Australia: A 'Click and Collect' Weapons Warehouse for Israel

Let’s start with the Albanese government’s favourite comforting phrase: “non-lethal parts.” Penny Wong uses it to argue that Australia’s role in the F-35 fight jet program doesn’t make us responsible for what happens in Gaza. Well, it gets worse. Because it turns out we’re not just a supplier - we’re a 'click and collect' weapons warehouse.

Declassified Australia has uncovered how the government's own shipping records show F-35 parts are regularly flown from Australia to Israel. Australia functions like a logistics node: parts are warehoused at the Williamtown Airbase near Newcastle as part of the F-35 sustainment system, then shipped on demand through the program’s global pipeline. That’s not a metaphor - it is precisely how integrated supply chains work, and it is why the “non-lethal” framing is so slippery. An F-35 isn’t lethal because of one magic component. It’s lethal because all the components arrive, on time, to keep it flying.

And these transfers matter deeply in context. Israel’s conduct in Gaza is the subject of war crimes and crimes against humanity investigations, and the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant. A genocide case against Israel is also underway at the International Court of Justice.

So when Australia’s F-35 parts go to Israel, they go into an environment saturated with grave legal and moral risk. The government can call the parts “non-lethal” all it likes; as punters, we judge them by what they enable.

The “frequent shopper”… and the next rewards member

Now to the second punchline: Donald Trump has agreed to sell F-35s to Saudi Arabia. When it joins the F-35 club, the same global sustainment logic will apply: jets need parts, parts need warehouses, warehouses become pipelines. That’s how you end up with the “On-line Bunnings” problem: Australia as a convenient shelf in someone else’s military-industrial machine - servicing, potentially, not just one “frequent shopper”, but a growing list.

And Saudi Arabia’s human-rights record isn't an abstract debating point. Saudi executions surged to around 330 in 2024, and its criminal code still endorses stoning people to death for so-called 'crimes' like adultery. If this regime is being welcomed into the F-35 ecosystem, Australians are entitled to ask: what exactly are we signing up to enable and normalise?

The law Australia promised to follow (and why “weasel words” won’t cut it)

Australia is a party to the Arms Trade Treaty which applies not only to weapons systems, but explicitly to parts and components. The Treaty’s core logic is simple: you don’t authorise exports if you know they would be used to commit genocide, crimes against humanity, or certain war crimes, and you must assess the risk of serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law.

Here’s the point that should bother any Australian who still believes sovereignty means something: if weapons parts are sitting on Australian soil, routed through Australian airports, and leaving under permits Australia approves (or arrangements Australia tolerates), then Australia is not a bystander. We are a participant. And “non-lethal components” starts to sound like what it is: a rhetorical excuse for a supply chain that's doing exactly what it was designed to do.

The pub test: are we a country, or a warehouse?

Sending F-35 parts into the machinery of Israel’s genocide in Gaza - and potentially to Saudi Arabia - doesn't pass the pub test. Not morally. Not politically. Not strategically. Because if we’re an online warehouse, we’re part of the system.

Sovereignty isn’t just about control. It’s about responsibility. Right now, it looks like we’re exercising neither.

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