The Greens’ defence red lines: No weapons for Ukraine, curtail the US alliance

Australia should not provide any military support to Ukraine, new Greens leader David Shoebridge has declared as he called for the United States to be evicted from prized Australian defence facilities, including the Pine Gap surveillance base.

Shoebridge said he planned to retain his existing portfolios of defence and foreign affairs as party leader, and will continue grilling defence, intelligence and law enforcement officials at Senate estimates hearings, where he has gained a reputation as a fierce interrogator.

The NSW Senator and former barrister labelled Labor MP Josh Burns “appalling” for this week accusing him of being prejudiced against Jewish Australians and placing them in good or bad categories based on their position on the war in Gaza.

As well as economic and environmental issues, Shoebridge said he believed the Greens could win votes at the next election by campaigning on two of his passion projects: scrapping the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine pact and legalising recreational cannabis.

Shoebridge won a partyroom ballot for the Greens leadership on Wednesday after Queensland Senator Larissa Waters stepped down from the role because of kidney disease.

“The Greens have been clear from day one that we’re a party of peace and non-violence, and we don’t support military aid to the Ukraine,” Shoebridge told this masthead in an interview in his Sydney office, referring to a party position that has not gained significant attention.

“But we’ve also made it clear that we oppose Russia’s illegal invasion of the Ukraine, and there are supports we can provide to Ukraine and the people of Ukraine at this time.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has thanked Australia for providing over $1.6 billion in military assistance since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, including the transfer of tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and ammunition.

Shoebridge said the Greens backed the provision of “basic humanitarian and civil assistance” to Ukraine, and support for anti-corruption efforts, but the party opposed global weapons transfers as a matter of principle.

The party would support providing military aid to Ukraine if it were backed by a United Nations Security Council resolution, he said, but Russia would use its veto power on the council to block any such move.

The Lowy Institute’s latest poll, released in June, found 70 per cent of Australians backed sending military aid to Ukraine, though the proportion voicing strong support has declined since the early days of the war.

The Australian-Ukrainian community has thanked Shoebridge for his support of sanctions on Russia, including cracking down on the flow of Russian-origin oil to Australia through third countries such as India and Brunei.

Shoebridge said the Greens supported a dramatic downgrading of the US-Australia alliance, including renegotiating the bedrock ANZUS treaty of 1951 that commits the nations to consult each other if they face a military threat.

The US should not be allowed to base its long-range bombers in the Northern Territory or nuclear-powered submarines in Western Australia, he said, and should not have access to the top-secret satellite signals intelligence and surveillance base at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs.

“The US military bases aren’t making us safe; they’re making us a target ... in a war that we will almost certainly have no agency in deciding whether it started or not, and will be dragged into simply because we’re the real estate that the United States wants to fight it from,” he said.

Shoebridge said that when he took on the defence portfolio after entering federal parliament in 2002, many people would not have considered it a “core platform” for the Greens.

But the amount of waste in the portfolio, coupled with bipartisan agreement between the major parties on many national security issues, had made it a “target-rich environment”, he said.

“The reason why we’ve gone down this bizarre rabbit hole of AUKUS to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on these unicorn nuclear submarines that are unlikely to happen, and the reason why we’re sort of bending the knee to Donald Trump, is because of this stultifying consensus between Labor and the Coalition and One Nation on defence,” he said.

Campaigning against AUKUS would prove a “vote winner”, he predicted.

Asked about his relationship with the Jewish community earlier this week, Shoebridge said the party had “really strong connections with much of the Australian Jewish community here, working alongside Jewish Australians who are fighting a genocide”.

Burns, who is Jewish, called Shoebridge’s answer “pretty shocking”, saying: “The Jewish community should not be put into categories of good and bad based on their views of what is happening in the Middle East. That is not progressive leadership, that’s prejudice.”

Shoebridge refused to back down, saying: “I find his comments to be pretty appalling to be honest.”

He said the party’s connections were “with the progressive Jewish community, who express deep-held humanist philosophical beliefs that come from centuries of Jewish philosophy”, adding that he strongly opposed antisemitism.

Shoebridge said he would continue campaigning for the legalisation of recreational cannabis use: “It is absolutely nuts that millions of Australians are labelled criminals because, at some point in their life, they’ve decided that instead of going down for you know a beer in the pub, they go and have a joint or a gummy with mates at home ... we also don’t want to be the fun police.”

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