Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That this House censures the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister for Foreign Affairs for:

(1)

their failure to investigate repeated warnings of breaches by AWB Limited of the United Nations Oil for Food Program; and

(2)

their gross negligence in allowing AWB to provide $300 million to the Saddam Regime through that program for the purchase of weapons and the funding of suicide bombers.

This is a scandal that goes to Australia’s international reputation, the safety of Australian troops serving in Iraq and our country’s national security. It is a sorry story of a government in a mode of reckless negligence, now fully exposed by evidence to the Cole inquiry and the shameful revelation that, presented with mounting evidence of kickbacks, the Prime Minister, the Minister for Trade and the Minister for Foreign Affairs all turned a blind eye.

Let us understand this completely. The case of reckless negligence is already proved. There can be no question about that. There were repeated warnings, which I will go into a little later. There were 41 contracts that had to be signed off by departmental officials and ministers. There was plenty of warning out there, massive amounts of it, that there were problems in the oil for food program—all of it out there inviting attention from a government official charged with the responsibility to ensure that this incredibly sensitive area of international politics and policy saw any Australian participation in it monitored to the nth degree by the ministers responsible. This clearly did not occur; therefore the case for reckless negligence is automatically proved.

Then there comes the question of turning the blind eye. There is a slightly different standard of proof applying to the question of turning a blind eye. There we must go to the details of the facts, not simply the process which occurred. Again, we on this side of the House accuse this government of turning a blind eye to the circumstances in which they were engaged. You cannot say that the way in which they handled complaints that came through from the Canadians, complaints that came through from the UN, the responsibilities that went to studying these contracts, which produced such huge gaps between the international market price and the price that was actually being received for the Australian wheat, was anything other than flashing warning signs that something was seriously wrong with this program. If nothing was done about it, then of course the case is proven for turning a blind eye to it.

We had a person appear before the Cole royal commission yesterday, Hogan, who pointed out in the course of his remarks that he just assumed that the gap was so great, and the government knew so much about it, that obviously the government must have known. And obviously that opinion was general throughout the Australian Wheat Board—throughout those servants associated with the AWB who had direct responsibility for this. They believed, obviously, that the government had turned a blind eye to this and that they were doing their masters’ will. Indeed, we believe that that is exactly what was happening.

This is so John Howard: arrogant, out of touch; spin, no substance. This government for 10 years has refused to burrow down into the entrails of their processes to ensure that—when they have made a statement out there and got all the wonderful gladhanding for keeping up the wheat sales to Iraq or whatever, and you can think of any other project in which they entertain themselveswhen it comes to getting down to the nuts and bolts and making sure that this is done in an acceptable way, our reputation is protected and nothing is happening which would render our troops unsafe if they were sent into this situation. Not a single jot of attention was paid and—we would say—with great deliberation on their part.

The consequences of it for the reputation of this nation are simply awful. We cannot assume from this that we are dealing here with one of those side issues which rise up every now and then in international politics but for which a Prime Minister or minister could be forgiven for not having paid any mind to the matters that were there before him. The simple fact of the matter is that this issue, the issue of the Saddam Hussein regime, the issue of the question of his weapons of mass destruction—or what were alleged to be his weapons of mass destruction—and the question of whether or not the sanctions regime imposed on him was effective, was front and centre at the heart of US foreign policy, the foreign policy of our principal ally, for about a decade before the war in Iraq.

It was an absolute moral, legal and political obligation on the government to ensure that in every element of Australian participation in international politics where those issues of concern to our allies were raised, where those issues of concern to Iraq’s neighbours were raised and where those issues of concern to the UN were raised, it was the responsibility of Australian ministers—not UN officials, not Australian public servants; not even, in the end, AWB CEOs and servants. In the process there is supposed to be a minister with a guiding hand and an absolute determination as the final point of reference for the Australian national interest, to make absolutely certain that the Australian national interest was being protected. And Howard, Downer, and Vaile failed their nation. They failed their parliament.

They were the three wise monkeys of this issue: they saw no evil, they spoke no evil, they heard no evil. But they knew all about the evil, every one of them. Yet they stand in here, boasting of their ignorance and puffing themselves up for the press gallery and the gallery here. ‘I am so proud of the fact that I am a completely ignorant human being’, says the Prime Minister. ‘I am so proud of the fact that I and my ministers didn’t administer one jot or tittle of this particular program. It was all the UN’s fault. It was all the AWB’s fault.’ Three hundred million dollars went to Saddam Hussein—the biggest element of the whole program: 15 per cent of it.

And what did this program do? It did three things: three things into which Australian money went. And the Prime Minister sneakily said, ‘No, it wasn’t my responsibility to look at that; it was the UN’s responsibility to look at it.’ That $300 million went to pay for Saddam Hussein’s research effort into weapons of mass destruction—that is absolutely clear. That $300 million went to arm Iraqi troops—actually, not so much Iraqi troops but the insurgent element: the Fedayeen. That same Fedayeen subsequently became the basis of one part of the insurgency which is now killing and maiming thousands of Americans and thousands of Iraqis. That is what Australian money went to. And it went to arming troops who may—and thank God it has not occurred yet—mount attacks on Australian soldiers now serving in Iraq.

Poor old Bob Menzies got labelled Pig Iron Bob for sending pig-iron to the Japanese before 1939. What are we to describe this Prime Minister as: Wheat Bag Johnny? From his performance here, he is every bit as deserving of the sort of epithet that was attached to Menzies. This is incredibly serious.

You see them out there again today—the spin merchants—as they try to work their way through the press gallery and out into the public to get their explanation out; to get their straw men erected and invite the media and the public to pay attention to their straw men. They are out there singing and dancing with them, as they go and split hairs over the levels of approval and responsibility that each has. They have one responsibility only, as ministers, and that is to make sure that everything, particularly in major areas of their departments, is done according to the laws that are established for them and the policies which surround those laws—and in this instance they have failed massively.

They are out there saying too that the demand in the United States that we examine this is a product of nefarious behaviour by wheat lobbyists in the United States, and that that is all that Coleman, Daschle and all the journalists in the United States are concerned and worried about. They are just worried about their wheat contracts in competition with us. No doubt they have an interest in those particular wheat contracts, but I will tell you about another interest the Americans have—and if this government does not do this inquiry properly, it will come home to haunt it. I note that the Prime Minister is not in the chamber—more of his arrogance. The United States complaint about this is driven primarily not by their wheat interests but by the fact that 15,000 young Americans have been killed and maimed in the Iraqi exercise, and so have countless thousands of Iraqis.

There are many Americans now who would have much preferred that the United States government had not proceeded in the way in which it did. But the fact of the matter is that it has happened, and many in the United States believe that, it having happened, it has to be brought to a conclusion that they would consider satisfactory. But think of the bitterness, the sorrow, in thousands of American households who have had their young men and young women returned to them either in a body bag or with limbs missing. The injuries that come from the bomb blasts alongside the roads these days are not a little pinprick in your left shoulder or the loss of a thumb. The people who survive the terrible bomb blasts are horribly maimed, and every town in the Midwest of the United States has such young men and women. So when they find that the Australian government has been responsible for 15 per cent of this and that funds from the biggest program that has gone to Saddam’s regime are now supporting the insurgency, they want the questions answered. They will not accept that Australian ministers and the government are irresponsible here; they will want performance.

There is a lot of goodwill in the United States towards this country. But this government has never cottoned on to this fact: Australia does not simply have an alliance with whatever administration is in place at any point in time—the Bush administration or whatever—Australia’s alliance is with the United States, and it is meant to be timeless. There are many more people who have a hand, a stake, a vote—as the American administration folk are wont to say—in what happens to that particular relationship. Whatever the attitudes of the people who support the Bush administration might be to this government, we need not only them—we need the members of Congress and ordinary decent Americans. They have had to carry so much over the last 50 years of world politics: in keeping the international community safe and secure, in taking upon themselves the serious possibility that they might be obliterated by nuclear weapons in order to preserve the central balance. And what does this lot opposite do? They sneakily go through the process of providing $300 million by their negligence to an enemy who at one point they believed was planning, with weapons of mass destruction, a similar fate for them as the Soviet Union once contemplated.

Do not think this is not serious. Do not let anybody out there think that this matter ends with whatever the debate is in this chamber, or with the question times of this chamber, or with the Cole commission. But I tell you this, and I put the government on notice here: if the United States found out that they had been lied to again, that the inquiry that was proceeding could not be an inquiry into the behaviours and responsibilities of ministers and officials, they would be completely unforgiving. If the United States believed that, however independent this inquiry, it had been circumscribed by the terms of reference that had been put onto it, do not think for one minute that they would take the view that this had been an adequate inquiry.

Let us get to why they should have known. The simple fact of the matter is that they had passed to them by the Canadians, through the United Nations, a statement that the Canadian wheat board equivalent had found that, when they had approached the Iraqis, they were invited to pay the same price—which was a bribe price—that the Australians had paid. They were directly told this. This was not a freebooter. This was not an international pirate. This was not a bunch of people who we would regard as ne’er-do-wells. This happened to be a respectable government, the government of Canada, which had every bit as much of an interest in the wheat market as the Australian government and Australian farmers. They put that through to the United Nations.

The government had that raised with them by the United Nations. They rang the Wheat Board. They asked, ‘Are you committing murder most foul, old son?’ ‘Oh, no, we’re not’ was the answer. ‘An investigation has been made, then. We can sign it off to the United Nations that there is no problem here. We have had it investigated, and they denied it absolutely.’ Remember that these are complaints that ended up in ministers’ offices; we know this. The ministers cannot claim they were not aware that all this was going on. The complaints ended up in ministers’ offices from officials who had close connections in the past with ministers and were no doubt following very closely what the Wheat Board had to say. That was it. The assurances were given and the UN ticked off on the Australian assurances. The UN may have had some degree of responsibility for this program, but it required the advice of Australians to know whether or not their rules and regulations were being offended.

Contemplate what that chap said yesterday at the royal commission about a $50 gap in the price of wheat—a huge gap, which had to be explained by something. There were other events—which our shadow spokesman on foreign affairs will talk in more detail about—such as the fact that all of a sudden the wheat contracts that the government ticks off on have the transport component removed from them and they just get the overall global amount. But, as Mr Hogan said, you would have thought that from the global amount they would have been able to draw their conclusions. You would have thought that the exclusion of the transport costs would be enough for them to draw their conclusions that something untoward was happening, but nothing happened with the administration of this program when those warning bells were flashing out before them.

The sheer, unmitigated hypocrisy of this government; the sheer reckless negligence of this government; the sheer arrogance, in turning a blind eye, of this government; the sheer worthlessness of this government, in the way it tries to point its finger now at everybody else. It was even blaming us! ‘You as an opposition did not do enough,’ it said, ‘to monitor us and make sure we were behaving ourselves. You are to blame for all this.’ Just in case it thinks we are to blame, I will go to a statement made by Senator Kerry O’Brien and Craig Emerson entitled ‘Iraq kickback claims must be investigated’, which they put out on 6 June 2003:

US Wheat Associates has told the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, that Australian wheat contracts under the UN Oil for Food program were inflated by millions of dollars per shipload and “the excess may have gone into accounts of Saddam Hussein’s family.”

While the claims appear bizarre, it is important they are properly investigated and disposed of as quickly as possible.

That was the extent that the opposition supported you, Mr Prime Minister. We thought you actually ought to do your job—which you absolutely, manifestly failed to do. Then you sent a good man, your Ambassador to the United States, to make sure that, during the election campaign—this was now way after the event—nothing embarrassing arose to haunt you. So you made a decent man say to another decent man, who happened to head up the US Senate’s investigation of all of this, that all those claims against the Wheat Board were bogus, they did not happen.

The minister tried to get up today and say somehow or other there had been a change of tune from the said senator. There was no change of tune; it is only that the poor old senator thinks that this is a thoroughgoing investigation. No doubt he will discover differently. When he discovers differently, do not think he is going to be very happy at all—but we will leave that to one side.

The simple fact of the matter is that these craven people thought this might be mildly embarrassing for them during the 2004 election, so what did they do? Even though, by now, ministers know they have a serious problem on their hands with the Volcker commission already under way, they say there was nothing wrong. You say to the Americans that there was nothing wrong with the Wheat Board. This government has lied, deceived, turned a blind eye, been recklessly indifferent—

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