Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade and International Security) Share this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. I refer to his statement of 30 January 2006, when he said in relation to the AWB’s dealings with Saddam Hussein’s regime, ‘We had no suspicion, no suggestion there’d been any bribes,’ and that there were ‘no alarm bells’. How could the Prime Minister have made that statement when he was in possession of the cable from his embassy to the United Nations in New York which warned that Saddam Hussein’s regime were directly approaching wheat suppliers to inflate contract prices of wheat, that the AWB had concluded such contracts with the Iraqi regime and that another national wheat supplier had specifically rejected these approaches, having been advised by the United Nations that accepting any such arrangement would be in breach of United Nations sanctions? How could the Prime Minister credibly claim that there were no warning bells?

See this speech in context