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

Again, I thank the honourable member for his questions—two in a row on this topic—and I appreciate that enormously. Yes, this is another one of the cables that have been tabled today in the Cole commission. The 11 March cable, which is from Austrade back to Canberra, is about the same issue. It is not a separate issue; it is the same allegation made by, as it turned out—I said earlier the Canadian Wheat Associates; that was a mistake—the Canadian Wheat Board. It is the same issue. I made this point earlier: in order to round off their investigation, the United Nations wanted access to contracts that they had not had access to in the past. Why AWB Ltd had not passed them those contracts, I do not know. That is the sort of thing that will be considered by the Cole inquiry, as indeed will all of this. But what I do know is that, through this period, the department was quite assiduous in making sure that it furnished the United Nations—which was responsible for the administration of the oil for food program—investigators with the material they asked for. I made the point earlier, by the way, and it is quite an important point, that AWB Ltd was a little reluctant initially to provide the department with these documents to pass on to the UN.

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