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Broadside on Greens' 'naive isolationism'

A Liberal frontbencher has launched a blistering attack against the Australian Greens, accusing them of supporting Jihadi barbarity against Afghan women and children.

Bob Brown
Bob Brown

2 min read

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Source: AAP


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Michael Ronaldson attacked the "delusional" Greens and their leader Bob Brown during a parliamentary debate on Australia's involvement in the Afghanistan war.

The Greens argue Australian troops should be brought home immediately.

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Senator Ronaldson said the party had previously called for all coalition forces to withdraw.

"What Senator Brown and his Green party colleagues are effectively advocating is open slather for Jihadi barbarity," the Victorian senator said on Wednesday.

"They are effectively declaring open season on Afghan women and anyone who believes in modernity over medievalism."

Senator Ronaldson said if coalition forces withdrew now there would be absolute chaos in Afghanistan.

"(There'd be) death and destruction on a massive scale," he said.

"It would trigger a flood of Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists that would pour out of the Hindu Kush to exploit the vacuum left by departing NATO forces."

Those terrorists would maim the innocent, kill the defenceless and persecute the vulnerable.

Senator Ronaldson said the Greens policy would result in the resurrection of the Al Qaeda sanctuary where the 9/11 plot was hatched and harboured.

It would cause a further destabilisation of an already shaky government in neighbouring Pakistan.

"Senator Brown's alternative also means casting Afghan women into a new dark age of illiteracy, impoverishment and oppression," the opposition veterans' affairs spokesman said.

"I find it sadly ironic that a political party espousing such impeccable feminist credentials is willing to sell 15 million Afghan women and girls down the river into Taliban servitude.

"I find it morally outrageous that Senator Brown and his green colleagues would sacrifice half the population on the altar of a naive isolationism."


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