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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2011-02-23 Daily Xml
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RAYTHEON

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS (15:52): I rise today as US arms manufacturer Raytheon is about to move into yet another South Australian school. Staff at Hallett Cove R-12 school have recently been told that the school will now have a relationship with the defence company Raytheon. Currently, I understand that there are three schools in Adelaide in the program that have such a relationship: Glenunga International, The Heights and Aberfoyle Park. I understand that Raytheon entered into a three-year partnership with these schools in 2008, worth some $450,000.

I also understand that the program is a government-funded program called Ignite, a high school program for students with high intellectual potential—our best and our brightest. In return for supplying the Ignite students with personal laptops, Raytheon is given access to these students in order to mentor them towards maths and science studies, with a view to promoting engineering as a career path.

Raytheon, of course, employs many, many engineers—more than 40,000 of Raytheon's 75,000 employees are engineers—and the company hires many more thousands each year, but what does Raytheon hire them to do? Well, Raytheon, as members are also probably aware, is the world's largest guided missile manufacturer: Tomahawk and Paveway missiles were the weapons of choice for the US military during the Iraq war.

Raytheon produces cluster bombs, which have been used extensively by both US and Israeli forces, including the AGM-154A standoff weapon, a cluster bomb that contains 145 smaller bomblets. Human Rights Watch estimates that 1,600 Iraqi and Kuwaiti civilians were injured between 1991 and 1993 as a result of unexploded cluster bombs and that 60 per cent of these were children under the age of 15; that is the same age as those in the Ignite program—some 960 or so children.

Some cluster bombs are bright yellow in colour, which makes them similar in appearance, in the eyes of small children in war torn areas, to toys or food packets. Many of those who follow the work of War Child would be horrified to find that these bombs were, in fact, made to look attractive to children. Raytheon is now looking to develop new technologies and, in 2010, it announced that it had successfully tested a ship-borne killer laser to knock four unmanned aerial vehicles out of the sky. The laser weapons offer the military a very cost-effective and nearly unlimited magazine for shooting down things such as threatening UAVs or perhaps even aeroplanes.

On 25 July 2010 it was reported that Raytheon had delivered three active denial systems, or heat ray guns, to the US military, which had deployed them for the first time in Afghanistan in June. These guns direct focused, invisible 100,000 watt beams of energy at the speed of light across a range of up to 250 metres (or 750 feet) at human beings, burning them intolerably until they get out of the beam's way. The heat ray penetrates the skin to a depth of about one sixty-fourth of an inch, according to the report.

Raytheon expects the technology to jump from the battlefield to civilian use. Various commercial and military applications include law enforcement, checkpoint security, facility protection, force protection and peacekeeping missions, according to Raytheon's own website. This system was never used in Iraq because it was found to be politically risky.

In the light of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, the ray gun was seen as too closely evoking a form of torture. Curiously, those issues were set aside when the weapon was recently shipped to Afghanistan. In addition to pioneering the use of ray guns as weapons of modern warfare, Raytheon continues to manufacture such old technology weapons as Maverick, Sparrow, Sidewinder, Tomahawk, Hawk, Patriot and Sea Sparrow missiles.

The Greens raise this today, because we have grave concerns that we are opening up our students to the influence of a company like Raytheon without perhaps providing some of these pieces of information to our students, and certainly without proper consultation of school communities. The Australian Education Union has opposition to such corporate sponsorship and its policy states, 'No sponsorship under any circumstances should be accepted from corporations involved in the ownership of armaments factories, sale or manufacture of armaments or environmentally damaging products.'

The Greens agree with that. We also alert the parliament to a new alliance which is forming (and I imagine we will hear a lot more of that in South Australia over the coming years) of human rights, peace, and political women's groups who believe that education should not be linked to a defence industry and certainly should not allow a company which is involved in the killing of children to have access to our best and brightest children.

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS: Mr President, I draw your attention to the state of the council.

A quorum having been formed:

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