Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade and International Security) Share this | Hansard source

You know it because the Volcker inquiry has been running for a couple of years now, from the beginning of 2004. You have had teams of bureaucrats throughout DFAT raking through the files, finding everything it is possible to find, and still today we have ministers at the dispatch box thinking it is a fair and reasonable thing to evade the question. These are critical questions. The events of 1999 date from when this scandal began.

We also asked the Minister for Trade questions concerning the Tigris matter. I would have thought that a Deputy Prime Minister of Australia would come into this parliament somewhat better briefed than this one was today. Twice he was asked, first by me, then by the Leader of the Opposition, a very simple and basic question: did you, your office or your department provide any assistance to the AWB, BHP or Tigris to recover moneys from Saddam Hussein’s regime? It is a very simple and direct question of the type that is often asked here. This minister, the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, could not answer that straight. He evaded, and if he thinks that the people watching question time today missed the point that he evaded it completely he is sadly mistaken.

This saga in the scandal—that is, what happened in the events of 1999—is critical. Had the Howard government, had the Minister for Foreign Affairs and had the trade minister been doing the job that they are paid to do, then the subsequent five-year-long, $300 million scandal would not have happened. It could have been nipped in the bud right back then. So far in the parliament in the last 24 hours we have looked at the powers and responsibilities which had this government’s name attached to them, entrenched by UN Security Council resolution 661, requiring national governments—nobody else—to ensure that none of their corporations or individuals were going to provide funding or illicit goods to Saddam Hussein’s regime.

In this place yesterday we ran through the seven sets of warnings this government has been presented with over the last several years about what the AWB was up to in Iraq. There were the UN’s warnings in early 2000, Canadian warnings prior to that, more UN warnings in March 2000, following up again with a report by the US Government Accountability Office in April 2002, before the Iraq war. Then after the Iraq war we saw warnings from the coalition provisional authority in June 2003, seven senators writing publicly to the United States administration in October 2003 and, to cap it all off, the CIA’s own report in 2004 about what had happened with the rorts on the oil for food program. These were all warnings which these ministers chose deliberately to ignore.

We have also dealt in this parliament so far with what happened to the money afterwards. I know, Minister Vaile, you find that a difficult question to answer, because if I were in your position I would be humiliated by that question. Because of your own failure to discharge your responsibilities, who knows where the $300 million ended up? We know for a fact from the CIA that some of it went off to fund weapons. The unanswered question is what happened in the bank in Amman, in Jordan. That is where Alia’s money was coughed into and that is where the money was coughed out to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. It is a pretty basic question.

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