Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. My query is: can the Prime Minister tell us what would constitute an alarm bell for him? We had the issue raised with us by the United Nations in 2002, after the Canadians raised it with them for the very good reason that the Iraqis had asked them to pay the same sorts of bribes they were getting from AWB. How was this not an alarm bell? Then in 2003 the American lobby group US Wheat Associates made a formal complaint to US Secretary of State Colin Powell. How was this not an alarm bell? Then there was the Washington state Senator Patty Murray’s 2003 statement urging the Bush administration to investigate the issue, stressing:

... U.S. taxpayers have a right to ask if Australia acted improperly in close cooperation with the former government of Saddam Hussein to manipulate wheat sales.

In what way was this not an alarm bell?

When the Prime Minister had his attention drawn to a letter from him to the AWB suggesting the AWB maintain close contact with his government, he denied that this suggested he would have known anything about the bribes. He said the letter just proved he was doing his job. Surely if we had ministerial standards in this country, doing his job would have meant knowing, would have meant finding out about the AWB bribes to Saddam Hussein and finding out about the breaching of UN sanctions.

There are many questions for Ministers Downer and Vaile to answer as well. Just who told Ambassador Thawley to tell the United States congressional committee chair, Senator Coleman, that there was no basis for investigating whether the AWB had paid kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq? Just what inquiries did they make before providing assurances to the United States, which have turned out to be utterly baseless and utterly misleading? And even earlier, in November 2003, a number of United States senators wrote to the then Secretary of State, Colin Powell, expressing grave concern that the AWB had been paid inflated prices for wheat by the Iraqi regime. Did any of these ministers even know this had happened? If they did, what investigations did they undertake into the accuracy of the United States senators’ grave concerns?

We had Minister Vaile describe concerns expressed in the US Senate that Australia had:

… acted improperly in close co-operation with the former government of Saddam Hussein to manipulate wheat sales …

as ‘quite insulting’. The question is: what inquiries did Minister Vaile make before making such a cavalier dismissal? When Senate minority leader Tom Daschle wrote to President George Bush in October 2003 asking him to raise allegations about the AWB paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime with Prime Minister Howard, the Australian embassy wrote to Senator Daschle saying the allegations against the AWB were ‘reprehensible’. What the public needs to know is who approved that letter? Was it the foreign affairs minister? If it was the foreign affairs minister, what investigations did he make prior to making such a bold assertion?

There is the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. We want Minister McGauran to tell us whether the AWB, prior to paying hundreds of millions of dollars to the Jordanian trucking company, Alia, ever bothered to find out whether this trucking company actually owned any trucks. We cannot have our reputation made an international laughing-stock while these ministers—the foreign minister, the trade minister, the agriculture minister—revel in their incompetence and make a virtue of their incompetence. ‘We never knew what was going on,’ they say, even though it was raining allegations. The US, the UN, Canada, the Iraqi provisional authority, the Wheat Export Authority—the stories were coming from everywhere.

I do not have a lot in the way of religious convictions, but some of these ministers are strong evidence for the theory of ‘reintarnation’—that is, that some of us after death come back to life as hillbillies. This has been a hillbilly performance from start to finish. The Prime Minister—the Kirribilli hillbilly—has long since thrown out his code of conduct and allowed ministerial standards and Australia’s reputation to sink lower and lower. Those photos of AWB officials posing with guns in Iraq speak volumes about a cowboy outfit with a frontier mentality and a contempt for the international rule of law.

The fact is that prime ministerial and ministerial standards of accountability have been steadily eroding in this country for the past decade, and it has got to stop. Does anyone seriously doubt that the strenuous lobbying efforts by the Australian embassy against the United States’ investigation into the AWB’s deals with the Saddam Hussein regime were motivated by a desire to avoid these issues coming to light prior to the 2004 election and, therefore, save the government from political embarrassment? Does anyone seriously doubt that the government turned a blind eye to the fact that in 2002 the Wheat Board was able to go to Iraq and secure continued wheat contracts from Australia, continued wheat sales into Iraq, at a time when the Prime Minister’s bellicose rhetoric had caused Saddam Hussein to threaten an end to those wheat contracts?

On what basis was the Wheat Board able to achieve this? It was able to achieve this by upping the kickbacks that were being paid. The Australian government turned a blind eye to that; it made no attempt to find that out, because it was happy for the wheat contracts to continue. It certainly did not want to see Australian wheat farmers paying the price for this Prime Minister’s foreign policy.

It is time for the lies to stop. It is time for the cover-ups to stop. It is time to extend the Cole commission’s terms of reference to cover the conduct of government ministers and officials. And it is time for ministers who either do not understand ethics and integrity in trade and foreign policy or who are too incompetent to see that honesty prevails throughout their areas of portfolio responsibility to make way for ministers who can. This has been a scandalous and shameful affair, and the Howard government’s double standards on this matter have been absolutely breathtaking. It is quite clear as the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle get pieced together that AWB payments were the largest discretionary cash payments that Saddam had access to, and so we ended up sending money off to the Iraqi government, which ended up as rewards and incentives for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

See this speech in context