Q: Two years into this deadly conflict, so many people dead, just a tragic loss of life. When will there be greater transparency of our military exports? Particularly in relation to the F-35 program? An ABC investigation published yesterday revealed that detailed information about many parts manufactured in Australia are no longer available online. Why is that?

Richard Marles:

Firstly, there is great transparency in terms of all of our exports that are controlled around the world and there is great transparency in terms of exports in this circumstance. We’ve been really clear we are not exporting weapons to Israel. And have made that clear from the outset and, you know, there’s all sorts of attempts to put information into the public domain but the simple fact is we are not exporting weapons to Israel. We are an F-35 country. We have been participating in the F-35 supply chain for many, many years now. I mean the F-35 program has been going on for more than two decades and, again, all of that is on the public record. But what we do in terms of the F-35 supply chain is supply to the prime contractor which is Lockheed Martin out of the United States. It’s part of our obligation in terms of participating in the F-35 project…

Q: Sorry to interrupt, Richard Marles, we also have human rights and legal commitments alongside our export commitments, don’t we?

Marles:

Of course we do and we maintain all of those commitments and we absolutely have those and we rigorously apply those, but let’s also be clear the F-35 is at the heart of the Royal Australian Air Force. It’s at the heart of our military aviation capability and we’re not going to do anything which jeopardises that. We will maintain all our obligations under humanitarian international law, which we absolutely do. And we also maintain transparency here.

The government has not maintained transparency and DOES export weapon parts. The parts of the F-35 supply chain Australia provides are assembled in America, where the planes are then sold to Israel, and have been used in the non-stop bombing of Gazan civilians. International law doesn’t make exceptions for ‘military aviation capability’ in determining what was, and wasn’t, done to stop a genocide.