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 Minister for Foreign Affairs. I refer to his statement to parliament that the United Nations had only raised with the government a general concern about contracts of the Australian Wheat Board and that, when the opposition talks about the warning bells, it picks out obscure documents. Minister, I refer to another obscure document, a third cable of 11 March 2000, containing a further warning to the government concerning the AWB’s activities in Iraq and one which is explicitly copied to the secretary to the minister’s department. Will the minister confirm to the parliament that this further warning from the United Nations stated that the representative of the office of the Iraq program ‘had received an insufficient response to enable her to close the matter and that it was imperative that this matter be put to rest’? What action did the minister himself take to ensure that these sets of warnings conveyed by the United Nations had been comprehensively addressed?

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