Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the Leader of the Opposition moving immediately.That this House censure the Foreign Minister and Minister for Trade for:

(1)

turning a blind eye to cables sent to his/their office(s) that contained hard evidence that bribes were being paid to the Iraqi regime; and

(2)

for misleading this House on when he/they first had knowledge of the Wheat for Weapons scandal.

This is the fifth time that an effort by the opposition to censure the government or individual ministers in relation to what is without question the worst scandal in our national political history in living memory has been frustrated by a determination from the government that they will evade a censure motion. It is becoming a feature of the Howard government’s lack of accountability that they will not permit themselves to be subject to the testing of a searching debate on the state of their knowledge and their culpability and responsibility for this dreadful scandal.

They prefer to stand up in this place, beat their chests about their commitments to Iraq now, criticise the opposition for taking the view that this was a bridge too far in foreign policy and the wrong way to go, and refuse to answer questions about their personal and governmental culpability in this scandal. If this parliament cannot have a censure debate upon this motion, this parliament has no capacity to hold the government accountable. It is a serious issue, and when it is refused for the fifth time we know that this is a government that have absolutely no confidence in their capacity to explain things.

The new piece of information from today’s question time relates to the character of the knowledge of Minister Vaile. What Minister Vaile indicated—he got very close to it and he may have something more to say to us later or on a later day—was this: he had a general awareness back in 2000 or 2001 of the character of the complaints that had been raised at that point in time. He puts in his defence a quote from the particular cable which says that the Iraqi office in the UN had no capacity to judge the validity of the claims—that he puts in his defence. Precisely! They had no capacity; they relied on Australia. They relied on the effectiveness of the Australian investigation to determine whether or not they had a breach of sanctions on their hands. So what he used in his own defence in this place in question time is in fact the heart of the accusation against him.

We all remember what it was like back in November when he stood up in this place and said that the first time he became aware of any of this was when Mr Volcker reported. That was a statement of cover-up, pure and simple. He knew a heck of a lot about this a long time before Volcker reported. The Australian public believe that, and they are right to do so.

This is why we have to have the censure motion: the time for squirming and wriggling from this government is over. There have been pathetic hair-splitting and tricky excuses for what is essentially corrupt behaviour. That is enough contempt for this place and for the Australian people from this government. Heads should roll—the trade minister’s head and the foreign minister’s head. For too long, the bucks went to Saddam Hussein. Now the buck stops with Alexander Downer and Mark Vaile. They saw the cables. They knew they mattered. They turned a blind eye.

The trade minister is the biggest problem for Australian farmers since the arrival of the rabbit. My message to farmers is that Mr Vaile has let you down. He is now arrogantly trying to use our farmers as a human shield. He is incompetent and arrogant. Instead of investigating AWB at the time, he and his ministerial colleague tipped them off. The foreign minister is the best friend Saddam ever had. He is a foreign affairs fraud and his career has been marked by serious lapses of judgment. He has a perennial problem with the things that matter, but this was no inoffensive slip of the tongue; this was an ill-advised romp in fishnet stockings. This was about turning a blind eye to $300 million in bribes going to the very dictator our troops were fighting in Iraq.

What mattered here were the bribes to Saddam Hussein, and what did these two ministers do? Did they bring in investigators? Did they hold anyone accountable? Did they thump the desk and say Australia must not fund Saddam Hussein’s evil dictatorship? They turned a blind eye to things that mattered. They are stupid, arrogant, complicit and not fit to represent Australia’s interests abroad.

Yesterday, the ego of the Minister for Foreign Affairs got the better of him—another lapse in Mr Downer’s judgment. He spilt the beans when he had been misleading so well for so long. He wants to look like he is on top of his portfolio but he just keeps revealing that he is at the bottom of this scandal. The Prime Minister got up in parliament yesterday and said that there is not a skerrick of evidence that the government knew. In a weird way, there is not a skerrick of evidence; there is a mountain of evidence. There is too much evidence piled up for those absurd denials to continue.

They constantly invite us in this place to go to the cables and take a look at them. They do not want us to only go to the parts of the cables which indicate in very considerable detail the fact that there was a company in Jordan receiving illicit funds in US dollars in clear breach of the sanctions regime of the United Nations. Do not look at that part of the cable, they say. Look at the fact the Iraqi office at the United Nations could not substantiate this—look at that, they said today. Precisely! The office and the United Nations relied on the honesty and integrity of the Australian processes—it is as simple as that.

The UN cops an awful lot of flack around the place, but the UN’s defenders say—and honestly—that the UN is only as good as its member governments. The United Nations is not a country. The United Nations is a collection of countries that does not transgress the sovereignty of each member country, and it relies on the goodwill of its member countries to ensure that the sanctions that all the members agree on are being upheld.

If you go to those cables, you will notice something else apart from the weakness of that essential defence. When the cables refer back to consultations with the Wheat Board, you will notice that there is no record of a hard, tough investigative process being put in place. Instead, there is an immediate assumption that if anything is being done by the Wheat Board it must be at worst inadvertent and that all that is required is to speak to the Wheat Board and say to them: ‘You need to properly explain your contracts. This issue has been raised, and you need to properly explain this issue to the United Nations. That’s what you need to do.’

These events, which have an enormous amount of literature behind them in the cables of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade—and I will lay you London to a brick, Mr Speaker, that there are a load more cables than those we have seen already—rather than showing diligent action on behalf of the Australian government to uphold the sanctions regime to which we had signed up, have much more in common with a tip-off to a gang. That is what the materials that emerge from those cables make this seem like.

What every department requires, when the hard stuff has to be done and the tough work has to be done, is the action of the minister. That is when the minister steps in to make sure the right thing is done. What happened here was that the ministers stood to one side, completely indifferent as to whether or not the wrong thing was being done. That is why, if this parliament is to have any credibility at all, this parliament now needs an opportunity to censure these ministers, to hold them properly to account for the way in which they have failed this nation. They have failed our allies, and they have failed the international organisation to which we have signed up. They have failed the farmers but, above all, they have failed the Australian people in protecting our reputation. This is a massive scandal which they treat as a joke, and they should be censured. (Time expired)

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