Alexander Downer (Mayo, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Griffith interjects. I want to say that I am disappointed. I am a bit more than that: I am hurt! The fact is that we had all the answers ready to go—and the jokes with them. But unfortunately the questions never came.

More seriously, the opposition claims that this is an issue of enormous concern. The fact that AWB Ltd may—and it is a subject that is yet to be proven before the Cole commission—have been involved in kickbacks is a matter of great concern. But the opposition’s proposition here is that the government has been involved in this. We have had two weeks, 70 questions, several censure motions, attempted censure motions, MPIs, an enormous amount of parliamentary time and a very fair wind, if I could put it that way, from some elements of the media—I think we all know who I am talking about. I forgot to mention the hearings in the Cole commission as well, and all the evidence that has been presented in the Cole commission under questioning—I must say it seems to me to be very forensic questioning—by the senior counsel, Mr Agius, to AWB Ltd officials and former officials. Despite all of that there is no evidence that the Australian government has been involved in this affair at all—none, not any evidence at all.

For all the bluster and the confected passion—from the Leader of the Opposition, in particular—and after two long weeks of labouring in the parliament, the Leader of the Opposition has achieved precisely nothing. He has taken up the time of the parliament without focusing on issues that might have a little more resonance from the opposition’s point of view—if I could be so bold as to suggest that their tactics could change—and would be of greater moment to the Australian people.

Not a skerrick of evidence has been produced that the government is complicit or involved in this, despite the fact that the Leader of the Opposition on two occasions prior to the parliamentary session accused the government of being corrupt. ‘Corrupt’ is a big word to use—but there was no evidence. The Leader of the Opposition stood up outside parliament—which is an interesting thing to do, but accusing people of being corrupt is an extremely serious accusation.

The trouble for the Leader of the Opposition is that this whole issue and the way it has been handled in parliament has gone very much to the heart of his own credibility and the longevity of his leadership. The Leader of the Opposition established a series of benchmarks, all of which he has failed to meet. He said it was going to be the most aggressive parliamentary interrogation that government has ever faced. To be honest, I think a lot of members have been rather bored with the constant repetition of the questions and the hyperbole that we have seen during MPIs, censure motions and attempted suspension motions. The Leader of the Opposition said that the government was corrupt. He came into the parliament for two weeks and never provided any evidence; nor has any evidence been provided anywhere else. He said that the government was complicit.

The truth of this matter is perfectly obvious, I would have thought. The truth of this matter is demonstrated by what has happened in other countries as well as this country. There were 66 countries whose 2,000 or more companies were involved in oil for food kickbacks under Saddam Hussein’s regime. Everybody agrees that that was a bad thing. As Mr Volcker pointed out in his report, the responsibility for this failure rested with the United Nations and the officials in the United Nations who were meant to run this program. But in 65 of the 66 countries the government did not pick up what was going on; they were not able to identify what was going on. In this country, we did not either. We are the 66th country.

But we in this country were supposed to set a standard of detecting what at least allegedly is fraud—certainly a breach of United Nations sanctions and possibly even worse. We in this country were supposed to detect something that 65 other countries—including the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, France, New Zealand and so the list goes on—were not able to detect. Somehow we were supposed to have the miracle powers of transparency that no other government on earth had. We may be a miracle government, a great government and a strongly supported government, but we do not have miracle powers that no other government on earth has. We do not have those. We just have a lot of determination and we do a lot of hard work.

The opposition talks about ‘the warning bells’. It picks out obscure documents and says, ‘Look, if you read this sentence here on page 973, and surely the Prime Minister did, you can interpret that as being a reference to food. And if you mention food, that could be wheat, and that could be that the Wheat Board was corrupt and therefore the government should have known.’ It is one of these typically contorted—and, if I may say so, from the public’s point of view, completely unconvincing—arguments.

The other 65 countries presumably had about as much access as we had to any of those reports—particularly the UK, because they were part of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and to a much greater extent than we were. The argument is that, by some miracle, they failed to pick this up, but we should have; and it is dereliction of duty that we failed to do that. At the end of the day that kind of an argument is simply not going to wash.

In this country we have taken the Volcker inquiry very seriously and we have established a commission with the powers of a royal commission to look into all of these issues. The opposition suggests that in this country we are involved in a cover-up, but none of the other 65 countries—only two of which have set up an inquiry at all: one in South Africa, which has not even convened yet, so I cannot speak of that beyond the fact that they have established it; and one in India, which was an in camera inquiry—has set up the transparent and public process that we have set up in this country. But the argument of our Labor Party is that we are involved in a cover-up. It beggars belief that anybody could push that argument and that anybody, including in the media, would ever believe that.

We are perfectly happy—and I have said this over and over again throughout all of this—for all our files to be gone through, for our officials to be interviewed and for there to be complete transparency. Mr Cole made the point in the statement he made, I think on the Friday before last, that he does, under the terms of reference, have the capacity to look into the government. This is the point that I do not think the opposition understand—or, they might understand it, but they certainly do not want to understand it. But Mr Cole makes this point very clear. If AWB Ltd was lying to the Commonwealth, that is potentially an offence. But to lie to the Commonwealth and to endeavour to mislead the Commonwealth, you have to establish whether the Commonwealth knew the information or not in the first place. So he needs to establish, as he has pointed out, what the Commonwealth knew in order to establish whether anyone misled the Commonwealth, which is potentially an offence. You do not have to be a QC to work that out; it is pretty obvious. Therefore, as a result of the way the terms of reference are written, the Cole inquiry has enormous breadth.

Mr Cole has also made the point that, if there were any suggestion that a Commonwealth officer—including the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, me, the agriculture minister, whoever else; the education minister sitting here—has been involved in fraud, corruption or whatever it may be—I have forgotten the exact term he used—then he will ask for his terms of reference to be expanded. But he said that so far there is no such evidence. Of course there is not. I have never seen such evidence. This suggestion that the government has been complicit is a suggestion that I can only regard as absolutely absurd. It is politicking of the worst kind.

I have read and I have heard some people say that the way the Public Service is handling this shows that they have been politicised. That suggestion is an extraordinarily insulting thing to say about our diplomats and our public servants. It is suggesting, if you like, moral corruption on the part of those people.

I have been a minister for 10 years and before that, at one stage, like the member for Griffith, I worked in the Public Service. I worked as a diplomat, like he did, in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. My experience of our public servants is that they are good, impartial people. They tell you if they do not agree with you. They would draw my attention to mistakes I had made—if I did make mistakes. They are people of true honour and integrity. I read in the Australian that I had a new doctrine that I would not stand by them, that I would separate myself from them. That is complete nonsense. I stand by the public servants in my department and I stand by their integrity. These are good people, these are honourable people, these are hardworking people. I do not know how they vote—they probably vote in all sorts of different ways—but I do know how they work: they work hard and they work in a determined way. And, contrary to what the Australian suggests, I stand by them. I stand by these people; I stand by their integrity. They work for me. As their minister, I am the leader of the organisation and I am prepared to take all of the responsibility that comes with that.

Let me conclude by coming back to the issue of warning bells. The member for Griffith and the Leader of the Opposition make great play about how many warning signs there were out there. I have made the point already in this debate that 65 other countries did not pick up the warning signs but by some miracle we were supposed to. The member for Griffith, I discovered, has actually on several occasions met with the Australian Wheat Board in the wake of the warning signs that he now says everybody should have seen. Some of these warning signs he refers to are available on the internet!

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