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

I heard an interjection from the member for Mallee, ‘They’re trying to sell wheat.’ That is exactly right. It is like this: the AWB’s task is to sell wheat. They are in the business of selling wheat. They should not have been paying anything to Alia or to anyone else. They should have been receiving money; they should not have been spending money. If you are wholesaling TVs to stores for $1,000 a pop, for example, and someone at the store says, ‘I want you to pay me $200 for each TV, but it is okay, you can bump up the invoice by another $200 and make it $1,200 per TV,’ you have to understand that something is rotten in the state of Denmark—or in this case the state of Iraq. But such is the pathetically inadequate level of scrutiny that the government claims it engaged in that it was not able to work this out.

I recently came across a mock script for South Park about this very issue which had a chorus of the United Nations, Canada, US Wheat Associates and sundry brown dogs saying to the Australian government, ‘Hey, the AWB is paying kickbacks to Saddam,’ and the Australian government says to the chorus, ‘Okay, we will thoroughly investigate that.’ DFAT goes off to the AWB and says, ‘Sorry to bother you, but are you paying kickbacks to Saddam?’ The AWB says, ‘No’. DFAT: ‘Okay then. Thanks.’ DFAT goes to the chorus and says, ‘We’ve thoroughly investigated your outrageous allegations and you’re totally wrong and simply jealous of our marvellous AWB men. And your sheep are ugly too.’

We have had the Minister for Foreign Affairs saying that the AWB was a flagship company. It was a flagship of convenience concealing the government from the consequences of its own actions. This is a government which should have seen the red flags in relation to the AWB. I want to take the House to the two specific instances where the government profited politically from the cover-up of these issues and from the conduct of the AWB. In each of these incidents, the role of the government must be thoroughly explored, given their vested interest in the cover-up. First, in 2002, as the Prime Minister embraced George Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, Saddam Hussein responded by threatening to cancel Australian wheat contracts. If those sales had stopped at that time, it would have been very embarrassing for the Prime Minister and those opposite. We opposed the proposed invasion; so too did the majority of the Australian public. If Australian wheat farmers had lost this important market as a result of the Prime Minister’s actions, the pressure on the Howard government not to ignore the United Nations on this issue would have been massive.

The AWB personnel went to Iraq in 2002 to save the day. We now know how they did it. They greatly increased the size of the kickbacks they were paying to Saddam. But the Australian people and Labor opposition were kept in the dark about this. We were never told that there was a price to be paid for being able to have our cake and eat it too, to attack Saddam mercilessly in public and still be his preferred salesman in private, and a price to be paid for protecting Australian farmers from the consequences of this government’s foreign policy. That price was the payment of bribes which propped up the Saddam regime, breached the UN sanctions, have done enormous damage to our reputation as honest traders and, in all probability, will now bite our wheat farmers on the backside as other countries move to punish us for undermining the UN sanctions and rorting the system. But it was all covered up so the Prime Minister was able to go off to war without Australians understanding what invading Iraq really meant for our future trade relations with Iraq.

The second occasion on which the Howard government profited from the cover-up of this scandal was during the 2004 election campaign. In October, the Australian Ambassador to the United States, Michael Thawley, visited the United States senator Norm Coleman, of the powerful US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and asked him to drop a committee investigation into alleged AWB kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime in exchange for wheat contracts. Ambassador Thawley assured Senator Coleman that there was no truth in the allegations and that AWB had not being paying bribes to Saddam. The inquiry was dropped.

This was unquestionably politically beneficial to the Howard government. A United States investigation into AWB kickbacks to Saddam would have been highly embarrassing to the Howard government at any time and particularly during the 2004 election campaign. It is also certain that Ambassador Thawley was not off on a frolic of his own when he visited Senator Coleman. He was under instructions from someone in the Howard government. The first question is: who? The second question is: how could they justify having an Australian ambassador mislead the United States Senate? On what basis, on what evidence and on what investigations did the Australian government assure the US senator that no kickbacks had been paid? We have had the AWB saying that they were the innocent victims of the deceit of Saddam Hussein. Now we have the Minister for Foreign Affairs out there suggesting that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was the innocent victim of the deceit of AWB. I dare say it will not be too long before we have the Prime Minister saying he was the innocent victim of Foreign Affairs.

The truth is that this debacle has been brought to you by the same people who brought you all the lies: ‘never, ever’ for the GST; children overboard; weapons of mass destruction—

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