Senator David Shoebridge

Foreign Minister Wong is absolutely right. The Greens want to get out of AUKUS. If you are in the ALP you should probably get out too.

AUKUS is such a rotten deal, that even buying second hand submarines still means the Australian public is paying top dollar.

New details on the Australians that were on the US submarine that sunk the Iranian frigate. Defence is claiming they were not in their bunks as previously thought, but where "assigned to damage control activity."

BREAKING Its not just the US and UAE, Australia also providing 'defensive' military support to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar. The Albanese Labor Government cannot pretend we are not involved Trump and Netanyahu's war of choice when we up to our neck in it.

At Estimates Defence confirmed it on the record that the Palantir software Defence is paying $14.4 million for is the same suite of products used in Gaza, Lebanon, and the US attack on Iran. I then asked if anyone ran an ethics check. See what happens next.

The US Secretary of War said he was going to disregard rules of engagement in war saying, "Who cares what other countries think." I asked if the Albanese Government cares. Turns out they care a lot about AUKUS.

There are hundreds of Australian troops in the US military right now. I asked what their role in the war on Iran is. Defence said: "our people have a very clear understanding of that remit that limits a number of them to defensive roles only". How does that work when you are on a US sub?

Trump has just told Albanese that he is not giving Australia any new submarines under AUKUS. I asked Defence how this can still be the 'optimal pathway'. The response is... interesting.

This whole LOTE project for the Collins Class was based on the idea we would get French submarines, something that disappeared in 2021 when Morrison chose AUKUS. That means Defence bought a whole bunch of stuff, based on a now scrapped idea. Here are the figures.

Defence knew in October 2025 that the LOTE project on the Collins Class submarines was in crisis. When I ask back then if the $11 billion project was on track, they said there was "no change to the program of record". The LOTE program has now been massively de-scoped with a scathing audit.

The Australian War Memorial is sponsored by the companies that build the weapons that kill people, and at Estimates today we made them say so out loud.

Labor are slashing veterans' healthcare and putting a cap on services in this budget. This Government is cutting healthcare across the community, it must stop.

Spending billion more on AUKUS, silence on genocide in Palestine, Palantir contracts and spying on Australians - we have many questions! This week we will demand answers in Senate Estimates again and I'm not holding back.

Israeli President Herzog got a personal tour of ASIO headquarters. Asked if they could name another foreign leader ever given that access, ASIO drew a blank.

The Albanese Labor Government has just given the Federal police $200 million, as part of the new 'AUKUS Command' force. Today we learnt this is solely to protect US and UK submarines. Australians paying for the protection of the US military, that's AUKUS.

The Albanese Government sent nearly $400 million in public funds to a 'Trust' in Nauru. This was part of the deal to forcibly remove people to Nauru. Do you want to know who is in charge of the Trust in Nauru? Hint: The President of Nauru is David Adeang...

Workers in onshore detention tried to save a person from a burning room and got injured doing so. MTC, the Trump-linked US company running the centres, did not provide enough staff or training. When I criticised them, the Government jumped in to defend this company.

The US private prison company and part of Trump's ICE regime, MTC/Secure Journeys runs Australia onshore detention. We now know they breached their contract. We asked how much the penalty is. The Government knew and refused to say. Labor, transparent as a brick🧱

Many social media accounts were shut down under the social media age ban but the data from eSafety shows it did not change the number of cyberbullying and image based abuse complaints from people under 16. That's a fail.

The Albanese Labor government is currently talking with the US about what data Trump gets access to on Australians traveling there. We need clarity that Australians' biometric data will be safe from Palantir, the US far-right tech giant powering ICE's deportation machine.

A few months ago the Labor Government (backed in by Liberals and One Nation) got the power to stop Iranians, who already have a visa to Australian, from coming because they might seek safety here. We learnt 6,634 people have been impacted.

Many people asked how it was that the Government decided to grant ECAJ $124 million more in funding this budget. Turns out that’s the number ECAJ asked for. Don’t know any other area in Government where this is how it works!

Asking questions of the counter terrorism unit in Home Affairs - they got a ton of money to tackle online radicalisation of young people but they're not doing that by penalising algorithms that promote extremist content, instead the focus is on young people themselves. They just don't get it.

What happens when every Fed department is responsible for AI data centres but none of them actually is? At Estimates we found out: foreign multinationals make commercial decisions, states rip up their planning laws, and the water and energy consequences are someone else's problem

Asking the question 300,000 Illawarra residents (and those of us who visit regularly) want an answer to: when will you be able to make a phone call on the train or the highway between Wollongong and Sydney without dropping out?

Tonight Commissioner Brereton acknowledged that he was "sorry for the delay his involvement caused in the Robodebt referral", while dismissing broader harm to victims. Families who lost loved ones to Robodebt deserved a genuine reckoning from the nation's integrity commission. They didn't get one.

Thirteen hundred of you took the time to complain to the NACC about their appalling mismanagement of the Robodebt referral. This is how the Commissioner talks about those complaints. How utterly shameful.

I asked the outgoing NACC Commissioner whether he accepts responsibility for keeping his own CEO in the dark about his ongoing defence work. His answer was that his CEO had no business knowing what he was doing on the side 🤯🤯🤯 They just don't think the rules apply to them!

Australian National Audit Office has done amazing work holding Defence to account for multi-billion dollar failures. In response the Albanese Government is cutting there work. So much for accountability and transparency.

Hateful media and political rhetoric drives trans people out of public life and undermines rights as fundamental as work, education, and living as your authentic self. We will always call it out. 🏳️‍⚧️

At Senate Estimates, the Federal Circuit and Family Court revealed courts are at the mercy of Canadian multinational VIQ that controls transcripts and is now refusing to cooperate with the Australian government. This is what privatising essential court functions looks like.

The Federal Courts handed every court transcript to outsourced provider VIQ Solutions. VIQ then publicly boasted their AI was trained in partnership with Australian courts, without a single litigant ever being told or asked for their consent on often intensely private material.

Asking the Royal Commission into Social Cohesion and Antisemitism if Muslim communities can't give evidence and false claims of antisemitism which conflate a bake sale or wearing a keffiyeh with antisemitism go unchallenged, what exactly is this royal commission for?

This is the Department where things go to die.

Many of you are asking where the Government is up to on a Human Rights Act. We asked the Attorney General's Department what 'actively considering' a Human Rights Act means. Not a lot as it turns out. A briefing a year ago 🙄

On tranche 2 privacy reform: Corporate Australia is hoovering up your biometric data and they can because we have last-century privacy laws in this country. Labor's response is that at some unspecified point in the future, they'll consult on legislation they haven't written yet..

NT prisons are 80% funded by the Commonwealth and not just missing their "closing the gap" targets but getting catastrophically worse - the Attorney General's Department admits the "trend has not been towards improvement" but don't worry the AG has written a letter...

I asked the Attorney General's Department how they justify a direction delaying publishing an FOI until 1 minute before Senate Estimates

Permanent residents are critical in building our country, they're our friends, they're the people we go to the pub with and go to run club with.

Four years into this Labor government and we can see what they are all about. Super profits for gas corporations, cuts to people on NDIS, billions more for war and AUKUS and changes to negative gearing and property taxes that only make inequality worse.

The inquiry into offshore detention heard about horrific instances of sexual assault occurring before basic health care was provided. I put this to the current 'healthcare' provider on Nauru.

Hearing from Mariam, a refugee who fled Iran and was held on Nauru and is still denied a home in Australia: "I don't know what will happen today to me, to my husband, my little one, you know. I think the politicians have power to change this law, this cruelty."

Just opened the offshore detention inquiry with Human Rights Law Centre, making the important point: " It has simply pushed the death offshore behind a veil of corruption and secrecy."

We now know that the Chief of Navy has ordered every Australian embedded in every US nuclear submarine to follow all orders given them by the US military. If they don't they face disciplinary charges. We need to end AUKUS before we become the official 51st US State.

Evidence from Northern Territory Paediatricians about what locking 10 and 11 year old kids does to them. These experts know that it causes serious harm. The NT Government initially tried to ignore them and then to silence them. It's shameful.

The Larrakia Nation turned up today to the hearing into youth justice but the NT Government (who are the ones responsible for the harms kids are facing in the NT) has refused to come. I agree with Uncle Eric Fejo that it's an absolute disgrace.

The NT government gets 80% of its budget from the Commonwealth. Some of that money goes on spit hoods for kids. On Friday, every child in detention was locked in their cell all day because there weren't enough staff. This is where your federal dollars go.