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

Mr Deputy Speaker, I draw your attention again to standing order 76(c), which says that public affairs may be debated. The conduct of the Wheat Board is a public affair. I know that there are some members in this house who do not want to hear about the Australian Wheat Board, but it is a legitimate matter of public importance and that is why we should be talking about it now, and other members should be talking about it as well. The member for Fisher, who spoke before me, proposed that the single desk be abolished. No-one pulled him up and said, ‘You’re not speaking in relation to the appropriation bill.’

If anyone at all still believes that the AWB thought it was complying with the UN sanctions, they should have a look at the BHP Tigris deal. BHP and the AWB concocted a scheme to recover a debt from a BHP wheat shipment to Iraq. For a recovery fee of $500,000, the AWB secretly inflated wheat contracts under the oil for food program to help recover BHP’s debt. They did this despite a federal government ruling expressly telling them that trying to recover money for the wheat would contravene the UN sanctions program.

BHP had been given approval to provide the wheat to Iraq only on the basis that it was a gift. Anything else would breach the sanctions regime. Subsequently, it decided to recover $US5 million for the wheat with interest. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade expressly told BHP executives Tom Harley and Mr Charles Stott, then of the Wheat Board, that trading with Iraq was banned, so seeking payment for the wheat would breach sanctions. Mr Stott was not happy. He said, ‘This sanctimonious position is inhibiting our trading relationship with Iraq and has resulted in lost opportunities’ for AWB.

So instead of dropping the matter, Mr Harley and Mr Stott worked on getting around the UN sanctions and recovering the money anyway. Mr Harley from BHP is a very well connected Liberal Party figure. Meetings of one of the Liberal Party factions have been held at his home and the Howard government appointed him to chair the Australian Heritage Commission. What is BHP going to do about Mr Harley, who is now covered in the stench of the stinking, rotting carcass of the Tigris deal? This was a straight up and down attempt to deceive the UN by BHP and AWB. These companies put out bucket loads of flowery words about their commitment to ethics and high standards of corporate governance—all that blah blah blah. Let us see some action to match those words.

Then there is the Wheat Export Authority. It admitted it had examined reported kickbacks from AWB to Iraq, contrary to the evidence it gave to a Senate committee in November. But the authority found no evidence of illegal payments, with chairman Tim Besley declaring it had given AWB a ‘clean bill of health’. Again, this is not good enough. Both the failure to discover and the failure to disclose are indicative that the Wheat Export Authority has failed in its primary mission to safeguard Australia’s wheat trading reputation. What is the government going to do about this? Turn the usual blind eye, I suppose. Lord Nelson has nothing on those opposite.

I want to take the House back to the Prime Minister’s statement of 31 January, when he said:

There were no alarm bells, there was no suggestion, there was no evidence before us that AWB was paying any bribes ...

Can the Prime Minister tell us what would constitute an alarm bell for him? We had the issue raised with us by the UN 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? There is a quaint if somewhat vulgar expression in Melbourne: he wouldn’t know if a tram was up him till the conductor rang the bell! To hear the Prime Minister say there were no alarm bells ringing about AWB kickbacks—

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