John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

That statement was based on quite widely circulated material—and I refer in particular to an address by the British foreign secretary, Mr Jack Straw; for the benefit of the member, I will get him the precise reference—and also plenty of open source reports at the time which suggested that a number of things were happening: that Saddam was selling oil on a bilateral basis to bypass the UN sanction and was also adopting the practice of leaving unspent amounts in the United Nations escrow account and then pointing to the inevitable suffering of his own people to support his argument that the suffering was due to the behaviour of the allies. That is the basis of the claim, and it is totally accurate.

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