CANBERRA: Senator Joe Bullock of Western Australia today delivered a speech in Australia’s Senate, blasting the anti-Armenian stance on Nagorno-Karabakh recently expressed by his fellow Federal Australian politician, MP 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".

On the first 2016 sitting day of Parliament, Bullock spoke in Australia’s Senate, recalling his late-2015 meeting with an ANC Australia delegation headed by Republic of Nagorno Karabakh MP, Davit Ishkhanyan.

He 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.

After highlighting the historical background of how Nagorno Karabakh was always Armenian, and explaining the oppressive Azeri regime forcing the Armenians of the region to vote for Independence in a referendum, Bullock said:

“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?”
For full Armenian National Committee of Australia (ANC Australia) statement click HERE