Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

In Australia, we love our sport. In my own home town of Melbourne, we are getting particularly excited by the Commonwealth Games just around the corner. One thing we do not tolerate is cheating in sport. We hate cheating. We hate performance-enhancing drugs. It is not the Australian thing to do. Unfortunately, we now know that our wheat-exporting monopoly, AWB, was the gold medal winner for kickbacks in Iraq. Those $300 million in inland transportation fees were the performance-enhancing drugs, the steroids, of AWB’s wheat trade in Iraq.

But government ministers, from the Prime Minister down, want us to believe that they knew nothing of what was going on. They make a virtue of their incompetence. They revel in their incompetence. But, with every passing day, this Sergeant Schultz claim that ‘we knew nothing’ becomes less and less believable. Just yesterday, the member for Gwydir, former Deputy Prime Minister Anderson, stated that the Prime Minister asked him early last year what he thought of AWB executives. The member for Gwydir says the conversation was cut short, so I guess we will never know why the Prime Minister was seeking his opinion on the calibre of AWB personnel.

But this is the same Prime Minister who told us in January:

... there were no alarm bells. There was no suggestion, there was no evidence before us that AWB was paying any bribes.

Well, Prime Minister, there were alarm bells ringing in Canada, there were alarm bells ringing in the US, there were alarm bells ringing in Iraq, there were alarm bells ringing at the UN, and there were even alarm bells ringing at farm machinery days in the Victorian Mallee. It seems that the only people who could not hear them were the Prime Minister and Trevor Flugge. How are we supposed to reconcile the Prime Minister’s claim that there were no alarm bells with the member for Gwydir’s statement that the Prime Minister raised the character of AWB personnel with him? Why did he ask, if not because alarm bells had started to ring?

And how are we to reconcile this with the Prime Minister’s statement that the AWB people were ‘a very straight up and down group of people’? He said: ‘I can’t, on my knowledge and understanding of the people involved, imagine for a moment that they would have been involved in anything improper.’ On what did he base that assessment? It seems to me that, by the time he made it, he must have realised the seriousness of the issue, so he was basically trying to put one over the Australian people in the same way that the government tried to put one over US senators Tom Daschle, Patty Murray et cetera.

This matter of public importance provides us with the opportunity to condemn the government’s continuing refusal to answer questions about its role in the ‘wheat for weapons’ scandal. I lament the way the government is treating this parliament with contempt, stonewalling questions in this House and shutting down the Senate estimates committees. I remember that when the Prime Minister won control of the Senate he said he would not abuse his newly won power. It did not take long for that promise to vanish—just another non-core promise lying dead on the road.

There are many questions which remain unanswered. For example, AWB’s public and government affairs manager, Darryl Hockey, a former adviser to the member for Gwydir, Mr Anderson—it really is hard to know where the Wheat Board stops and the National Party begins—has stated that he specifically asked Minister Downer’s office and Minister Vaile’s office to say nothing about the sale of wheat to Iraq in December 2002. Given that governments are normally falling all over themselves to announce large wheat sales as good news, you would think that that request for confidentiality would have struck the ministers, in the words of the Prime Minister, as ‘passing strange’ and rather irritating. So the question I have for these ministers is: did they make any inquiries about why they were being asked to keep quiet about the sale and, if they did make any inquiries, what were they told? What did they find out?

The government also has to tell us on what basis it agreed to pay Mr Trevor Flugge, the former National Party candidate, $978,000 from the foreign aid budget for eight months work in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. What were Mr Flugge’s qualifications to be paid so much? What did Australians get for our million dollars? Why did the money come out of the foreign aid budget? I thought the aid budget was to feed starving people, not to make millionaires out of unsuccessful National Party candidates.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government, the Howard government sent Mr Flugge to Baghdad and paid him $978,000 from our aid budget for eight months work because he was such a great communicator. Yesterday he told the Cole commission he is pretty much deaf—he has a virtually ineffective left ear and a right ear which is somewhat impaired. Mr Flugge’s hardness of hearing came in relation to the subject of trucking fees being raised at a 1999 dinner where AWB executives were present. Mr Flugge wanted to take issue with AWB whistleblowers who claimed that the fees paid to that truckless Jordanian trucking company, Alia, were a means of paying kickbacks. The whistleblowers have told the Cole inquiry that Mr Flugge had approved the use of the London based trader Ronly Holdings, where his daughter worked as a junior administrator, as a middleman to pay the bribes. I believe the whistleblowers. I find it absolutely unbelievable that the government should have been paying Mr Flugge $978,000 from our aid budget for an eight-month consultancy job in Iraq.

That was yesterday; there is something new every day. Today we learn that there are cables from early 2000 from the Australian embassy to the United Nations in New York which expressly warned the government, first, that the Iraqis were demanding a surcharge of $US14 per metric tonne for wheat which would be paid outside the oil for food program; second, that the funds were to be provided into a bank account in Jordan; third, that the system was designed to provide illegal revenue for Iraq in US dollars; fourth, that the UN believed the company involved in the scheme was owned by the son of Saddam Hussein; and, fifth, that the AWB had concluded contracts of a similar nature to this with the Iraqi regime. The cables also say that another national wheat supplier had specifically rejected these approaches having been advised by the United Nations that accepting any such arrangement with Iraq would not be permissible under the oil for food program.

In the parliament today, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Downer, admitted that he had seen these cables. The media have been clamouring for a smoking gun. There is more smoke here than you would find in a London pub. The Minister for Foreign Affairs has had his attention expressly drawn to each of the elements in the oil for food scandal and yet no action has been taken and we have seen this $300 million debacle progressively unfold.

The government has been getting increasingly worried and casting around for distractions. Today we had the government’s Minister for Health and Ageing, Mr Abbott, casting around for distractions. He asked: ‘Are there any Australians in the Australian Labor Party?’ They are all Australians. Everyone who participates in Labor preselections is an Australian citizen, unlike Liberal Party rules, which have no such requirement and have led to such excesses as the Liberal preselection for the electorate of Ryan being participated in by residents of Hong Kong who had no Australian connection whatsoever.

The government has received warning after warning after warning of what was occurring. We have talked during this debate about the period after the downfall of Saddam Hussein. There were warnings in June 2003 from Michael Long and again from US Wheat Associates, who wrote to US Secretary of State Colin Powell. There were warnings in August 2003, in September 2003 and in October 2003. Then, late last year, the balloon really started to go up. We know that the Prime Minister met Paul Volcker in New York and the issue of the oil for food scandal was discussed.

We also know that the foreign affairs minister had discussions with Mr Volcker. Mr Downer’s meeting led to a flurry of activity, suggesting a realisation on his part that the cat was out of the bag marked ‘AWB kickbacks’. Minister Downer met with AWB senior personnel and told them the report was bad for the company and they needed to meet with Mr Volcker as soon as possible. A week later, the member for Gwydir sold all his AWB shares. Given this history, it is high time ministers started to appear before the Cole inquiry instead of trying to hide behind it. These ministers and former Minister Anderson should go before the Cole inquiry and answer the question which would no doubt be put to them.

See this speech in context