After all, the government keeps telling us that foreign investment is a great boon and we need it.

Well, because of their financial size and domination, decisions about Australian investment and development are made not by the Australian government but in the boardrooms of those corporations — and most probably overseas. The decisions are made to maximise the profit for their shareholders. That’s their prime responsibility. Not in order to meet the needs or priorities of the Australian people. But that’s just the normal behaviour of capitalism, of course — private capital, the boardroom, the CEOs. Their job is to maximise the dividend to their shareholders. That’s normal behaviour. That’s the problem with the system.

A classic case is the car manufacturing industry. Successive Australian governments have allowed and even encouraged foreign investment, and hence ownership, until the control of the entire car industry was 100 per cent owned by foreign companies. Right? One hundred per cent, the Australian car industry. The government lost any control over it, and the entire industry was taken out of Australia by its foreign owners, who decided they could make higher profits elsewhere. We not only lost a major engineering industry, but the jobs and skills that went with it.

We also lose out because of tax manipulation and so-called creative accounting. Recent work by the investigative journalist Michael West and the Tax Justice Network has exposed the myriad ways in which certain corporations get around the tax laws. ExxonMobil, for example, paid zero tax on more than $18 billion in income in 2014–15, although the price of domestic gas went through the roof.

Figures analysed and released in December 2017 showed Glencore, which operates in commodity industries such as coal, copper, oil and zinc, managed to get rid of all its profit and tax on $22 billion in income. Shell Australia paid zero tax on $4.2 billion in revenue. Chevron, nothing on $2.1 billion. Viva Energy, which bought the petrol stations from Shell, zero tax on $16.8 billion. And ExxonMobil, not a cent on $6.7 billion.

In short: one Australian worker — a cleaner, a nurse, a teacher, a waterside worker — one Australian worker paid more tax in that year than five giant US corporations whose combined income in that year was $51.8 billion.

Now, Clinton points out Norway’s experience in handling energy. Norway harnessed its earnings from oil and gas in its continental shelf. The Norwegian government is the largest shareholder in Statoil, its state oil company. The Norwegian government created the oil fund in 1990 to invest Norway’s oil revenue. The fund had more than 11 trillion kroner — now, in Australian terms, that’s 1.7 trillion Australian dollars — to invest. This was a handsome investment for a country with only 5.5 million people. Norway has one of the highest living standards in the world. A different way of handling the situation.

Successive Australian governments have lost sovereign control of the economy and the ability to set national priorities. The defence against foreign ownership and US corporations is publicly owned, government-owned enterprises — the reversal of privatisation.

That ownership can be regained using the compulsory acquisition powers under the Constitution, using the existing power of the legislature — section 51(xxxi) — to acquire property on just terms. So parliament does have the powers to nationalise, in whole or in part, critical national industries, and provide compensation over a long period of time. It’s simply a question of whose interests are to be served, and having vision, intent and some Australian backbone to do what’s needed.

Yes — okay, I will sum up.

In summing up: we are being ripped off. We are not getting a fair return on the immense wealth of this country, which could otherwise provide us with world-class infrastructure, including affordable housing and transportation, free health, free education and child care, and help us address the climate crisis.

In its absence, we have economic oppression every day, with people having to work two or more jobs to keep their heads above financial water, and suffering emotional pressure leading in some cases to family breakups, mental illness, and one in six Australian children living in poverty.

When is the revolt coming? I’m reminded of the words of the great independence revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, who said a man or woman joins the revolution when they recognise the source of their oppression. And it is the mission of IPAN, and of all progressive people, to help awaken the Australian people to the source of their economic oppression — so that we can implement the title of this conference and break free from the US, and rebuild Australia as an independent, peaceful, sustainable country, free from economic oppression.

Lightly edited for readability. The talk was given alongside slides, referred to throughout.

Facilitator: I’d now like to ask Derek Burke to come up and give us his address. Please welcome Derek.

Firstly, I’d like to acknowledge that we’re holding this event on Kaurna stolen land, whose sovereignty was never ceded. Always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.

IPAN’s alternative self-defence policy was introduced by Bevan Ramsden at the 2024 national conference in Western Australia, and formally adopted in early 2025 by the National Coordinating Committee. My purpose this afternoon is to refresh people’s knowledge and understanding of what this policy is about and what it hopes to achieve. So let’s look at the reasons for an alternative self-defence policy, and what it would look like.

Where to from here? Australia’s involvement in the United States’ overseas wars over the last 80 years was the impetus for coming up with the self-defence force concept. The US domination of Australia — politically, economically, militarily — has shaped our Australian Defence Force into an offensive military operation. To achieve a truly independent self-defence for Australia, we have to break the control the US has over our nation.

For Australia to become a truly independent nation, it must do some honest history of the invasion of First Nations land. This requires non-Indigenous Australia to accept the history of dispossession and genocide, and not deny it. The frontier wars must be acknowledged as the first wars fought on Australian soil by British colonialism, and continued by the Australian state.

The first line of defence would be diplomacy. If Australia could release itself from the grip of the US, we could pursue diplomacy to resolve international conflicts and develop positive and peaceful relations with all countries, without resort to war. This would be based on equality and mutual respect, as opposed to military might.

What is required for a self-defence policy? IPAN envisions a non-nuclear-armed, non-aligned policy for Australia’s defence force. Military alliances are preparation for war, whereas pursuing non-alignment is a step towards peace. Australia would avoid involvement in any wars between other countries. Australian territory could not be used in such wars. This requires the closure of foreign military bases on our soil. In effect, Australia would end the alliance with the US.

The role of our military should be to defend Australia effectively against hostile incursions into our sovereign territory. Australia is ideally placed geographically to develop such a policy for self-defence. The Echidna military strategy can be applied: this kind of defence is so prickly, like the echidna, that the cost and pain to an enemy to invade Australia would become too exorbitant.

The primary role of the Australian Defence Force should be to safeguard Australian territory and its approach waters within Australia’s 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone. This is in contrast to what our military does presently — sending Australian troops off to expeditionary wars led by the US empire.

Presently there are no threats to Australian sovereignty coming from our northern neighbours, as our right-wing pundits erroneously argue. The only threat to Australia is the United States, whose war with China will make us a target. Expelling the United States military bases […] is the real, dangerous threat facing Australia.

A self-reliant defence force requires the reconfiguration, reform, retraining and equipping of a new type of ADF. This could only be done under a truly independent Australia. Currently the ADF is interoperable and interchangeable with the US military. Historically it has acted as an extra battalion for the British Empire, and now for US imperialism.

There will need to be extensive development of a sovereign, publicly owned Australian manufacturing and industrial base to provide support to defence. There is no place for private or foreign-owned arms manufacturers, who have created a military-industrial complex for profit.

There will need to be the development of all essential services and critical supply chains — a noticeable flaw that became obvious during the COVID pandemic, and in the oil crisis resulting from the US and Israeli war against Iran. Currently, Australia’s military supply chains are controlled and run by US weapons corporations. When necessary, defence systems and materiel unavailable in Australia will be sourced from countries with defence postures and foreign policies close to our own.

A common misconception of non-alignment is that it is a retreat into isolationism. To the contrary — it would involve active involvement in international affairs: opposing wars of aggression and occupation, hosting meetings between belligerents, acting as a mediator in disputes between countries, and peacebuilding in our region and wider. There are 120 countries who are members of the Non-Aligned Movement. Australia would not be isolated. It would be in good company.

Australia would contribute to United Nations peacekeeping and humanitarian operations as its contribution to regional and global peace. Australia would cultivate positive relationships with all countries, especially with non-aligned countries such as those in Southeast Asia and others in our region.

As opposed to financially bribing Pacific island states into security treaties, which Australia could not realistically achieve militarily — this “ocean of peace” is in effect shoring up the Pacific, or to use a colloquialism, the American lake, for the US, with Australia paying the bill.

A truly independent Australia committed to non-alignment would, IPAN believes, inspire a sweeping voluntary mobilisation in support of both military and civil defence. Conscription will not be necessary. Conscientious objection to participating in any war will be respected and made a legal right.

And the final slide. The pursuit of an independent foreign policy grounded in non-alignment and territorial self-defence is effectively strangled by Washington’s grip on the country. The challenge is enormous. We have the state, corporate media, big foreign capital, think tanks, the three war parliamentary parties — indeed the repressive state apparatus — to confront. These compradors and quislings will be no easy match to deal with.

Therefore Australia’s aggressive, subservient military posture demands a clear alternative: a genuine self-defence. That means taking the case directly to the Australian public, by getting out into the suburbs, through the use of independent media — which has widely embraced the idea of a genuine self-defence — and by building alliances, as we have with groups such as the Greens.

In the end, only a massive, united, broad-based people’s movement can break Washington’s grip on this country. Only that kind of pressure will force the shift to non-alignment — the only path to real security and freedom from foreign wars. That is our mission, and it should be non-negotiable. Thank you.

Lightly edited for readability. The talk was given alongside slides, referred to throughout.

Facilitator: And perfect timing — just saying. Perfect timing. Ten minutes on the dot. Okay, let’s move on now to John Lander, who will give us his overview from his experience, I’m sure, as a diplomat and as an expert in foreign affairs.

Just a little bit of my background first, because I think many of you may not be aware. I have had virtually a lifetime of involvement in developing friendly relations with China. I joined the Department of Foreign Affairs a very long time ago, and I was the deputy ambassador in Beijing in 1974. And much more recently, I was Australia’s first ambassador to the Islamic Republic of Iran. So I have personal experience in two of the most important focal points of geopolitical instability.

When I was in Foreign Affairs back in 1971, we produced a policy planning paper in which we said: Australia cannot rely on the United States to protect Australia’s interests at every turn in the implementation of their geopolitical ambitions. Accordingly, Australia shall need to develop an independent foreign policy based on Australia’s national interests and the interests of our near neighbours.

That was on the 21st of July 1971, that we came to that conclusion within the department. That advice was suppressed, and never went to government — simply because the people at the top were afraid that it would mean the United States would disengage from our region.

David Shoebridge last night referred to the fear in the eyes of the senior military and political people in Canberra whenever movement away from the United States is mentioned. Fear of abandonment. I say that it is time that we had an abandonment of fear.

I can’t believe that I have spent 55 years basically struggling to disengage from the stranglehold of the United States. Australia is the only country I know of in the world that has surrendered its sovereignty willingly, gladly, and without a fight — to the point where we now have really no genuine sovereign control over not only our defence, but every aspect of our national life: economic, political, media, et cetera. We are thoroughly under the boot of the United States.

Getting out from under that control of the United States is a herculean task, to which we all must become committed and engaged — with the knowledge that, as John Mearsheimer said five years ago in a debate in Canberra, Australia would always side with the United States, because Australia knows that the United States can do much more damage to Australia than China can.

We have now reached the point where we’re deciding that we are going to make an enemy of China, despite the fact that China has never expressed any hostility towards Australia. Throughout my entire experience with China — and this continues to this day — China has always expressed a willingness to develop a mutually productive and mutually beneficial relationship with Australia. Australia has time and again slapped away the hand of friendship from China, at the behest of the United States, which of course now has control in particular over our digital communication systems.

We had the opportunity to diversify, but at the behest of the United States we refused to allow Huawei to bid for involvement in the development of Australia’s 5G network. So quite literally, if we stand up against the United States, the United States could simply switch us off. And we have to face that possibility.

I’ve forgotten who it was who said it — I think it was Cameron who said that the AUKUS submarines are fundamentally a distraction from the really significant element in the US domination of Australia, which is the Force Posture Agreement. Because that is the enabling instrument under which the militarisation of Australia has been, and continues to be, taking place — pushing us further and further into the inevitability of war.

The war, we are told, will eventually occur over Taiwan. My understanding of the political position in Taiwan is that that is unlikely. And what we’re seeing with the buildup of United States military bases in the Philippines, and the military exercises which the United States is conducting along with the Philippines in the South China Sea, is that we can expect in the near future to see a false flag operation stemming from the Philippines, creating a military conflict with China in which Australia will be considered obligated to become involved in order to protect the Philippines.

So we really need to find ways of undermining and eventually forcing the rescinding of the Force Posture Agreement. A friend of mine, Councillor Richard Foley in Wagga Wagga, came up with the idea: why don’t we look at a legal challenge to the validity of the Force Posture Agreement? Which is the proposal that you see on the screen — the proposal for a draft bill to be presented in parliament.

A bill for an act to require parliamentary approval for agreements granting foreign military forces access to, or operational control of, Australia’s facilities or territory. And thereby to declare that the implementing arrangements made under the Force Posture Agreement, and all other foreign military access agreements — including the extraordinary agreement to allow Japanese forces to have access to Australia’s territory and facilities…

We’ll move through these slides fairly quickly, because the principal reason for my appearing here today is simply to appeal to you all to use your networks to put pressure on your parliamentary representatives to support an initiative to bring this bill forward in the parliament.

We’re still looking for a member of parliament — either a senator, as mentioned in slide number three, or a member of the House, but probably a senator — to bring this bill forward and to provoke a debate. We are not so naive as to believe that we would actually succeed in getting the bill passed. The political duopoly in Canberra is so wedded to the so-called consensus on defence that it would never really get beyond a debate. But the important thing is to stir the possum in Canberra, to the point where the whole nation becomes much more aware of the terms under which the Force Posture Agreement allows for the militarisation of Australia by the United States.

So we really need to have everyone committed to a phone-in campaign, or sending emails, pressuring every member of parliament about this proposal. I was only able to produce a few copies of this, but Emma-leigh promised me that if I give her the original, she will put it online and make it available to every participant in the conference.

So I thank you all, and would really just repeat my call: it is time that we had an abandonment of fear. The consequences of standing up to the United States will be severe — but the consequences of following the United States into a war against China will be equally, if not more, severe. And so it’s time to make a rational, cold, hard-headed, cost-benefit analysis of where we go from here.

I think everyone participating at this conference today needs to take up the baton, take up the challenge, and bring pressure to bear in Canberra to get a redirection of our foreign policy and of our defence policy. Thank you very much.

Lightly edited for readability.

Hi everybody. I’m Natasha Watt. I’m the Deputy President of the New South Wales Teachers Federation, and I’m also a maths teacher by qualification. I see myself as a working-class person — which is why I tell you about my qualifications, because it’s very important for the working class to have access to well-qualified, meaningful, healthy work in their lives. My purchase on this economy is only through my union. There is no intergenerational wealth transfer in my family. And so the material conditions in which we campaign — as teachers, public school teachers and TAFE teachers, and as peace activists — come back to the material frequently.

But before I go on, just to talk about what the union movement is today. The largest union in Australia is the nurses and midwives, and they have 356,000 members. The Australian Education Union, which the New South Wales Teachers Federation is affiliated to, has approximately 190,000 members. And I think the third largest union is the ASU, and it’s got 135,000 — and a lot of the ASU are women.

So the union movement today are women, and many, many of us — most of us — do public sector work. The smaller unions, that are battling for union membership more significantly than public unions are, have private employers. Which is something to think about when we talk about money and where it’s being spent.

So, what to say to you? So many things to say to you. I’m feeling the burden of expectation. I’m looking forward to the questions at the end more than the little speech I’m about to give. Please, if you’ve got hard questions that you want to ask about unions, I hope that you think about them and ask them at the end, because hard questions make for good conversation.

I am, alongside some other unions, involved in a committee — the Peace is Union Business committee, that we’ve recently established. The MUA — hello MUA — the Teachers Federation, and the NTEU, with the support of the South Coast Labor Council, have formed a committee to try and build our class consciousness around peace, and to work through our unions and at some point across unions, to make a space for unions to campaign again on peace as we have done in the past.

In our union we have a long history in peace activism that goes back many, many decades. A former president of ours, Sam Lewis, brought back from UNESCO in the 1950s that “all wars are fought against children” mantra — now a social media meme, and something we talk about when we actually form positions on peace and update our positions on things.

So when the genocide started, “all wars are fought against children” was part of our policy setting and our campaign beginnings, as we reinvigorated our understanding of what that meant for teachers and for class consciousness. In the west of Sydney, where the Palestinian diaspora is prevalent as well as other Arabic communities, our teachers associations — teachers who worked with students from those families — those are the people who began, from the grassroots, our understanding about how we should move forward on this issue. And we had the opportunity at that point to go back into our history and bring out the “all wars are fought against children” decision-making, and put it firmly back into our policy positions.

There’s been so much talked about at this conference already that’s so rich, and the absence of discussion about workers is noted to me. It’s not a criticism, it’s just an observation. Really, I just want to comment on some of the issues that have been raised.

I want to talk about Bondi. Because there was one group of workers that Chris Minns called out after Bondi, and it was teachers. It was the only group of workers he called out, and he talked about the indoctrinating effect of teachers. Prior to that, the person who spoke about the work of teachers in such scathing terms was Peter Dutton, when he was trying to get himself elected, when they talked about teachers being indoctrinators of young people.

And as workers, that is not what we do. We take kids from all sorts of backgrounds and we pull them into a classroom and we teach them syllabuses that are democratically decided. And the influence of lobbies trying to change, for example, currently the teaching of history — because we don’t do enough around the Holocaust — is misplaced. And as a union we quietly go about pushing that out the door across the country. So even though we’re not in the media doing that, doesn’t mean we’re not doing it, as teachers. And other industries will be doing similar things in the area of peace as it applies to their work as workers.

The AUKUS inquiry: $368 billion. The public education system in New South Wales costs about $1.9 billion a year at the moment. You think about how much more we could be doing in schools and in TAFE colleges across this country if that $368 billion was pulled away from the notion of war. Because peace is not just the absence of war. It’s actually about the spending on peace.

So that’s one of these tensions in the discussion so far about where our money goes. When a union campaigns for a rise in salaries, that’s come straight from taxes — they’re taking money into peacebuilding, if the work of that industry is around peacebuilding. And teaching, nursing, all the major unions are actually involved in peacebuilding. So supporting unions in salary campaigns is part of peacebuilding.

Our union is about to launch an inquiry — it’s actually underway, we’re gathering evidence — for capital infrastructure spend in schools. Because in New South Wales, I’ll just speak about that quickly, we’re in the middle of a $1.9 billion spend of taxes on private schooling in New South Wales, and the budgetary equivalent into public schools is zero. Actually zero. So there’s no requirement of the federal government to spend on the infrastructure that our young people go into — and they should be world-class facilities, in a country as wealthy as this one. So the campaign to rebuild our schools literally should soak up our taxes and take it away from military spending. An act of peace, to take our taxes back.

Superannuation. Our superannuation is being invested offshore in lots of different places. There is a problem with the laws around the best financial interest duty, that every investment of our superannuation — our deferred salary into retirement — that money should be coming back in here. We should change those laws, I think, and it’s a campaign that the Federation and the AEU are going to be looking at: how do we bring our money back from superannuation investment in the military-industrial complex, and into housing for workers here, for example? So when workers develop those campaigns, they’re also doing acts of peace.

I don’t need the full 10 minutes. I’ll leave it there. I’d just like to finish by saying I lean into teaching stories, because that is our work. And peace attached to your industry, and working out how to develop activism amongst your membership, is step one.

I note that the MUA do that as well. How does this — what does this mean when we’re on the docks, and we’re talking about things down on the docks? What does AUKUS spending mean to our daily work? It’s an important conversation that they own, not other people own. They own it as workers. And how do they claim their space back, to take the money back from our governments and put it into our communities, around quality work?

Lightly edited for readability.

Oh, cheers, Arthur. I want to start by reflecting on that acknowledgement of stolen land, and pay our collective respects. We’re talking peace. We’re talking an anti-nuclear movement. And if we’re not doing that side by side with, and in support of, First Nations struggles for genuine power, land, acknowledgement and agency in this country, then we’re missing a big part of the movement. This land always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

And we just heard from Natasha exactly why the war parties hate public school teachers — and why they don’t like public education. Because they come and say it like it is. They teach thoughts and principles and decency.

We’re talking about building on the union connections and the union movement. There’s a little bit of the Democratic People’s Republic of the Illawarra sitting here on the stage. And I’ve got to tell you, as somebody who goes across this country into places where these struggles have been fought in workplaces and fought on the streets — you get a bit of that here in Port Adelaide, some of that union town feel and resistance. But when you go down into the People’s Republic of the Illawarra, the Democratic Republic of the Illawarra, and you see the history that happens there from union activism, you see the history of working people, the waterside workers and others who refused to load the ships with pig iron to go off to Japan to fight in the imperial aggression in China; who blocked the sending of arms to go and fight against Indonesian independence. You can feel that history of working people struggling for freedom and making the connections. That’s absolutely real.

And you heard from Natasha: it has not ended. If you want to get a sense of inspiration about working people and others building alliances and realising that our workplaces are political as well — the people’s picket that is happening on a repeated basis out the front of Bisalloy Steel, an armoured steel manufacturer in the Illawarra that is pumping out armoured steel into the Israeli weapons and occupation industry. Going down there and watching hundreds of people come and picket and shut that workplace down until it stops feeding the war. That spirit is alive and well in the Illawarra, and we need it alive and well across this country. Because union business is peace, and peace is union business.

So — when we’re talking about defence and security, often we jump to missiles and submarines and particular weapon systems and the like. But from a Greens perspective, when we’re talking about security, we start from a concept of human security.

And I don’t know about you, but when I wake up in the morning and I think about what makes me feel secure — what makes me, as a human existing on this planet with the little arc of life that I’ve got — what makes me feel secure is when I wake up in the morning and there’s a roof over my head, and I feel me and my family are physically secure. And I can think that my kids, if they need an education, the education is there and they can reach it without having to reach into their parents’ wallet. When we get sick, we can go to a doctor, we go to hospital, and society will take care of us. And when we want to engage in productive parts of our lives in workplaces, we’ll be able to go to a workplace where our rights are respected and what we produce makes the world a better place. That’s my concept of security when I wake up in the morning.

And when I think about how to keep that secure, I think about what we need to fund our public education system, what we need to fund and run our public hospitals and Medicare. I think about ensuring that the climate my kids and grandkids and future generations will inherit will be safe to grow the food, so we’ll be able to have plenty on the table.

That’s the concept of security that is entirely missed when our governments leap into nuclear submarines and war and missiles. Because when I wake up in the morning, I’ve never thought: bloody hell, I hope we have some nuclear submarines to keep us safe. That is not what grounds our sense of human security. And when we’re talking about peace and war and security, we should never forget that actually the weapons industry is what creates insecurity, what creates fear, what takes away from all of those fundamental things we need for human security.

And it’s not just us who feel this way — we need to remember this. Who are our opponents in this struggle? Who are the people we’re up against? We’re not up against the mum and dad taking their kid to school somewhere in Iran, who are fearful about whether their kid’s going to come home because it might get hit by a US missile. We’re not up against the union activists in Minnesota who are blowing whistles against ICE. We’re not up against the young couple in Beijing who are trying to make an economic life for themselves and wondering if they can afford a kid. We’re not up against each other, whether we’re migrants or First Nations. We’re up against the 1 per cent who seem to want to run the planet, to divide us and make war on us. And let’s never forget who the real enemy in this is. Let’s keep it focused — because unless we take that on and recognise what human security is and what the real enemy on the planet is, we’re not going to win the struggle.

But what would winning the struggle look like, at least in the defence space? I suppose I’ve been asked to speak about the Greens’ defence and foreign policy, and thankfully Derek basically laid it out in large part. I want to really credit IPAN for that thinking about an Australian self-defence policy: removing ourselves from being part of projecting violence and projecting war as a bit part in the US military, and actually thinking about what an Australian self-defence policy would look like.

When I’m down there in Canberra and you’re having those discussions with other MPs — you’re having, you know, “discussions” is a polite word for it, but engagement with defence officials and others — and they’re talking about this fear of China. I’ll give you just one little exchange that happened in a Senate Estimates session only a few months ago.

We were down there in Senate Estimates and there was a coalition senator — Michaelia Cash, you may have seen her. And she’s engaged with this guy called Hugh Jeffrey, who is the senior strategic thinker on the part of Defence. He’s the one who always refuses to tell you what weapons were sent into Israel, refuses to tell you what weapons were sent into the UAE, refuses to give key information.

But in this exchange with Cash, she was asking him questions about, well, the world’s a very dangerous place now, isn’t it? And he goes: yeah, very dangerous. There are countries — including countries that we’re aware of — that are ignoring international law, aren’t they? Oh yes, ignoring international law. There are countries that are willing to use their military to assert dominance in the world. Yeah, very, very troubling, these countries. There are countries that are willing to use trade sanctions, and the power of trade sanctions, to force and compel others to comply with their demands. Yes, it’s a terrible, terrible thing. Yes — we’d better do something about China, hadn’t we?

Literally. And I’m just there, and I couldn’t help myself. I said: China? Can you not hear yourselves? Can you not hear this exchange? It’s China that’s using tariffs and war and breaking international law? What is wrong with these people?

And when they’re positioning this concept of going to war with China as though they’re a threat and a risk to Australia — well, you heard John talk about his decades of experience engaging with China. Now, China is not some kind of neutral, cuddly place run by pandas that’s there to give us a free ride in life. China is a complex, increasingly powerful, sophisticated society — incredibly sophisticated. And it turns out there’s a huge amount of complementarity between our two economies, which is actually playing out in real time. We’re resource-rich, food-rich, connecting with this kind of growing industrial powerhouse. There’s a lot of synergy between the two economies, and there’s increasingly people-to-people contact between the two.

But China has its own interests. And sometimes that plays out in acts of aggression, like launching an intercontinental ballistic missile into the Pacific. Bad. Really bad, destabilising and wrong, and we should call it out when we see it. But when we do that, perhaps we could not conveniently forget about the three intercontinental ballistic missiles that the United States fired into the Pacific in the last 12 months at the same time. We can remember that when we talk about it.

And when we talk about concerns about human rights in China, we should not exceptionalise China. We should see that there are human rights issues playing out in India, in our own country, in the United States. We should conceptualise and actually deal with the world as it is — not as the United States and their interests and their lackeys here want us to see it. And that is the fundamental challenge to getting an independent defence and foreign policy for Australia.

And what would it look like? Well, it would look like closing US bases. It would look like getting out of Lockheed Martin and Rafael and every single Israeli arms manufacturer, and terminating those contracts. It would look like changing our defence force, so that instead of projecting force and threatening our neighbours, it’s about defending Australia and de-escalating the arms race in the region. And it would look like dealing with China as a complicated, sophisticated part of our region, and not as an enemy that we’re going to go to war with on behalf of the United States.

That’s a challenge, and that’s an outcome, and that’s a solution for Australia’s place in the world. And the Greens are up there to make that challenge, in parliaments and on the streets. So thanks very much.

Delivered via Zoom. Transcribed from the conference recording and lightly edited for readability.

I wish I was back down on the Port. I had some great political experiences down at the Port, with rallies on May Day and things, in the past.

What I want to talk about in these seven minutes is the military-industrial complex. We all refer to it in relation to President Eisenhower, in 1961. What I want to suggest to you is that the two terms — military, industrial — are inadequate. Also, Eisenhower didn’t make it up. It grew out of the anti-war movement that followed the first Great Slaughter, and the committees in the US Senate that produced what is called the Nye Committee report into the merchants of death. There are two chapters in that: one on the DuPont Corporation, the original merchants of death, and one on JP Morgan, the bankers who financed the British war effort. That’s part of what we need to be aware of — this larger and wider movement.

But what I want to do is spread out from where those two terms, military-industrial complex, go, to a whole set of others that have made it up all the way through the twentieth century and into the present. What we face is an academic, corporate, information, legislative, media, military complex. All of those elements have always been there, and they work out very differently across there. You could write a book about each of them, and many people have. What I’m going to do is give you one or two examples of each.

Let’s start with a recent example of the academic links in Australia. About a decade ago, four professors at the University of Queensland got $1.5 billion from the Australian and Queensland governments to come up with a commercially valuable quantum computer. In 2025, Nick Warner, the ex-director of ASIS, joined the board. They then got $1.5 billion from Lockheed Martin, to engage in aerospace and warfare research. So what wasn’t commercially profitable ten years before becomes commercially profitable once it’s linked into Lockheed Martin. There are endless examples of that link between academe and the warfare industry.

Now, the corporate sector. We all think in terms of the armament industry as making things — making guns and bullets and bombs. But there’s another element to it that is fundamental, and that’s finance. You can go back as far as you like: the Rothschilds in fact became the bank they are by helping to finance the British war effort against the French and Napoleon. That’s how they moved from being […] traders into being the great international financial system that we know.

I want to give you a couple of other examples. In 1942, the Americans — at war, of course — set up something called the Applied Physics Laboratory to develop proximity fuses, to improve their whole way of being able to wage war. Sixty years later, in the early 2000s, they shifted their emphasis. They were looking at capital markets, in case anybody would want to use them to make an attack on the value of the US dollar dominating the world economy. And indeed, in 2009 they conducted the first financial war games — using currency and capital markets instead of ships and aircraft.

The other side of this is the control that the National Security Agency imposes on international financial transfers. To give you one example: in 2014 the French bank BNP Paribas was fined $9 billion for engaging in trade with banned countries — Cuba, Iran and Sudan. So this power that the complex that is America, the US warfare state, operates from is as much financial as it is any of the other elements, and we have to keep on top of that.

Now, the information part of it. This has been there since 1901, when Marconi managed to send wireless telegraphy — one word — from the United Kingdom across the Atlantic. Then of course it spread into ships and submarines and aircraft; during the first Great Slaughter it produced unmanned aircraft, which we now have a different name for.

But the American military establishment, and the Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1918 were panic-struck that the British — the long-standing enemy of the US empire — were going to be in control of world telegraphy. So they made an attack on Marconi. In the next year or two they forced Marconi to sell to General Electric, and they then set up what we now know as the Radio Corporation of America, RCA. In turn, when television comes, RCA becomes the National Broadcasting Company as well. So that link between communications and warfare and finance was there all along.

General Electric, at the same time, was being employed by the military to find a way of keeping aircraft up in the air. They used their experience as engineers making turbines to produce electricity, to make turbine engines for aircraft — and in 1942 they produced their first jet aircraft. So those links cross into everything.

But the big one, and the thing I’m always a bit surprised that people aren’t aware of, is: where does this magic phrase “artificial intelligence” come from? A lot of my friends are surprised when I tell them it was coined in 1956 — 70 years ago. By whom, and for what? By John McCarthy at Dartmouth College. He and others — Marvin Minsky and that lot — thought: how are we going to get Pentagon money away from all the funds they’re giving to cybernetic research? Which itself had come out of the attempts to control the projection of missiles in the second Great Slaughter.

What they did — being in America, of course, they knew you’ve got to have a brand, you’ve got to distinguish yourself from cybernetics — so they came up with this phrase, artificial intelligence. And they promised the Pentagon that they would give them intelligent war machines. Well, even the Pentagon, after 30 years, said no more, and the first AI winter descended upon the system. But this is the beginning of that connection with what is still talked about as the artificial intelligence movement, with its promise of what it was going to do, which it never has done. And there’s a technical phrase for when it’s going to happen. That technical phrase is: soonish. That’s when it’s going to happen.

The next one I want to look at is the legislative. Eisenhower included “congressional” in “military-industrial-congressional complex”, but he didn’t want to interfere with the separation of powers, so he cut congressional out. That didn’t mean to say they were cut out of the loop, of course. Senator Graham, who’s just departed us, fortunately, was one of the major pushers of this in the US Senate from day to day.

But we have our own people here. Mike Kelly, who was a lawyer in the Army — got to be Major, never heard a shot fired in anger — was an ALP member of the federal parliament. I shouldn’t say Labor; there is no Labor Party. He resigns in 2020 on the grounds of ill health. Two weeks later: a miracle cure. He joins Palantir, as the president of Palantir Technologies Australia. And they go after more contracts, using the contacts he had made as a member of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. Christopher Pyne and Kim Beazley sold their services, in retirement, to Ernst & Young, to get more defence contracts. We won’t name any names of anybody who might be lining up to do the same today.

And the final bit, of course, is the role of the mass media — the ad-mass media, as we really need to understand it. Here again I want to give a very recent example. Ellison set up Oracle as an AI company decades ago. He made so much money that he became — and this really surprised me, that there is such a person — the largest non-government donor to the Israeli Defense Force. Poor things: they had to go around with their hat and collect money so they could kill more people.

But his son used the family fortune to buy Paramount Skydance. And then he used money from the Gulf states — those slimy lot, who betrayed the Palestinians at every turn of the last couple of decades — oiled by none other than Jared Kushner, to get enough money together for Paramount to take over Warner Bros. Discovery, and to beat Netflix to it. It means they’ve now got CNN. Meanwhile Father Ellison has taken over TikTok, for 15 billion.

So what we now face, with this alliance of all these US big corporations and their influence around the rest of the world, is that the non-existent Zionist lobby can go from bribing journalists to owning their employers — as does the military complex. I thank you.

Transcribed from the conference recording. Lightly edited for readability.

Hello. I wish to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land, past and present.

PACOA was formed in late 2023, early 2024, in response to the AUKUS agreement, where nuclear submarines were proposed to be built at Osborne. This is a community which has strongly opposed all things nuclear. No community engagement was undertaken, and very little has occurred since.

PACOA seeks to offer vital information, gleaned and shared by rigorous researchers, to the community — that it may be informed of things this government tries to keep secret to avoid scrutiny. The Malinauskas government prefers to tell The Advertiser what to write.

PACOA has had many public meetings in Port Adelaide, Semaphore and Osborne. We protested at the Lefevre Community Centre AUKUS information centre. There have been many leaflets produced and handed out at events, at May Day, and letterboxing. There was a concert with Eric Bogle and local performers, and we collaborated with IPAN on the showing of Twilight Time and Earth’s Greatest Enemy at Semaphore.

The Lefevre Peninsula is a Labor stronghold. For nearly a century, Hindmarsh has been one of the safest seats in the country. The population is dominated by working-class families, and aged and other pensioners. Due to the heavy industry and socioeconomic disadvantage, there are many health issues. Loyalty has meant they have been taken for granted. This is a popular government that feels free to bulldoze obstacles, citing jobs and economic benefits, whatever the costs.

Most Osborne and Taperoo residents appear to be disengaged. I live in Osborne. There are people around employed by AUKUS, but lots of elderly people who just keep to themselves. We’re currently letterboxing with our alternative jobs leaflet.

Our aims are to grow the grassroots movement against this aberration. We’re doing it by collaborating with other like-minded groups and supporting their endeavours as well. We share information and try to find ways to engage the community further. We’ve done lots of submissions — and the last was an excellent one, which wasn’t done by me, to the AUKUS Public Inquiry. We also collaborated with the Port Adelaide Artists Forum to make a submarine for the demonstration.

We’re very concerned about increased militarism, particularly in schools in the area. And we don’t have that many avenues in which we can advise people, apart from leafleting.

Transcribed from the conference recording. Lightly edited for readability.

Thanks very much, Bevan. I’m sure I’m going to get a ding before I’ve hardly started, but anyway — great to see everybody here, and it’s a fabulous opportunity for so many like-minded people to come together. Thank you to IPAN for organising such a fabulous conference, and my respects to traditional owners.

So our brief today is sharing what has worked. Look, we’ve had our successes, and we’ve had our fair share of challenges, as every group will have. Three minutes can’t possibly represent what our campaign has done since it started five years ago. But I’d recommend, if you want to come and have a chat to Sam and me, we’re going to be on a little Stop AUKUS stall today. Have a look at our Stop AUKUS WA Facebook page — credit to Leonie Lundy, who does a fabulous job with that — and also have a look at our submission to the AUKUS Public Inquiry, which was very thoroughly done.

In terms of WA’s history, we have a strong anti-nuclear, anti-uranium-mining movement. These are things to build on. We had strong opposition to visiting warships a few decades ago, and some of those people have come back into the peace movement over AUKUS. One of those people is Jo Vallentine, former Senator for Nuclear Disarmament, who is very active in the Stop AUKUS group. We have councils that have had nuclear-free policies — Fremantle Council, which is one of the Cockburn Sound councils involved, has a nuclear-free policy.

Stop AUKUS WA — the name pretty much sums up our objectives — was formed very soon after the AUKUS agreement debacle. Like a lot of groups, we have a core supporter group, and then we have layers of people who come and go. Our core supporter group meets monthly on Zoom. Perth is geographically spread, like every city; we have supporters in different parts of the Cockburn Sound communities, and up in the northern suburbs. So we meet monthly on Zoom, and that’s a good way for us to keep connected.

We have a good mix of people in that core group. We have someone who’s very good at submission writing. Leonie, as I said, is fantastic at social media. We have people who are very experienced in campaigning, public speaking and so on.

A lot of building our supporter base has really been through personal outreach — the good old-fashioned conversations at stalls and events. This has been one of our most effective means of engagement. On our supporter list we now have 500 people. We’d like that to be 5,000, but at every event we pass around a contact sheet and we encourage everybody to sign up, and then we follow up straight away with a newsletter, with some news. That’s the way to keep them. We’re also finding that Facebook and Instagram engagement is really going up.

Is that three minutes? Oh God, I haven’t started!

So, look — many of our Stop AUKUS supporters do live along Cockburn Sound. It’s a 25-kilometre stretch along the coast, and it covers a lot of different local government areas: Fremantle, Cockburn, Kwinana, Rockingham. When we started Stop AUKUS, 2027 seemed a fairly long way away. It’s now next year. And from next year we’ll have the submarine rotational force coming into Cockburn Sound, into HMAS Stirling. We’ll have up to four US and one UK submarine. So that’s pretty sobering.

The Rockingham CBD is very close — I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Perth or Rockingham, but from the Rockingham CBD you can look straight across the water to Garden Island and HMAS Stirling. HMAS Stirling has been there for a long time, so it’s a pre-existing naval base. A lot of families have people who work at HMAS Stirling, so there’s a mix of reactions to AUKUS and the nuclear submarines. Certainly Rockingham has huge problems with homelessness and lack of housing — and then we have Defence building housing for US and Australian families coming in. So that causes friction.

We campaign on many different levels, as many groups will do. All right, look, I’d better wind up. We’re finding some of our messaging — the AUKUS spend — is really resonating with people. As I say, please come and have a chat with us at the stall, have a look at our Facebook page, and have a look at our submission to the public inquiry. Thank you.

Transcribed from the conference recording. Lightly edited for readability.

Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Bevan. I’m Alexander Brown, Wollongong Against War and Nukes.

I think we’ve already acknowledged Country, and I just wanted to acknowledge the country we come from, which is the land of the Wodi Wodi, Dharawal and Yuin people. Our campaign has tried to forge links with traditional owners, with some success, and we see that as really important to fighting war — because the original war brought to those lands was by people like me, white Australians. Or they were British then.

So, let me begin. I was asked for three minutes, so: three things.

The first, and probably the most important foundation for how we started WAWAN — which is basically fighting the East Coast nuclear submarine base as part of the AUKUS pact — is democracy. We started out with a commitment to transparent, open organising and rigorous debate within our organisation. Maybe not so much in this room, but people are forgetting a lot of basic organising skills in the movement. A lot of organising is not particularly democratic, and that’s across a range of different organisations. So we’re really committed to having a democratic, open organising structure, and I think that’s served us really well.

It’s meant that — and this is my second point — we’ve built an ecosystem. Ecosystem is a really important concept for us. The first interpretation of that, obviously, is our environment: the climate crisis is a lot more important for us to deal with than a non-existent war. So we’ve always said Port Kembla should be there to build a renewable energy industry, to protect the ecosystem, which is already heavily damaged by colonial capitalism to begin with.

But also an ecosystem of groups. Because of our democratic organising structure, we have members participating from all of the different socialist and left groups in the area. And we have an ecosystem in the sense that there are many other groups in Wollongong doing similar work — for example, in the trade union movement, with the South Coast Labor Council and individual unions affiliated to that Labor Council. We’re all able to work in a way where we may not always agree on everything, but the ecosystem model means we have our own way of organising, and where that can interact, we always try and make those links.

Similarly, obviously over the last few years Palestine has been a more headline issue, for good reason, than AUKUS. Some of the biggest demonstrations of the last couple of years in Wollongong, and the most important actions, have really been around the issue of free Palestine. But all the way along we’ve got a relationship with Wollongong Friends of Palestine and other groups working in that space. There’s a lot of overlap between the membership, and we see that as a strength — so we’re able to bring an AUKUS perspective and articulate how the struggle in Palestine relates to what’s happening here, and vice versa.

And finally, I wanted to talk about what I think is the most important principle of organising, which is love. Wollongong Against War and Nukes is built on the Wollongong tradition of communism and peace, and the basis of that movement is about solidarity, it’s about relationships.

In Wollongong in the 1930s there was an incredible dispute where waterside workers refused to load pig iron for Japan, in solidarity with Chinese workers. But they didn’t just do that because they thought it was a good idea. They did it because they’d gone through the thirties, they’d gone through the hard times of unemployment, and they knew that survival and support for one another was the basis of organising. That gave them the power to stand up to BHP and lead a national campaign, which had a lot of success in stopping the pig iron trade.

So for us, relationships are the core of everything we do — our relationships inside our group, our relationships beyond our group, in our community. That’s why we’re here today, and that’s why we try and build relationships. We recently had visitors from Okinawa and Japan. Because that’s the strength that we have that the warmongers don’t have. Thank you very much.

Transcribed from the conference recording. Lightly edited for readability.

Thank you all for being here. I’d also like to acknowledge the traditional owners and pay respects for the care they’ve taken of this land for many, many generations. And I’d like to say respect to Alexander for what a terrific speech about organisations — I think it was really worth a clap on its own.

MAPW, the Medical Association for Prevention of War, has been around for over 40 years. We’re a group of health professionals — doctors, nurses, physios, OTs, you name it. We come together and we work on the prevention of war, recognising it’s a global health issue. We’re also really interested in the prevention of nuclear war particularly, and all of the aspects of the nuclear chain, most recently in regard to waste and to nuclear power.

I suppose our crowning glory, which was a bit like giving birth to a gorilla, was ICAN. I’d like to acknowledge Sue Wareham, Tilman Ruff and of course Dave Sweeney as among the founders of ICAN.

We also set up Quit Nukes, which is nuclear-weapons-free finance. A lot of you wouldn’t be aware that your superannuation has nuclear weapons companies in it. With that campaign, which is now about five years old, we’ve got two major funds to drop nuclear weapons altogether. We’ve got three funds to reduce their holdings significantly, by a 5 per cent threshold — which means they won’t invest in companies that derive more than 5 per cent of their income from nuclear weapons. And the Responsible Investment Association, after approaches from us, included nuclear weapons in any certified product: they had to have zero nuclear weapons. So that was good.

Other projects we’ve worked on: we’ve done reports on weapons companies in schools. Alongside others, we wrote to the state governments to get them to stop weapons companies coming into schools — and in Queensland and Victoria, and in New South Wales alongside the New South Wales teachers, they have now prohibited weapons companies from public schools. It’s great to see that the teachers are speaking here today, because we’d be really interested in hearing about the implementation of that policy.

We’ve also been examining emissions from the military — I think a lot of you would have seen Earth’s Greatest Enemy.

On Gaza and Israel, we have written many letters to the Foreign Minister and Prime Minister about the appalling genocide in Gaza, and particularly the targeted destruction of healthcare and hospitals. The killing and imprisoning of so many people, but particularly health professionals, has been quite shocking. We’re also working with the medical regulator, because they’ve just recently adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism — which is just a shame. It’s just an exercise in silencing, and we’re challenging that decision. We’re meeting with them in a couple of weeks.

Collectively, I think there are a lot of groups, and we can take a lot of credit for it, to say that there is no public licence — or really, very limited public licence — for AUKUS. They keep pretending that the waste coming from AUKUS is like hospital waste. Well, bollocks to that.

Other things we’ve worked on with others, and it’s been successful: stopping the international nuclear waste dump; opposing nuclear power at the last election; and stopping waste dumps on First Nations land where they had no consent. I think we’re quite proud of that.

I also think we’re working actively on pointing out the complete farce that is AUKUS. I don’t need to tell you lot about AUKUS and how awful it is — but tying us into the US military-industrial complex, and now the Israeli military-industrial complex since some legislation passed Congress a couple of days ago, is really quite shocking. And committing us to the next US war, even worse. Thank you.

Transcribed from the conference recording. Lightly edited for readability.

Thanks, Bevan, and thanks everybody — it’s lovely to be here. Really proud and happy to be here on Kaurna Country with you today.

The Doomsday Clock, that measures humanity’s proximity to extinction, is at 85 seconds to midnight — the closest it’s ever been. We all know that. Bevan’s clock isn’t as dramatic, but it’s not much more generous, so I’ll just be a bit of a race caller here.

ICAN was born in 2007, and it set out to get rid of our worst weapons via an international treaty to ban them. It looked at the model of things like banning chemical and biological weapons, landmines and cluster munitions, and said: we need a treaty that bans our worst weapons. And from little things, big things grow. From that small group of people — and I acknowledge others in the room here for that role — there are now 700 affiliate organisations around the world, and over half the world’s nations are signed on to that treaty.

In our region, nearly all of ASEAN is signed on. Nearly all the Pacific has signed on. But not Australia. Yet. And it is absolutely essential that we do, because it is a critical protection, a critical guardrail, against nuclear weapons under the AUKUS pact.

Now, our Prime Minister, our Foreign Minister, our Defence Minister stand there routinely and they put their hand on their heart and they say Australia has no aspirations to acquire nuclear weapons. That may or may not be the case. I would say, looking at some of them, that it is the case that they truly believe that. They don’t want it. But in a sense that’s absolutely irrelevant — because our AUKUS partners don’t just have an aspiration, they have them, and they deploy them.

And since the expiration of the New START arms control agreement in February of this year, the US policy and the US military are retooling to make platforms capable of carrying nuclear weapons. So when we hear about the subs at Stirling, when we think about B-52s at Tindal — they could all have nuclear weapons. We need to draw a line on that. That is absolutely out of control.

Last December, Greg Moriarty, who was then Secretary of the Department of Defence and is now the Australian Ambassador to the US, fronted Senate Estimates. Pushed by David Shoebridge, he was asked about the declaration of nuclear weapons, and he said: well, we don’t ask, they don’t tell, and the government is comfortable with that. We don’t ask, they don’t tell, and the government is comfortable with that.

Well, we are not comfortable. We are not comfortable, and we are not passive. Australians have a right to know, and a right to say no to nuclear weapons.

I’m really rapt to be at this conference today, because I’ve just spent three days with ICAN comrades at the ALP conference. That was a mixed bag. But we got good profile, we got good presence, we got good elevation of expectation of delivery of a commitment that Labor made, driven by Anthony Albanese, put into platform in 2018. So we’re going to bring that home. And we got an important concession, and an important recognition, that the platform now acknowledges that the AUKUS deal does not preclude signing the treaty. That’s an important thing.

We’re working with groups now, and there’s a declaration — many of you have signed it. I should hold it up; it’s underneath my seat. There are 160 groups that have signed on to a declaration to ban nuclear weapons in this country. It’s important, urgent work, and we welcome all our efforts.

Now, just to be clear, and just to finish: ICAN is not saying that signing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons would make AUKUS all right. But we are saying it is essential and urgent to stop AUKUS being all wrong.

This is the declaration. We’ve worked to try and make the unimaginable — the thing that people psychically block out — deeply personal. Everything that has been, is, and could be, sterilised by these weapons. By men of limited capacity, and weapons of unlimited destruction. And we have worked to seed and nurture hope.

Transcribed from the conference recording. Lightly edited for readability.

I’d like to start out by acknowledging, and by appreciation for, the custodianship of the Kaurna peoples, displaced — and recognise that their sovereignty was never ceded. I’d like to thank Eileen for the opportunity to be here. It’s very nice to be in such a broad community of people working together.

How many people in here have heard of Rising Tide? Yeah, okay, so we’re among friends. Great.

The particular contribution that Rising Tide is trying to make to this incredibly rich ecosystem is civil resistance. So we have, if you like, a very specific focus. I was going to say narrow, but it doesn’t feel narrow. We’re interested in skilling people up in mass civil resistance and civil disobedience. They choose whether they do that or not, after they’ve had the opportunity to learn about it, train in it, try it out.

In the three years since we rebooted, in the Port of Newcastle in 2023, we’re now running at nearly 500 of us who’ve been arrested — and some of my comrades in the room are, like me, going through the glacial legal system. And it’s showing great strength in resisting oppressive changes to legislation that suppress protest. So if you’re interested in protest rights, you’ll find a home with us.

Three key demands. Stopping coal, oil and gas — and we’ve headlined coal because it’s the lowest-hanging fruit. Australia’s largest single contribution to global emissions goes out of the Port of Newcastle in the form of coal. When it’s burned, that’s its contribution, so it’s a blockbuster.

Our second demand is to tax fossil fuel export profits at 78 per cent, to pay for nature repair and to ensure a fair transition for the workers and communities impacted by the cessation of the coal, oil and gas industries here — and not leave them stranded, as is currently happening. Every week there’s another announcement about a coal company pulling back and making no provision for workers.

And critically, the landmark site for this struggle is the Port of Newcastle and the Hunter region. So our big national campaign is focused this year on Hunter Valley Operations, the biggest single coal operation in the country. Many of those workers are being hoodwinked by those corporations. There is good independent research that tells us nearly 70 per cent of workers in the upper and lower Hunter do not want their children and grandchildren working in the coal industry. So — key thing to understand.

For those of you who want to get active on the ground and learn about mass civil disobedience, we’re targeting the gas villain, the ANZ Bank, and their potential to fund a 1,500-kilometre pipeline from Beetaloo to Gladstone. All of the information about how you can join us, how you can be part of this, is at risingtide.org.au. If you’d like to sign up to the ANZ campaign, adopt a branch and click Adelaide, we’ll get in touch with you. If you want to come to the blockade next year — the last weekend of February, first weekend of March — there’s a link for that. And anything else you want to know about the Adelaide group, my phone number is on the website.

I’d just like to close with an invitation. This coming Friday, for those of you who haven’t seen it, there’s a doco of the blockade at the Mitcham Cultural Centre. Free evening — come and watch the doco. There are nine of us on a panel. It’s called You’re Not Going to Get Arrested, Are You? It’s our Climate Action Week contribution. And if you like dancing, we’ve got a céilidh in two weeks.

I guess I’d just like to echo the great contribution from our Wollongong comrades: if we can’t dance together and love together, we can’t take action for mass civil disobedience together. Look forward to being part of this broader movement, and thank you very much for the opportunity.

Transcribed from the conference recording; the recording picks up shortly after she begins. Lightly edited for readability.

…one of the first things we would have done in the New South Wales Teachers Federation, Senator, if you were in our patch, was to move a motion at every school that he was not allowed to come and present at our school assemblies. Grassroots activism. Democratic: voted, motions, debated, discussed, set, voted — highly democratic.

What I’d like to talk about a bit is the Teachers Federation structures, and how we structure ourselves to allow for grassroots activism meeting leadership, and all the things in between.

So we have 200 associations across New South Wales, around about 60,000 members, 2,216 schools, 35 TAFE colleges or thereabouts. Those are our work sites. The 200 school associations have all elected an association peace contact. Those peace contacts go to trade union training on the issues, on our history in peace, and what to do about that — to empower people with knowledge, and also to network them, and to allow them to bring issues in to us. Arthur Rorris is a close friend of the Federation. He will deliver history around activism, for example, at our trade union training, so they learn from people who work across the union movement as well.

We have motions that come out of our associations into our State Council. Eight times a year we have a meeting on a Saturday from 9am to 4pm. About 250 councillors, who are representative of these associations across New South Wales, come into the council and they can bring motions through for debate. They get voted on in a highly democratic fashion — we vote preferentially around which motions we want to debate. There’s always a session for motions from associations. Some of the ones on peace come from the floor, as we say in the union.

Also, when we know that the union needs to lead from the top, we set motions from the top — and as a presidential officer, that’s one of my portfolios. So we will take motions to our council for debate, and to our annual conference. Or just a position from the senior officers, which is sometimes politically the right thing to do.

I’m very proud of the grassroots activism that the New South Wales Teachers Federation has done in response to the genocide in Gaza. One of the first things we did, when it became apparent what was going on there, is we supported our local associations and our officers to attend — with our Federation flags — the weekly, then fortnightly, then monthly protests in Sydney. We have had a contingent of members and officers at every single one of those for over two years.

That provides space to hold unity around things that not everybody engages with. In the Federation our membership is very big, and about a third of those people, we used to say, would vote National, a third Labor, and a third sort of undecided. So we have a broad group of people who are members, and we must hold them all in the subject matter of peace. And I’ll just leave that there. Thank you.

Transcribed from the conference recording. Lightly edited for readability.

Thanks, Bevan, and thanks everyone for being here.

I’m speaking as a non-Aboriginal member of the Aboriginal-led Australian Nuclear Free Alliance. It’s a forum that brings together Aboriginal people who are struggling against the nuclear industry with environment groups like Friends of the Earth, who I work for, and medical and public health groups, faith groups, and all sorts of other people.

It was formed in 1997, so it’s been a witness to — and it contributed to — some of the most extraordinary campaign victories over the past 30 years. Beginning with the successful struggle by the Mirarr Traditional Owners and their allies to stop the Jabiluka uranium mine in the Northern Territory. And one many of us hold dear here in South Australia: supporting the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta in their battle against the Howard government to stop a national nuclear waste dump being built near Woomera.

And multiple successful campaigns since then to prevent the imposition of nuclear waste dumps on Aboriginal land despite their opposition. There was Jay Weatherill and his plan for an international high-level waste dump in South Australia. The Muckaty Traditional Owners in the Northern Territory. The Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners fought off a plan for a national nuclear waste dump near Hawker. And most recently, in 2023, the government gave up on the plan to build a nuclear waste dump at Kimba because of the determined opposition of the Barngarla Traditional Owners — supported by many others, including ANFA.

ANFA revolves around the annual meeting. The next one is coming up in just a few weeks’ time in the Flinders Ranges. And of course there’s work that goes on in between the annual meetings.

We would invite people to support ANFA in any way you can. There’s always a need for funding. I mentioned we’ve got a meeting coming up in a few weeks’ time — if people can offer support and help to make that work well, that’d be awesome. And you can always stay in touch with us via the website, which is anfa.org.au. Thank you.

Transcribed from the conference recording. Lightly edited for readability.

I’ll be fine — I won’t blast you with a rally speech today.

Australian Friends of Palestine has been going for over 20 years. We’ve had our ups and downs. The most intense period of our activity has obviously been the genocide of the last two and a half years, nearly three years. Over time we’ve built up a membership base of about 500 people, and we’ve got over 3,000 on our mailing list. We’ve seen in this period of the genocide an amazing growth in the number of people getting active over Palestine, as we’ve heard today from the other speakers.

One of the things we’ve been very pleased about is that we’ve helped with the formation of other groups in other sectors of the community in South Australia. While we’re South Australian-based, we do have members nationally, and we have very good connections with other solidarity groups around the country.

What we found here was that, as the genocide was unfolding, the distress and the anger and the powerlessness of people was something really profound, and people wanted to find something to do. What we needed to do was try to empower people and support them. So what we’ve witnessed is the formation of health workers for Palestine, teachers for Palestine, academics for Palestine, lawyers for Palestine, bike riders for Palestine. Some of these groups we initiated — people would come to us and we would say: look, work in your area, find people in your sphere, and do things. Other groups formed organically, and we’ve been pleased to support them with publicity, publicising their events, publicising their fundraising efforts, having them as speakers. That’s been a very significant achievement for us.

The reality for us is that much of the work of Palestine solidarity — getting people to understand the reality of Israel and the reality of the situation of the Palestinians — has been done for us by Israel. The genocide has unmasked Israel as never before. The brutality, the ruthlessness, the cruelty. The never stepping back from what they’ve done, the never acknowledging what they’ve done, their impunity, their untouchability. It has been conveyed to people around the world, and this has done so much to get people to understand the reality of Palestine.

We saw this reflected in opinion polls, and we’ve seen it reflected in the rallies that we’ve held. We were holding them every two weeks for about two years, which was phenomenal. We haven’t seen that sort of thing before. So we’ve seen ordinary people in Australia, as we have around the world, recognise what’s happening — recognise that this is the crime of our time, that this is the moral issue of our time, and that it says so much about the international political structure, so much about war and peace, so much about nuclear weapons, and so much about the failure of our political system.

Where we’ve seen that failure most clearly is that the revulsion of ordinary Australians about what’s happening has been exacerbated by the failure of our government to act in any way. Absolute failure to act — with Penny Wong and Albanese leading the list of shame.

This was shocking to us, because we’d been lobbying people for many years. AFOPA lobbies, it runs education campaigns, it does fundraising for itself and for humanitarian causes overseas. But in the genocide, while the population had a very clear stance, the government turned in the other direction. And we recognised both the power of the lobby, the undiminished power of the Murdoch press, and the continuing malign influence of the United States government.

So this has been our greatest challenge. And we’re now faced not just with talking about Palestine, about the genocide, but with fighting for our right to free speech. This is something which is going to affect every Australian, every activist group. We’ve seen restrictions in different states about protest, about movement, and about speaking out. We’ve seen campuses affected. Now we’ve got this Royal Commission into Antisemitism, which promises to bring more restrictions on academics, on journalists, on lawyers, on activists.

This is a really dire time for us. It has been around Palestine and the power of Israel that all our movements are now threatened with being proscribed — we’re threatened with imprisonment and fines, for opposing a genocide and for standing up for all of the things that people have been talking about up here. So we are in a dire time, and we need to recognise that, and keep going forward.

Transcribed from the conference recording. Lightly edited for readability.

All right, hello everyone. I’d also like to acknowledge that we’re meeting on the stolen lands of the Kaurna people, and sovereignty was never ceded.

My name’s Nigel. I’m speaking as a member of Teachers and School Staff for Palestine, South Australia. We’re a group that formed with AFOPA’s assistance, of school teachers and SSOs and other staff who are committed to campaigning for the rights of Palestinians to live free of violence on their land — and, conversely, also in our schools. Unfortunately, destroying education has always been one of the main tools of colonial oppressors. In that regard, we condemn our state and federal governments’ complicity in the genocide and the scholasticide in Palestine.

I know we’ve only got three minutes, so I did want to concentrate on some of the actions we’ve been taking in regard to weapons out of schools.

As was mentioned before, other states have implemented bans on weapons companies in schools — education union bans — but that’s not the case in South Australia. Our group did manage to get some questions posed to the Education Minister at a branch executive meeting, I think it was last year, about our concerns regarding weapons companies in our schools. And the response from the minister was: yeah, I understand your concerns, but we need jobs, and this is our best chance. Since the closure of Holden, this is our best chance, apparently. That is what we’re up against here in South Australia.

But we are working in a number of ways to try and get rid of weapons in schools. I’m not sure if people here know — because that’s what we find is one of the biggest issues, that the public in general does not know — how much influence weapons companies have in education. Technical colleges: there are four now in South Australia, and all of them are aligned with a weapons company. There are TAFE programs that are aligned with a weapons company. And as we know, there are many STEM programs Australia-wide that have all of the weapons companies involved.

In that regard, we’ve been working with other Teachers for Palestine groups interstate to write letters and campaign to governments to try and get these sponsorships finished.

Then, in South Australia, the government has also paid directly for weapons companies to come onto our campuses and educate our students — so not just having them come and sponsor things, but actually paying them to come and teach our students.

So I guess I just wanted to finish here. This is one of those places where it’s helping, in that we do educate the public on weapons companies in our schools. And if you can help share that, that’d be excellent. All right — thank you.

Bevan Ramsden (chair): Thank you, Nigel. Perhaps I’d intervene myself here. I think the New South Wales Teachers Federation has done a lot of good in New South Wales. I wrote to the Department of Education about the funding of programs in my granddaughter’s school. I was very interested to know whether they had any policy on funding, or on allowing weapons companies to fund or support programs. I have it in writing from the department, who actually went to the school and investigated my question with the principal. The letter I got back said: we have a policy in the New South Wales Education Department not to allow gambling, alcohol or weapons companies to be involved in any school programs. So that’s a good thing.

Transcribed from the conference recording. Lightly edited for readability.

My name’s Anna, and I’m here on behalf of Extinction Rebellion South Australia. We abbreviate it to XRSA, just so you know.

We use nonviolent direct action — NVDA — to compel government action, to avoid tipping points in the climate system, biodiversity loss, and the risk of social and ecological collapse. We are action-based.

Because of our commitment to NVDA, we understand that some people, including other activists, struggle to accept our more disruptive methods. But believe me, there is sound reasoning and deep learning behind what we do. Disruptive action, often unpopular at the time, has proven over centuries to be a necessary way to let governments know just exactly how much something matters to us — and how much we are prepared to sacrifice to bring about change.

Since our inception in 2019 — that’s XRSA, not Extinction Rebellion globally — we have held hundreds of actions, with many arrests, and gone through some major upheavals and reincarnations. So I’m not going to be able to list everything we’ve achieved here today. We are smaller now. But the core group remains highly active, and strongly committed to honouring the reasons we joined in the first place.

We openly acknowledge and create room for the deep, abiding distress that compels us to act — because it is an entirely normal reaction to the most conservative estimations about the collapse of Earth’s climate, weather systems, oceans and food security. Because ecocide is ultimately suicide.

We are also increasingly aware of the enormous, multifaceted machine that relentlessly pursues Earth’s destruction for profit: enabled by military violence, fuelled by the lie of infinite growth, and the greed of the 1 per cent.

The only way we can respond that makes sense to us is to adapt our consciousness. To keep our eyes, our ears and our mouths open to this new, terrifying reality. To seek out compassion — the compassion that keeps us strong — and to return it in kind. To act together to hold those truly responsible to account. To work creatively, smart and hard. To stop the truth from being wiped from history by an increasingly credulous and sycophantic mainstream media.

So, infused with the energy and anger of our genuine collective outrage, our actions are fierce. Sometimes funny, but always unapologetically disruptive — even if all we are disrupting is the narrative.

Through acting together, we have stumbled upon true resilience. And hope. Not necessarily that we would achieve all of our worthy aims, although we will not stop trying — but hope that whatever happens, we can keep our humanity. Our love and respect for our fellow humans. And foster a more ecologically aware, more equitable, more peaceful and justice-driven version of ourselves, as we face what is to come. Thank you.

An unscheduled contribution, invited from the floor. Transcribed from the conference recording and lightly edited for readability.

Thanks, Bevan. Good day, everyone. Really pleased to be here for the conference — despite the cold.

I’m here for respite from the ten weeks of rolling air exercises, which sort of climaxed just in time. I was on the tarmac and the pilot’s saying, oh, we might have to stay here for two hours as all the jets take off. Fortunately I got away before that. I’ve got a rubbish job — I work from home, and for ten weeks I’ve had to shut the windows and yell at my laptop because of the noise overhead.

Up there, like everywhere I guess, we’ve really benefited from this new cohort activated by the genocide. The Darwin crew call it an AUKUS genocide.

When I get back, I’m going to be focused on defence housing — because all the Marines decided they didn’t really like the wet season, and they took over a lot of the barracks. Now we have pressure on beautiful urban bushland, lots of great environmental values under immediate threat for defence housing there.

And there’s another big new area of work which we’re directly confronting immediately, which is data centres. You’ve heard, I guess, critical infrastructure, AUKUS Pillar II. It’s happening right now. And it’s the sort of engaging fight that we can win. Thanks, everyone.

Transcribed from the conference recording. Lightly edited for readability.

I’m from Wage Peace. We like to remember and base our work on the genocidal frontier wars, and make sure that truth-telling’s at the centre of what we do. Our visionary focus is “earth care, not warfare” — and take the planet back from the billionaires.

At the moment, we think that we can’t stop the transfer of weapons into Israel without ending this alliance with America. So we’ve got a bit of a focus on “End Amerikkka” — with three Ks in America.

Our focus is to initiate coordinated action to restrict the weapons industry, and to stick the weapons exports industry at the centre of the anti-militarist discourse. I want you to learn to say it: weapons exports industry. Not defence — there are other words you can use, but weapons exports industry. Because we think it’s the corporations and the weapons exports industry that are really at the heart of AUKUS, and driving the economic part of AUKUS. It’s really nothing to do with defence. So just be cautious that you don’t spend too much time in the defence discourse, because it’s a cover and a fake discourse.

We’re situated adjacent to the grassroots. We’ve got a bunch of grassroots crews, situated close to IPAN, close to the anti-genocide movement. Our positioning is like Rising Tide and XR — as people-power direct action, part of the anti-militarism movement. Our philosophy is similar to the Wollongong crew: relationships, relationships, and working alongside as many adjacent groups as we can. And there are a lot. As people have said, there are a lot of adjacent groups now working against the weapons industry, because they see that it’s one of the major parts we’re playing in the genocide.

Our movement contribution goal is lots of ordinary people involved in political discourses on anti-militarism issues, including the development of capabilities and knowledge related to people-powered tactics and organising. So, similar to Rising Tide, but we’re located inside the peace movement rather than the climate action movement. Obviously we all move backwards and forwards.

Successes — because you asked for successes. The thing we’re getting good feedback on is that we initiate mobilisations. We did three Disrupt Land Forces mobilisations, where we collaborated with a lot of different people to create a strong force against those weapons exports conferences. But we’re moving towards what Rising Tide and XR are doing, which is waves of mobilisation. You have to move past the single boom-boom-boom action and do intensive waves in proximity with each other, where you’re really pushing and bringing people in, so people can learn a lot quickly.

So: multi-wave mobilisations. We’ve just completed a multi-wave mobilisation against F-35s. It went for about nine months from last September, with a couple of preliminary mobilisations that other people in the movement organised, that we joined with and collaborated with as well.

Wave one, our crews conducted about 18 actions. We’re trying to teach crews to do more than one action a week — to learn to do sets of actions, and how to do sets of actions in proximity. Wave two was situated in Newcastle and conducted a week of about a dozen actions against all the weapons activity there, the weapons corporations. And wave three, we really started to focus on the bureaucrats […]. We looked at the bureaucrats who we think are guiding each of the parliamentary sets of people that come through. They set it up around 2015, the exports industry, and they’re the ones who shift everything forward — as the new parliamentarians come in, they just slide on into the structures that the bureaucrats run.

So in terms of successes: taking a leaf out of the XR playbook and the Rising Tide playbook, to run waves of action and draw people in in proximity. We’ll have something developing in the next month. We haven’t decided what it is or how it is at the moment — we’re at the pre-preliminary planning stage. So if you want to join in, help us figure out what we’re going to do to keep that weapons exports industry central to what we’re doing.

Transcribed from the conference recording. Lightly edited for readability.

Natalie and I negotiated that Natalie will go last and end with a short video, so it’d be a good note to end on.

I’m here as a late-coming member to the Secretariat that organised the public inquiry on AUKUS. And here’s my three minutes. I want to explain to you about the public inquiry: what it is, what it has achieved so far, and most importantly, how each of you can get involved.

The establishment of the AUKUS Public Inquiry was led by the Australian Peace and Security Forum, the APSF, with strong backing from unions like the Maritime Union of Australia and the Electrical Trades Union, and groups like Labor Against War. This inquiry is being funded by the people, through crowdfunding and donations. IPAN has been very proud to support it. Both Annette Brownlie and I were asked to be part of the Secretariat, organising and driving the planning process, and our IPAN volunteers have been on the ground at hearings from the very start.

The inquiry, as many of you would know, is being led by five commissioners. Peter Garrett, lead commissioner, former federal member and frontman of Midnight Oil. Admiral Chris Barrie, former Chief of the Defence Force. Carmen Lawrence, former Premier of WA and federal minister. Leanne Minshull, co-director of the Australia Institute. And Karina Lester, second-generation survivor of the UK nuclear weapons tests at Maralinga and Emu Field.

The goal of the inquiry is simple: to hear from Australians about AUKUS. And the Secretariat is actively seeking to hear voices both opposed to and supporting AUKUS.

In Melbourne, the first hearing was held on 11 June, and it began with a powerful presentation from former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans. In Fremantle, on 29 June, former Defence Minister Linda Reynolds became the first major pro-AUKUS advocate to appear. The inquiry has also invited the Prime Minister, the Defence Minister and the submarine agencies — most have not even replied. Credit to Linda Reynolds for standing up to be counted.

In Adelaide on 16 and 17 July, two hearings were held. The opening day heard a compelling presentation from Rex Patrick, the former senator, as well as former federal Defence Minister Christopher Pyne. That day was followed by a First Nations yarning circle led by Karina Lester — vital voices, especially on nuclear waste.

There’s been significant media interest in the inquiry. The Adelaide hearing attracted four television cameras representing five networks, with confirmed flow-on public interest.

The most powerful moment so far is described by another Secretariat member, Russell Rollason from the APSF. It was Barbara from Melbourne, a suburban civilian who educated herself on international affairs during COVID. She walked in and delivered a compelling submission on sovereignty: we don’t need to ride on anyone’s coattails, we have the capacity to look after ourselves. This is exactly who this inquiry is for.

I heard last night that the 500th submission has now come in — so they’re up to 503. Let’s get it to a thousand. We’ve got 200 people here; that’s 700.

Hearings are still to take place in Sydney on 10 August, Newcastle the 11th, Wollongong and Port Kembla on 12 August, and Canberra on the 2nd and 3rd of September. And Brisbane, we believe, is proposed for 25 August, pending the availability of commissioners — so watch this space.

We need your voice. Go to aukuspublicinquiry.com and click “Make a Submission”. It’s the Inquiry Secretariat’s preference for people to make online submissions; if you have any issues you can make an email submission, and you can find that email address on the inquiry website. Please attend a hearing if you’re going to be in Sydney, Canberra, Wollongong or Port Kembla in the coming weeks. Please get there if you can. All views are welcome. Anonymous submissions will be accepted. Please encourage others to get involved — and get involved yourself. Thank you.

An unscheduled contribution, invited from the floor. Transcribed from the conference recording and lightly edited for readability.

Thank you. My name is Yasmin Khadra. I am a Palestinian-Australian physician up in Brisbane. I’ve been advocating against the genocide in Palestine, for the protection of healthcare, and against the systematic destruction of healthcare in Gaza — as part of my personal and professional obligation, and as part of many groups, including Australia New Zealand Doctors for Palestine and Healthcare Workers for Palestine, engaged in advocacy, fundraising and raising awareness.

So, this wasn’t planned. I was asked to introduce a new acronym — an alliance, the Australian Healthcare Alliance for Palestine, or AHAP. Thanks to Annette and IPAN for giving me the opportunity.

We came together recently, after the health regulator, AHPRA, adopted the IHRA working definition of antisemitism and the more troubling Special Envoy’s antisemitism handbook. Many of us in healthcare are concerned that these documents could conflate legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and Israel’s policy with antisemitism, and — more importantly — create a chilling effect on advocacy for Palestinian human rights. And in my opinion, a clear gesture of anti-Palestinian racism.

Healthcare workers from across Australia recognise that we need a united national voice. We have many active groups already, so this is not replacing them — but this is a united national voice. We bring together doctors, nurses, midwives, allied healthcare workers, paramedics and all healthcare professions, and we have members from every state, from many different health professions, working together.

Our mission is to provide a uniting voice for healthcare workers across Australia, through coordinated advocacy that protects healthcare, upholds equality, defends human rights and promotes justice for Palestine.

We’re continuing to grow, and we’d love more people to get involved. Our current focus is the campaign against the adoption of the IHRA definition — and we thank the many organisations already doing that, including, as mentioned earlier, the Medical Association for Prevention of War, and their strong advocacy for Palestine and Palestinian human rights for years before.

So don’t forget to follow us on social media — we have a Facebook and an Instagram account, and a WhatsApp announcement channel about our campaigns. And if you are a healthcare worker and you’d like to be more actively involved, have a chat to me. Thank you again for the opportunity.

Transcribed from the conference recording. Lightly edited for readability. The talk was given alongside footage from the Convergence, and closes with a short video.

Good afternoon — morning! We’re still in the morning. Good morning, everyone.

I’ve heard so much, and I’m feeling quite overwhelmed by all the amazing work of everyone here. I want to take a moment to acknowledge that the younger generation coming through doesn’t really know how much work has been done before. So I just wanted to acknowledge that, and all of you here — thank you for all the work that you’ve done.

I’d also like to take a moment to acknowledge that we are sitting and standing and resisting and fighting and sharing stories on the lands of the Kaurna people. I have the privilege of being here for the first time, and I had the privilege of travelling through so many countries in the last couple of weeks, as we made our way from Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung land, up to the APY lands, and then to Arrernte land, to Mparntwe, where we held our Convergence. So I just wanted to acknowledge that this land was stolen, that sovereignty was never ceded — and that word “sovereignty” comes up a lot in these spaces. So just to remember that sovereignty still sits with the traditional owners, with Aboriginal people. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

Just behind me there’s B-roll from the Convergence — background videos to give you a bit of an idea of what just happened. Around 600 of us gathered in Mparntwe, which, if you’ve never driven there, is a big feat. You can see the wedge-tailed eagle flying over; that’s the totem of the land over there.

We thought that we would have about 50 people. Then we sold 100 tickets. And then we started catering and logistics — and then 600 people showed up, and we had to house them and feed them. And we did all of that, and it was amazing.

So we all gathered on that beautiful Arrernte country to bring attention to what Pine Gap is. Can I just see a show of hands of who knows what Pine Gap is? Yeah — you’re the kind of people that know. I don’t need to explain it to you.

We gathered there for two days of conference, which is what you’re seeing now. We had beautiful speakers from all over the continent — from politicians to grassroots activists to elders and Aboriginal leaders, and activists and storytellers and researchers. It was quite amazing to hear from all of them.

And then we had a day of action on the Monday, where all of us got in about 100 cars and drove together in convoy to block the Pine Gap facility. And we did do that successfully. It was incredible to see. Once we got there, I had the privilege of announcing to everyone that in fact we’d blocked it for four days, not just one. We heard from someone whose kids go to the same kindergarten as the Pine Gap workers that they’d been asked not to go to work from Friday till Monday, and some of the people who were scouting confirmed that. So we were able to disrupt it for four days — which is quite good, and I hope that some children in Gaza got to live another few days because of that disruption.

I forgot to say who I am, or who we are. I’m Nat, I’m from the Anti-Militarism Action Network, or AMAN, which means safety in Arabic. We’re a very new group, so you probably just don’t know who we are — that’s fine. We used to be called Stop Arming Israel, and we’re a very direct-action-focused group. You might have seen the national days of action against Labor MPs; that was kind of our thing. We took part in Disrupt Land Forces as well, and lots of picketing outside Electromold and Heat Treatment Australia and A.W. Bell — and everything in between that I can’t say, with ASIO in the room.

We’re a very action-focused group, and we’re all very young, and trying to find our place in the world. The Convergence was basically our first big thing — we’re trying to make our way into this peace movement — and we had so many beautiful intergenerational connections. But most of the attendees were actually students. From that, we’ve realised that what we really need to do is connect with students on campuses, and that’s something we’re going to be taking forward.

To make the Convergence happen, it was a very beautiful, big cross-movement collaboration. We had over 60 endorsements from organisations, and IPAN played a really key role as well, to secure the venue for us — because a venue for 600 people was incredibly difficult to get. So just acknowledging what happens when we actually collaborate with each other, come together, put our differences aside, and decide to find our common ground. And to fight for the world that we know can exist.

Even with all of that, we’re still in the red financially, because it costs a lot of money. We’re selling stickers outside for $3 to $5 if you want to get a sticker, and if you’re able to contribute anything else, please let us know.

At the end of the Convergence, we all agreed that we needed collaboration. We had a 550-person workshop — similar to what we’re going to have after this, I believe — to talk about what collaboration looks like. There was very broad agreement that we need a formal structure. It could be a federation, an alliance, a coalition; there are very different structures for all of these things, but we all agreed that it’s necessary. So I suppose I’m here representing all of these people, to see what comes out of this space, and hopefully that we can collaborate together as well.

The last thing I wanted to mention before playing you the small video is that this Convergence only happened because a local group of people called Mparntwe for Palestine has been building relationships with the Arrernte people for over 20 years — and specifically the Hayes family, who are the custodians of that site at Pine Gap. It’s actually a sacred men’s site there.

Our action on the Monday was basically to support them, so that they could go through the barricades and deliver their letter to the CIA and Pine Gap and whomever. And for the first time since their land was taken from them, they were able to walk on their land. That was one of the most powerful — I’m getting kind of goosebumps. It was elders and babies, supported by a hundred of us, finally able to walk on their lands. There were elders who were hunched over with their canes, and then the minute they started to walk, they chucked their canes to the side and walked a little bit taller, because they knew they were walking on their land.

So what I’m going to show you now is a one-minute video. We haven’t had much time — it’s only been four or five days, so we could only edit one minute, unfortunately. But I’ll show you some footage of that action.

The call to action here is to sign the petition of the Hayes family, which Senator David Shoebridge will be tabling in federal parliament. So we need as many signatures as we can — there are sheets outside on the table. And we are really looking forward to collaborating and bringing all of that energy. Massive thanks to Shirley and IPAN for giving us the space here. Thank you — and let’s watch the movie together.

[Video: footage from the day of action at Pine Gap. The speaker, a member of the Hayes family, opens in Arrernte.]

I’d like to thank you all for being here to support me and my family. Thank you very much. We are going to go on to deliver our letter. This is our land, and we want land back. This is tribal land that was never ceded. This is their property, and we need to get Pine Gap out of here — because it’s destroying the world, killing our young people, old people, babies, everybody, and destroying everything. There are a lot of people starving and dying, especially babies. Don’t we want land back? There’s the genocide. We want to stop this fight.

Transcript to come.

Transcript to come.

Transcript to come.