PRIME MINISTER:
It’s good to be here joined by the CDF and the Defence Minister to announce that the Government has decided to commence the preparation of a military force to contribute to a building partner capacity training mission in Iraq. This follows requests from the Iraqi and from the United States governments.
This decision marks the next phase of Australia's contribution to the international coalition to disrupt, degrade and ultimately defeat the Daesh or ISIL death cult. We have slowed Daesh's advance but Iraq's regular forces now require support to build their capacity to reclaim and to hold territory.
The numbers that Australia will commit to this mission are still to be finalised but it is anticipated that the force will involve about 300 Australian Defence Force personnel. There will be a training team with command force protection and support elements and the Australian build partner capacity force will be working closely with personnel from the New Zealand Defence Force.
There will be about 300 Australians and about 100 New Zealanders involved in this mission. We will join international partners including the United States, Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands in training the Iraqi security forces. We are working with Iraq, the United States and other coalition partners to finalise the details of this training mission.
We anticipate that we will be in a position to make a final decision about the actual deployment as opposed to the preparations to deploy in a matter of weeks.
I want to stress that we haven't taken this decision lightly. Ultimately, it is Iraq that must defeat the death cult but we do not want to leave the Iraqis on their own. We are naturally reluctant as a peace-loving people to reach out to far-away conflicts but, as we know, this conflict has been reaching out to us for months now.
The Government's decision has the support of the Prime Minister of Iraq and it responds to a formal request from the United States to contribute specific Australian Defence Force capabilities to this international coalition.
I did speak to Prime Minister al-Abadi of Iraq last week following up the discussions that I had with him in January on my visit to Baghdad. Last week he reiterated his request for Australia's support and expressed his gratitude for the decision that we were at that stage contemplating.
We are part of an international coalition of some 60 countries including Iraq's Arab neighbours. It is right that we make a prudent and proportionate contribution to this effort to keep Iraq safe, to wrest back control of Iraqi territory from the death cult and, in so doing, to contribute to the safety and security of this country and the wider world.
Again, I stress, the death cult has been reaching out to our country with about 100 Australians fighting with Daesh and other terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq and about another 150 here at home supporting these extremists so this commitment is a matter of domestic as well as international security and I stress this is absolutely and utterly in Australia's national interests to do this.
I'm going to ask the Minister to add to these remarks, followed by the CDF and then obviously we will take some questions.
DEFENCE MINISTER:
Thank you Prime Minister. The first priority of a national government is the safety and security of its citizens, in this case all Australians. As the Prime Minister said, we know that more than 90 Australians are involved with Daesh in Iraq and the Middle East and more than 140 supporting them here in Australia so it is worth remembering why our forces are actually operating in Iraq.
The depravity, the brutality which we have seen on our television screens and on YouTube and in the media indicates that this is something that the world cannot ignore. The serious threat which Daesh involves to not only people in the Middle East but to the entire world calls for concerted international action.
That's why the Australian Government and the Defence Forces representing it are steadfastly committed to supporting the Iraqi people in their struggle against this medieval death cult.
This is a mission which is useful, which is proportionate and which is not open-ended – it will be reviewed from time to time.
CHIEF OF THE DEFENCE FORCE:
Thanks Prime Minister, Minister, the campaign so far has been successful in stopping the advance of Daesh across Iraq. Since October, Daesh have not made any significant territorial gains. They've lost the ability to amass their forces in the open, they don't fly their flags, their leaders aren't wearing uniforms. We are seeing more and more action where they are taking defensive measures around key terrain.
Now, more than ever, it is important for us to focus on the development of the Iraqi security forces to be able to take and hold their own ground, secure their borders and allow the restoration of governance in their own country.
The building partner capacity mission that we are about to commence working up for is a part of that strategy.
We will be looking to put our forces into Taji base which is about 30km north of Baghdad. We will be doing this in conjunction with our Kiwi counterparts. I have been working very closely with the New Zealand Defence Force, Chief of Defence Force, in developing the plan that we have put to Government.
The aim is to build the skills of the Iraqi Army, in particular from individual capability right up to Brigade and Battalion levels for skills and they're skills that are essential for the effective fighting that they need to do over the coming years to be able to secure their borders.
Thank you.
PRIME MINISTER:
Ok, questions.
Mark?
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, why is this not mission creep and what advice have you been given by military advisers about the increased risk of so-called green on green attacks?
PRIME MINISTER:
It's not mission creep. It's making sure that we do what we reasonably can to protect ourselves as well as to protect Iraq and the wider world from the Daesh death cult.
As the Chief has just pointed out the air strikes in which Australia has been playing a key role have been effective in preventing the death cult's further advance, but what we now need to do is empower the Iraqis to retake their own country and in order to mount effective offensive operations, in order to be able to mount operations to reclaim the cities that have fallen to the death cult, their regular forces need to be significantly strengthened.
We've had a Special Forces contingent, as you know, operating an advise and assist mission with the Iraqi counter-terrorism service for some months now. That mission will wind down after September. The challenge now is to ensure that the Iraqi regular forces are able to take and hold ground and that's what this mission is all about.
So, it's not mission creep, it's the successful execution of the original mission. As for blue on blue, you can never rule these things out, but one of the reasons why there is a very strong force protection element in this training contingent is to prevent precisely that and I might ask the CDF to offer a thought.
CHIEF OF THE DEFENCE FORCE:
It's a real risk, it's a risk I take very seriously. As the Prime Minister said, there is a large force protection element involved in this deployment and we're making sure that we take all our lessons learnt after the last 10 or so years of operations in the Middle East into account when we've been planning.
QUESTION:
Mr Abbott, can you give any guarantee that this will be the last escalation of our commitment?
PRIME MINISTER:
The challenge here is to disrupt, degrade and ultimately destroy this death cult and I don't want anyone to underestimate the seriousness of the threat that this death cult poses. We've already seen the attack on police in Victoria, the Martin Place siege, the pre-empted attack in Sydney. All of these were inspired by the death cult.
I don't want anyone to underestimate the problems that would be caused in a diabolically volatile part of the world should Daesh consolidate its hold on the territory that it already occupies and form a kind of ongoing terrorist state in the Middle East. So, this campaign is a very important one, but it's one that we are engaged in with our allies, our Middle Eastern friends, as well as our traditional allies and it would be wrong of me to say that this is the last that we will do here, but nevertheless what we are doing at this stage is prudent, it's proportionate. It builds on what's already been done and I think it has every chance of being effective.
QUESTION:
Is there a timeline on when you hope the campaign will succeed?
PRIME MINISTER:
We expect this training mission to be fully operational should we make the final decision to commit in June. After 12 months we'd review it, we'd review it again every 12 months and like our New Zealand partners, we at this stage are saying that it's a 2-year mission with that 12-month review.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, can you just clarify the numbers for us, will the Special Forces be coming back, the new group going, so a total of around 300?
PRIME MINISTER:
We've got about 170 Special Forces there at the moment, mainly in Baghdad International Airport on the advise and assist mission.
This additional deployment will be about 300. Most of the 170 Special Forces will come out once the current rotation ends in September.
QUESTION:
Just to follow up on that, will there be any new role considered for the Special Forces or once they come out they're coming home?
PRIME MINISTER:
I don't rule out additional work for them, but our intention at this stage is that once the current rotation is concluded that most, if not all, of them will come home because by that stage you would have spent 12 months advising and assisting the Iraqi counter-terrorism service, this is if you like, the Iraqi Special Forces. They were the best of the Iraqi armed forces. We believe because of our work and the work of some of our partners they are now in a much better state than they were.
That's why our attention now needs to turn to the Iraqi regular army, hence this new mission at Taji north of Baghdad.
QUESTION:
If ISIL is on the run, why don't you participate in boots on the ground and get it all over with?
PRIME MINISTER:
That's a fair question, but we are operating in lockstep with the Iraqis and the Iraqis believe, quite properly, that it's their job to recapture their country. They do not want foreign combat troops on the ground and obviously working with the Iraqis, we are doing what they have requested of us and what they've requested of us is not a combat capability, but a training mission.
Now, obviously the 300 soldiers that we are proposing to send on this mission, it's a capable force because we don't want it to get into any trouble, but nevertheless it is a training force not a combat force.
QUESTION:
When you review this deployment after a year and then after another year, will it be against the benchmark of a specific training task that they need to complete, or will it be reviewed against the overall success against Daesh, and is there a specific task that they need to finish before they come home, even if it's not done within two years?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, again I'm not going to be too prescriptive at this stage. What we want to do is help to train an effective Iraqi regular army. There's an American-led training mission at Al-Asad Airbase to the west of Baghdad. There's a Spanish-led training mission at one of their bases to the south of Baghdad. There'll be the joint Australian-New Zealand mission at Taji, which is to the north of Baghdad. There are also some American forces that are based there, as well.
In addition in the Kurdish areas there will be a German-led training mission. So, the objective of all of these missions is to try to ensure as far as we can an operational effective Iraqi regular army that can take and hold ground so that Iraq can once more be sovereign over its territory and the death cult can be removed from control and influence over the territory of Iraq. So, that's what we're doing.
We will review progress and obviously the key indicator here is how effective are the Iraqi armed forces? How effective is our mission to ensure that these armed forces are capable of doing their job? It's against that criteria that we will judge our success.
QUESTION:
PM, the US and some of our allies expended an enormous amount of blood and treasure in Iraq over more than a decade trying to train the Iraqis to look after their own security and they've failed and we have to go back in again. What gives you hope or optimism that they are going to be any more capable after this exercise which is a lot smaller than the effort expended over the last decade holding back forces like ISIS?
PRIME MINISTER:
I'll ask the CDF to add to this, but I think if I may say so the question misconceives what was happening. For much of that previous period it was the American and to a lesser extent British armed forces that were actually doing the fighting. It was only very late in the previous involvement with Iraq that a serious effort was made to train the Iraqi armed forces and my understanding is that the Americans then pulled out with the job at best, half done. So, this is a rather different mission. We don't expect to be doing the Iraqis fighting for them. This is a training mission not a combat mission. Nevertheless, it is a mission which is necessary, because obviously in the face of the initial death cult onslaught, the Iraqi regular army melted like snow in summer. Now, that's been a disaster for the people of Iraq. Millions of whom now live in a new dark age. It's been a disaster for the people of the wider world, including the people of Australia, because the declaration of a caliphate, this apocalyptic and millenarian caliphate throwback to the middle ages, the declaration of a caliphate has obviously excited people all around the world who are susceptible to this particular ideology and that's why it's very important not just for the people of Iraq, but for the people of the wider world, that the Iraqis regain control over their own country and demonstrate that this caliphate is not something which is going to have any lengthy existence.
CHIEF OF THE DEFENCE FORCE:
I think it's worth putting back the context and to provide your answer, you talk about a decade, there wasn't a decade of training before it. If you think about it, the Iraqi army started its rebuilding in 04-05 until the time that the US pulled out. The Iraqi chief of defence force has spoken to me at length a couple of times on this. I've met him three times in the last three months and his concern was the Iraqi army got their basic training in that first phase that they had, but after the US withdrawal they missed the next couple of phases which was building up the battalion and brigade-level capabilities that they needed to be able to fight as an effective army, not just effective units. That's where a lot of this training is taking formed Iraqi units and taking them to that next level – the training that they did miss out on. But I think it's a valid question and it's worth being able to explain the context of what we're doing as we go in.
QUESTION:
We appear to be committing to phase two here before some other comparable countries or even those with larger defence forces have actually delivered on phase one, I mean if you take the British for example they haven’t entirely delivered on what they said they were going to send, are we getting ahead of other comparable countries here, I mean you mentioned the European other contributors, but are they contributing as much as us, are we getting out ahead?
PRIME MINISTER:
The Spaniards are contributing about 300 to their Spanish-led build partner capacity mission. The Americans have some 3,000 personnel in Iraq, not all of them admittedly on build partner capacity missions. There's an advise and assist mission that the Americans are also prosecuting in Iraq. Britain has a modest contribution, mostly in the Kurdish regions, but Prime Minister Cameron has certainly indicated that in coming months Britain would be in a position to make a substantially greater contribution. So, I think that what we're doing is prudent and proportionate. It is in our national interests and again I stress it is absolutely at the request and invitation of the Iraqi government and the United States government.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, there will be many Australians who are deeply uncomfortable with this decision today to send 300 Australians into harm's way. Given that they thought this job was part of our mission before, so what exactly will success look like?
PRIME MINISTER:
This is our way of continuing the mission that we began back in about September of last year with the contribution of a powerful air contingent and the contribution of some Special Forces on an advise and assist mission to the Iraqi Special Forces. So, this is very much in continuation of the mission that we have been embarked upon since late last year. If I may say so, Sabra, what the Australian people want is security at home, but you can't have security at home without doing your bit for security abroad, because it is the Daesh death cult which is reaching out to us here in this country. This is a conflict which is reaching out to our shores and has already been the inspiration for two terrorist incidents and another potential terrorist incident that was only hours away from taking place. So, people want to be secure, but in order to be as secure as we can be at home, it's important that we actually do what we can to disrupt and degrade this scourge at its source.
QUESTION:
CDF Binskin, is the Iraqi regular army in fact trainable? Do they really want to fight and how do you overcome the Shi'ia-Sunni divide?
CHIEF OF THE DEFENCE FORCE:
Part of the issue is the Sunni-Shi’ia divide. So, the commitment of the Prime Minister al-Abadi to make the armed forces more inclusive and the commitment of their chief of defence force to do that is key to this. Are they trainable? Yes, they are. They took some initial losses and some significant losses. Part of that was training, part of that was leadership. I think that's been quite well documented and I won't go through the list, but what probably hasn't been there is some of the tactics that we used against them were horrific tactics and not tactics that any regular army would have anticipated to be honest with you. But no, I think they're trainable. If I didn't think they were trainable I wouldn't make a recommendation to Government that we could go in and do this, but it's going to take a concerted effort to do it. You're seeing a number of nations committing to this and we're just one of those nations.
QUESTION:
Air Chief Marshal Binskin, will this involve regular Australian troops or will they be Special Forces – the trainers – will they draw on experience from Afghanistan for instance? And in what way will their role differ from the role of the commandoes who've been there?
CHIEF OF THE DEFENCE FORCE:
So, it will be regular forces. I won't say the units today, because the commanders will only find out the names of the units and they'll be able to talk to their people this afternoon and tomorrow, but I will come out with the units in a bit of a release tomorrow, so people know who's going to go and obviously there's some security issues around too much detail in that. The missions of the commandoes so far, the AA mission, has been advising and assisting the counter terrorism services, so their special forces counterparts. This is doing the training inside the wire for the regular forces, so that’s the difference in the operation.
QUESTION:
There was a lot of talk last week Prime Minister about this exact decision. Why did you take the decision not to announce it last week when John Key in a sense announced it for you?
PRIME MINISTER:
What Prime Minister Key did was announce that New Zealand was prepared to contribute some 100 soldiers to a joint training mission and he anticipated that the New Zealanders would be partnering with Australia – perfectly appropriate thing for Prime Minister Key to announce. My recollection is that National Security Committee of Cabinet met on Wednesday of last week I think it was. We took it to Cabinet yesterday and as a courtesy it went to the Party Room today and I think that given the fact that it is a serious decision to put significant additional numbers of Australian forces into a country like Iraq even on a training rather than a combat mission, it was important that I take the Party Room into the Government's confidence before…
QUESTION:
[inaudible]
PRIME MINISTER:
No, it's not. My recollection is that John Howard informed the Party Room of the Government's decision and allowed some Party Room discussion of the Government's decision before we committed forces to the Iraq campaign of 2003. That's my recollection, and look, while in our system it is the prerogative of the executive government to commit the armed forces to combat or indeed any commitment of the armed forces even a training mission, nevertheless it is important as far as you can to take the Party Room, the public, the Opposition into your confidence and that's what we've done.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, this is a joint Australian-New Zealand operation, why is it not officially badged an ANZAC operation and does that suggest New Zealand may leave earlier than we do?
PRIME MINISTER:
I should point out that even in the ANZAC operation at Gallipoli, the New Zealanders were in their units and the Australians were in our units and so that's a perfectly normal thing for the nationals of particular countries to serve in their national units. Look, I'm very pleased and proud that in this Centenary of ANZAC year that Australia and New Zealand will be contributing to this important mission. I know that it's not strictly speaking an ANZAC mission, because there is not one Australia and New Zealand army corps in this particular case, but it certainly is an Australia and New Zealand military contribution, a joint military contribution to an important mission and I think there are obviously historical parallels.
QUESTION:
[inaudible] the advise and assist commandoes, is that set in stone, or is that still conditional on the Iraqis meeting certain benchmarks and do those include some successful ground offensive by the Iraqis before we’re ready?
CHIEF OF THE DEFENCE FORCE:
The counter terrorism service has been successful to date. They have been at the forefront of a lot of the operations in taking, but they haven't been involved in the holding territory. And that’s been coming back to the regular forces. So, it's not conditional. We’re looking at bringing out the forces after or the majority after this next rotation but we will leave some key people in there to give us a better understanding of situational awareness and influence in the planning. So they won’t all come out there’ll be a small group still staying in there.
QUESTION:
CDF, have our aircraft been involved in the attacks on Tikrit, or preparations for it all?
CHIEF OF THE DEFENCE FORCE:
So our aircraft range far and wide across Iraq and there's no specific target, it depends on where their tasking order comes out for that day. But the latest statistics I pulled as I walked out this morning is the F-18s have now completed 179 missions, that's around about 350-400 sorties, expended 221 precision-guided weapons, the tanker KC-30 has had 167 air refuelling missions, and the E-7's about 73. But if you look at where the predominant targets are, wherever the action is being planned, the actions are being planned for that particular day is where the air support tends to go in and support. It's just a matter of where you are in the air tasking order about where you might be flowed into that.
QUESTION:
Just on another subject if I may, on Medicare. Why has the Government dropped the Medicare co-payment now?
PRIME MINISTER:
Look, Health Minister Sussan Ley will have more to say shortly on this subject. I just want to stress three things. First of all, we are absolutely committed to a strong and sustainable Medicare for the long-term. Second, we are absolutely committed to protecting the vulnerable, including bulkbilling for the vulnerable. Third, what is pretty obvious is that the best way to improve our health system, to have an efficient and effective health system, is to proceed with the backing of the medical profession. That's why Sussan will be continuing consultations with the medical profession.
Could I just, if I may, wrap up this discussion of our Build Partner Capacity mission to Iraq by stressing that it is critical for Australia, just as it is critical for the wider world, that this death cult, this apocalyptic millenarian death cult, be disrupted, degraded, and ultimately destroyed. It is absolutely critical, because the aspirations of this death cult are not simply to capture and control a limited territory. It has – hard to credit I know – universal aspirations; it claims a universal allegiance. This is why so many countries are now involved in the campaign against it. The people who are perhaps most concerned about this are those who are closest to it – the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Iranians, the Egyptians – they are all very concerned about this because they stand first in line. But nevertheless, as we have seen, they are reaching out to people who are susceptible to the lure of this ideology right around the world. That's why I say that the security of Australia today isn't to be obtained simply here in this country, but domestic security requires a very strong element of international security, and that's what this Build Partner Capacity mission is all about.
Thank you.
[ends]