Senator calls for end to A.N.Z.U.S.

Press, 20 September 1985, Page 21

Senator calls for end to A.N.Z.U.S.

NZPA-AAP Canberra An Independent Australian Senator and peace activist, Ms Jo Vallentine, has called for an end to the A.N.Z.U.S. alliance and Australia’s involvement in the arms race. “We have slipped into a de facto nuclear alliance with a super-power willing to wage nuclear war . . . and hoping against all sanity to try to win a nuclear war,” she said in an impassioned maiden speech in the Upper House. Ms Vallentine, who was elected for Western Australia on a Nuclear Disarmament Party ticket in the 1984 elections but is now an Independent, said she was the first peace activist in the world to be elected to a national Parliament on the single issue of nuclear disarmament. There could be no mis-

take that Australia was engaged in preparations for fighting a nuclear war, she said. Successive Australian Governments had been able to justify themselves on the grounds that they were involved in deterrence according to the policy of mutually assured destruction. “The election of President Reagan removed the smoke screen of deterrence. We have moved from MAD to N.U.T.S. — nuclear use and tactics strategy.” Ms Vallentine said the Australian people were “involved in it up to the eyeballs” through the joint defence facilities at Pine Gap, Nurrungar, and North-West Cape. “These bases are the eyes and the ears of the United States strategic command,” she said.

“Through them we collect and transmit valuable information." The bases were good for the United States in its preparation for nuclear war but were prime Soviet targets. Ms Vallentine said the oceans surrounding Australia were becoming more militarised than any other area on Earth and the recent declaration of the South Pacific as a nuclearfree zone did nothing to prevent this. It was time for Australia to become independent and make a moral decision to say "no more” to continued complicity in the nuclear arms race, she said. Three options open to Australia in preference to A.N2.U.S. were neutrality, re-alignment, and social defence.