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

I seek leave to move the following motion:

That this House censure the Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and the Minister for Transport and Regional Services for:

(1)

concealing from the Parliament the full extent of their knowledge of the breaches by AWB Limited of the United Nations Oil for Food Program; and

(2)

their failure to prevent AWB from making payments totalling $300 million to the Saddam Regime through that program for the purchase of weapons and the funding of suicide bombers.

Leave not granted.

I move:

That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the Leader of the Opposition moving forthwith: That this House censure the Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and the Minister for Transport and Regional Services for:

(1)

concealing from the Parliament the full extent of their knowledge of the breaches by AWB Limited of the United Nations Oil for Food Program; and

(2)

their failure to prevent AWB from making payments totalling $300 million to the Saddam regime through that program for the purchase of weapons and the funding of suicide bombers.

This is a massive scandal and yet they will not permit a censure motion on it. We had the Minister for Foreign Affairs desperately trying to clean up for his National Party colleagues here with his answer. He stood up in this place and said that the money that went to Saddam Hussein corruptly under this program was not used for the insurgency, for weapons or for the payment of suicide bombers. He said that, despite the fact that the Coalition Provisional Authority advised him that that was a serious possibility. That is point 1.

Point 2: he said that despite the fact that the Iraq Survey Group, run by the CIA and with many Australian participants, found exactly the same thing. You should hang your heads in shame on this. You have been desperate all week to drag the Cole commission down over yourselves like some sort of cupola over a bunker and to say that the blame lies here with the AWB types and nowhere else. Gradually, slowly, kicking and screaming, you brought your own people into it, but you have still not put them into it fully.

The simple fact of the matter is that the National Party has used this program to satisfy its constituency and, at the same time as using this program to satisfy its constituency, it has trashed the reputation of this nation, has damaged our ally and has trashed the long-term viability of the way in which we do wheat sales in this country—all of it sitting on your desks.

It is obviously very difficult for the media to understand the significance of what was put down yesterday. I understand that; there is so much detail in this program that it is always difficult to see the wood for the trees. When you have one piece of documentation after another pouring out—hints, whispers, indications, possibilities of some degree of knowledge of what was going on, you forget the fundamentals of it.

The fundamentals of it are that you have one agency reporting to your ministry of agriculture. It was not, as you deceitfully told parliament last year, that there were no matters related to transport or the detail of contracts, but in fact a great deal of detail. There was a considerable amount of detail when they looked at those 17 contracts and detail when they looked at others. From 1999 onwards, they were persistently examining, piece by piece, each of those contracts for the structure of the payments that were being made. As a result of that, they should have been sending one message of warning after another to you. You chose to turn a blind eye to those messages.

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