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

What a disgraceful performance we saw from the Prime Minister in question time today—the ducking and shoving away of responsibility for this tragic scandal from himself. The one thing on his mind is: how can I and my ministers escape blame? How can we make absolutely certain that, whatever comes out of this, we will not have to accept responsibility for the worst scandal in many a long year in federal history? It is the most incompetent performance by a government: the trashing of our national reputation, the wreckage of the interests of the major trading components of our economy, our farmers—the trashing of all of that. How could the Prime Minister evade responsibility for that and throw as much smoke, as much of a camouflage, as he possibly can all over it here in question time?

He even got to the point where he was blaming the opposition shadow spokesman on foreign affairs for his ‘lack of attention’ to his job, as though it is the responsibility of the opposition to sit down and read the intelligence reports—all the cables, all the materials, that come in from all the diplomats—and stick up a flag and say, ‘Hey, Mr Prime Minister, take a look out for this,’ as though that was the opportunity we had and as though that was our responsibility. The simple fact of the matter is that he and his ministers were responsible. They were getting the cables and the analyses and they had day-to-day control of these matters—and they failed.

Then we saw another performance yesterday. What bold analyses there were out there in the editorials. What extraordinary things were to be expected of the Prime Minister. What did he let out then? The view that he was really going to get to grips with the situation which had emerged. He was going to put together the best possible mechanism for ensuring that we had a decent outcome in Iraq. We were going to cut adrift the elements of the scandal that the Iraqi government was objecting to, to wit AWB. We were going to be there; we were going to be decisive.

What a damp squib he produced—as though the only person he could send to effectively represent the grains interests was the chairman of AWB! It was sheer lack of courage on the part of the Prime Minister that he selected Mr Stewart when so many others were available in the Grains Council from any of the other organisations. All he needed to get from AWB was AWB’s permission, if you like, to stand aside from the contract. The Prime Minister did not effectively achieve that sufficiently to ensure that he went away with a delegation that looked as though we were making a fresh start on this as we approached the Iraqis.

They should be able to succeed; they ought to be able to succeed. The simple fact of the matter is that, if the government’s connections with Iraq mean anything at all, it ought to be a simple matter for that delegation to succeed in its objective in getting the Australian farmers back into that market. But they decided that they would handicap themselves on the way through.

The Prime Minister should be on his knees begging for forgiveness from the wheat farmers of Australia. When they needed him to protect them from this $300 million bribery scandal, he turned his back on them. Instead of protecting the Australian farmers, he is scrambling to protect himself and his ministers. This is an arrogant government. They have been abusing their total power, scrambling to save themselves at any cost, blatantly ignoring the national interest in pursuit of blind political self-interest, covering up their sorry hides, trashing our farmers’ livelihoods, damaging our national economy, undermining our reputation as an honest player, endangering the lives of our troops in Iraq, turning a blind eye to what we know was a systematic and deliberate rorting of the oil for food program and channelling hundreds of millions of dollars into Saddam’s coffers.

But, for the Prime Minister, this counts for nothing. Instead of coming clean, the Prime Minister and his ministers have swung into damage control—they stonewall, dissemble, evade questions and use their total power to close down parliamentary scrutiny. When ministerial heads should be rolling, they gag public servants and curtail Cole to quarantine their ministers. They are a law unto themselves, accountable to no-one—least of all, the Australian people and, far less, the hapless wheat farmers, who are the innocent victims of a shameless scandal, unwitting pawns in this disgraceful mess who will pay with their own economic security. The farmers now know that Saddam made almost as much out of Australian wheat as they did.

But, instead of going out to our wheat farmers and begging their forgiveness, what does this Prime Minister do? What is the best political spin he can come up with? What answer does he give? ‘I don’t know; no-one told me; I wasn’t informed.’ He pleads ignorant stupidity. How badly are you travelling when stupidity is the best you can come up with—the Forrest Gump defence? Then, in a bizarre example of policy on the run, the Prime Minister hastily dispatches a rescue mission to Iraq that includes executives from AWB, the very people who presided over the regime of kickbacks and bribes. Frankly, it is like sending the burglar back to the scene of the crime!

The government persistently hide behind this fiction that the Cole royal commission can answer all the questions in relation to their own behaviour. Our shadow spokesman on foreign affairs will have a bit to say later about Bret Walker’s opinion. But let me make this absolutely clear: what that opinion demonstrates is what all of us here know by commonsense—that there is a different treatment of the AWB executives in this and of the potential Commonwealth officers involved, including ministers. They cannot escape that. That is simply a fact.

There is different treatment between the two. On one side, they will face the full blast of Cole’s independent scrutiny; on the other, that has caveats attached to it. That is the first point. The second point is this: there is a lot more that the Australian people want to know about this particular scandal which has so dishonoured our nation. They want to know, for example, where the money went. There is nothing in Cole’s terms of reference which will establish where those hundreds of millions of dollars went where we had the rescue contracts, on the last occasion in 2003, one of which we revealed here yesterday.

The Prime Minister accuses us of presenting no evidence, yet we do document after document at every question time. This particular document demonstrated that Saddam, in this last rescue mission of Mr Vaile, got as much out of the wheat contract as the Australian farmers. That was pretty spectacular. That certainly was the best performance, if you like, of the corrupt other end on this. As to where that money went afterwards, there is no inquiry as far as we are concerned.

What was the money used for? There is no inquiry. Yesterday the Prime Minister got on television. I admit that, from time to time, I am reasonably accused of using the odd abstract or difficult word. But when asked by the interviewer whether he could tell him and the Australian people what this money was used for, he used this expression: ‘Kerry, money is fungible.’ Let me say this: money is not fungible in this sense. What the Prime Minister has decided is that this issue is ‘fudgeable’—a much more readily understood term. He does not want an inspection of this because manifestly it demonstrates the culpability of this government for turning a blind eye to a set of events that saw the funding of some of the more horrible things around the globe.

A further thing that the Cole inquiry cannot inquire into is how much of this money remains unaccounted for, given that AWB’s kickbacks to Iraq continued for 18 months after the collapse of Saddam’s regime. This is an interesting thing. Who got the money in those 18 months? We know that Saddam got the money before then. We do not know who got the money after then. There seems to me to be three candidates for this. First, the Australian wheat farmers might have got it. It would have been a change, if they got the price that was paid for the wheat that was sold to Iraq. It would have been good if that happened, but I suspect that is not what happened. Second, it might have gone into the hands of Wheat Board agents and ended up in the back kick of some of the people who are going to be appearing before the Cole inquiry, though this is not an area that is going to be inquired into. Three, I am afraid to say that it is much more likely that it kept going to Alia; it kept going to the transport companies. And if it kept going to the transport companies, it was directly funding the Ba’athist component of the insurgency. The Australian people are entitled to an answer on that. They are entitled to know what the truth is as far as that is concerned.

Everything the Prime Minister does is to take the edge off any parliamentary scrutiny on him, to get rid of the Senate processes associated with it, to get rid of the Senate estimates committees—what is now demonstrated to be, or has been, one of the most effective mechanisms of accountability of government.

You come into this chamber and shut down every censure debate that we have moved, bar one, at the outset. You obfuscate on every question that is asked of you by the opposition. You tell the public that the opposition is presenting no evidence here, despite the fact that at every question time we have presented a document, a new strand of evidence that was readily available to and could have been picked up by the government. It could have had knowledge of this and saved the honour of this country. This slothful, lazy government is great on spin but, when it comes to delivering solid administration of any particular area, it is an absolute no-account bunch of bottom-feeding fish. That is what this government amounts to when it comes to any effective accountability or any effective administration in this place.

We saw a bit more of what we had to deal with here. I have nothing against Mr Stewart—he is obviously a person of interest in this situation—but his job now is to sit down and work his way through his papers and prepare his organisation for the further inquiries of the Cole commission. Talk about obfuscation! When I first raised this letter with the Prime Minister, I asked, ‘Have you seen this letter?’ ‘Of course not,’ says the Prime Minister. ‘No, you are springing this one on me’—a letter that was copied to the Prime Minister, I might say, and I thought would have sat indelibly on his mind, given that he has said he has devoted a great deal of attention to it. He has said things in this letter which are so blatantly untrue.

You cannot tell me, Mr Deputy Speaker Causley—and you would know something about this as a National Party member—that there is not somebody in the Grains Council or in Cooperative Bulk Handling in Western Australia who could take Mr Stewart’s position in this particular delegation. All you needed to do was to sit down with Stewart and say, ‘Listen, you fellows have disgraced us—admittedly, we’re in it with you—and you’re out of this. You sign one letter saying that as far as you’re concerned you waive your rights over this particular trade to Iraq at this particular point in time, full stop.’ That is what would be protecting the interests of the farmers. But they cannot do this because they have no moral authority—and they know it—because the AWB people whom they are addressing know that they are in on the joke. The simple fact of the matter is that they cannot deal straight with AWB because AWB know that they have partners in crime. They know all about you; everything out there is confected. There is this brolga dance around this heap, this mess, of corruption that has to be danced by the ministers, pretending they are doing something and praying that AWB do not cough up that at least some of them were in on the joke.

This is going to go on for some considerable period of time in this place, because this is a major scandal that goes to the heart of the way this government governs. The fact is that this government cannot defend the Australian national interest because it is too lazy, too slothful, too unprincipled to be able to sensibly administer our foreign policy and our domestic affairs. (Time expired)

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