Treaty the planet’s best chance to get rid of its worst weapons

From Jakarta to the Vatican, Prime Minister Albanese's journey underscores a global call to ban the world's most destructive weapons, writes Dave Sweeney.

ON HIS FIRST overseas trip since his sweeping election victory, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made for two very different destinations.

The first stop was steamy Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, the world’s most populous island nation and home to the world’s largest Muslim population with around 240 million or 13 per cent of the globe’s believers.

After Indonesia, the PM switched time zones and belief systems and headed to the Vatican, the world’s smallest sovereign state in terms of area and population, and the (sacred) heartland of the Catholic faith.

These two places are very different worlds, with very different worldviews, but both have an active desire to protect our shared world from its most avoidable existential threat: nuclear war.

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Prime Minister Albanese also holds this view.

In December 2018, he championed Federal Labor’s support for the newly adopted UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), stating:

“Nuclear weapons are the most destructive, inhumane and indiscriminate weapons ever created. Today we have an opportunity to take a step towards their elimination.”

The TPNW, adopted by the UN in 2017 with more than 120 nations voting in favour, grew from an Australian initiative by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).

ICAN was launched in Melbourne in 2007 and was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of the group’s work ‘to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons’ and its ‘groundbreaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons’.

The TPNW entered into force in January 2021, an act which has finally and formally seen nuclear weapons be declared unlawful under international humanitarian law.

Supporters of the TPNW have described the Treaty as our planet’s best way to get rid of its worst weapons.

The fragile and fractured global situation starkly highlights the urgency of this task.

Two nuclear weapon states, Israel and Russia, are actively involved in hot wars.

Two more, India and Pakistan, are engaged in risky posturing that could dramatically escalate, while two others, China and the United States, are shaping up for a trade war with hints of worse to come.

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Nuclear experts are warning that we are dangerously close to annihilation as wars escalate around the world.

Against this grim background, the TPNW is a star that provides some light and hope and a navigation point to help chart a safer and saner course for our shared future.

Nations are embracing this path with half of the world’s countries having signed, ratified or acceded to the Treaty, including Indonesia and the Vatican/Holy See.

When it ratified the TPNW last September, Indonesia – a leading player in the global Non-Aligned Movement – made clear that ‘the possession and use of nuclear weapons cannot be justified for any reason’.

Speaking at the time, then Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi posed the fundamental question and delivered the humane answer:

Should fear of nuclear weapons be our guarantee for peace? Indonesia’s answer will forever be no.

Indonesia reaffirms its commitment to a nuclear weapon-free world.

The late Pope Francis was a strong supporter of the TPNW and gave expression to the principle of “blessed are the peacemakers” with the Vatican’s championing and early adoption of the Treaty. The Pope described the very existence of nuclear weapons as “an affront to heaven”. In his final Easter Sunday sermon, shortly before he died, he made a powerful call for peace and weapons abolition.

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These calls for nuclear abolition and for ways of addressing conflict that do not risk all that ever was, is or could be on our shared planet are finding a resonance and echo in many other nations.

Labor’s National Platform is clear:

Labor acknowledges the growing danger that nuclear weapons pose to us all and the urgent need for progress on nuclear disarmament.

Labor will act with urgency and determination to rid the world of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

Commits itself to redoubling efforts towards a world without nuclear weapons...

Labor in government will sign and ratify the Ban Treaty...

In this year that marks 80 years since the unveiling of the age of Armageddon with the first atom bomb test in New Mexico and the first atom bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is time to turn a political platform into a prescription for a habitable world.

It is time for Australia to follow the example of Indonesia, the Vatican and many other nations and to show that the pen is mightier than the sword by signing the TPNW.

As they say, Prime Minister, when in Rome...