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

Of course, Mr Speaker—to censure this government. The simple fact of the matter is that the Senate’s inability to ask the officials questions was not an inability imposed during the last Cole royal commission. Why? Of course, the government liked that royal commission. It was a royal commission into the unions. Nor was it imposed on them during the HIH royal commission. Why not? Because the government liked the idea that it could duckshove to someone else the blame for its incapacity to properly supervise financial markets.

The government had it all nicely set up. But the Cole royal commission shows all sorts of signs of going rogue on them as one piece of information after another comes before it—and it is why the government should be censured. We see that, for the Cole royal commission, out come the documents. ‘We met with the minister.’ Out comes another document: ‘I had a discussion with the minister.’ They are scared rotten that day by day in the Cole royal commission more and more of these hints of common knowledge inside the government about what was going on in AWB will come out. We get information from unusual sources. The last was a spectacular performance by the Prime Minister’s right-hand man in the Senate, Senator Heffernan, when he got up and said that for 2½ years he had been getting farmers, officials and all sorts of people coming to him to tell him how corrupt the AWB deals were in Iraq. That is what Heffernan used.

The point is this. We know that that information was coming into the government persistently and they turned a blind eye to it. You do not know where the AWB ends and the National Party begins. You simply do not know that. The AWB is the National Party overseas branch as far as its operations are concerned.

What is engaged in here is a disgraceful act of concealment. The Prime Minister has defended himself repeatedly on his limited terms of reference for the Cole commission by saying that Volcker had an opportunity to review all the matters before the government, all the documentation, and that he, Volcker, chose to make no findings on the government—he chose to make no findings on the government, but he made findings in relation to the AWB. That is an absolute lie.

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