The Australian government has committed to joining the US in its "Son of Star Wars" missile defence program in Washington next month despite strengthening political opposition to the project.
Defence Minister Robert Hill said the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) at the Australia-US ministerial consultations in the US early in July would formalise Australia's long-term commitment to participating in the program.
"We intend to sign the MOU," Hill said in the statement released on Saturday. "This is a long-term commitment to securing our future and strengthening the alliance."
But the controversial move is facing the resistance of combined opposition parties with Labor sceptical of any benefits and the minor Democrats arguing no agreement should be signed ahead of the upcoming election in which the government could lose office.
Hill said the MOU would provide a 25-year framework under which broad areas of cooperation can be agreed, before entering into more specific arrangements once individual projects were agreed to.
The first area of cooperation would involve research, development, testing and evaluation of technologies that could be used in the missile defence program.
A key initial project would be to jointly undertake some exploratory cooperative research and development activities to investigate the potential for Australia's world-leading over-the-horizon radar technology to be used in missile defence.
Other potential areas for participation in the program included greater cooperation in ballistic early missile warning through ship-based and ground-based sensors, Hill said.
Labor foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd said the opposition had profound reservations about the program, fearing it might prompt an arms race by countries such as China and India, and called on the government to produce evidence of its effectiveness.
"We still don't know whether missile defence systems actually work," Rudd told reporters.
"And furthermore if you seek to construct a missile defence system, does that in turn result in nuclear weapons -- countries in our region to increase their arsenal?"
Australian Democrats leader Andrew Bartlett said no agreement should be signed ahead of an election the government says could be any time from August 7 to late November.
"A government that may have only months left shouldn't be signing Australia up to an expensive 25-year agreement on new weapons," he said.
The left-wing Greens slammed the missile program as the next version of former US president Ronald Reagan's failed "Star Wars" missile defence plan of the 1980s.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS