Australian lawmaker slams colleague’s blind support for Azerbaijan

PanARMENIAN.Net - Senator Joe Bullock of Western Australia has delivered a speech in Australia’s Senate, blasting the anti-Armenian stance on Nagorno Karabakh recently expressed by his fellow Federal Australian politician, Member of Parliament for Cowan, Luke Simpkins.

Simpkins, the Chair of the Azerbaijan Australia Parliamentary Friendship Group, recently travelled to Azerbaijan as a guest of the petro-Dictatorship, and has since refused to meet with the Armenian side of the Nagorno Karabakh issue. Despite this unbalanced approach, and despite the Australian media questioning his relations with Azerbaijan and his other activities abroad, Simpkins has remained steadfast in what the Armenian National Committee of Australia (ANC Australia) has called his “assumed role as the chief communicator of the Azeri propaganda in Australia’s Parliament.”

Bullock proceeded to call out Simpkins’s “uncritical support for Azerbaijan,” sighting the history of the region of Nagorno Karabakh and why this democracy does not deserve the treatment the West Australian MP is serving. In his speech, Bullock also acknowledged the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, as well as the rights to self-determination for the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh.

“To speak, as the Member for Cowan [Simpkins] has repeatedly done in the other place [House of Representatives], of the “illegal occupiers of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan” is ludicrous. How can a people who have lived continuously in this region for centuries illegally occupy their own land?”

Bullock concluded his powerful address by saying: “[Nazi Germany Propaganda Minister] Joseph Goebbels may have notoriously preferred guns to butter, but the Australian government needs to take care that its efforts to increase exports of butter to Azerbaijan do not result in the Azerbaijanis more confidently turning their guns onto the brave citizens of Nagorno Karabakh.”