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

Just like the Liberals let The Nationals answer this question alone in parliament today, they are leaving The Nationals in the lurch on the future of the single desk. National Party members in this House know it, because they listened very carefully to what the Prime Minister had to say.

Why there is a matter of urgency as would warrant the suspension of standing orders goes not just to the fact that this is a $300 million wheat-for-weapons scandal—the worst in Australia’s history—or to the fact that we have a government which ignored 17 successive warnings and chose not to act but also to our concern that two ministers have misled the parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia. With the first of those ministers, the Minister for Trade, it all turns on a key proposition he put to the parliament. Last year, when this wheat-for-weapons scandal was just unfolding, I posed this question to the trade minister:

When did the minister, his office or his department first have concerns conveyed to them on whether the Wheat Board’s dealings with Iraq were violating UN sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime?

What was the Deputy Prime Minister’s answer? He said:

The allegations raised first came to my attention as a result of the Volcker inquiry.

The Volcker inquiry began in April 2004. Honourable members will ask: why is this important? There is of course the general principle that ministers should tell the truth in this parliament—increasingly a novel proposition in the last decade that we have been subjected to in this country. Mr Speaker, that is a core principle which you would agree to as upholding Westminster and everything which is true to it. But there is a second reason why it is important.

What we are concerned about in this $300 million scandal is when the government first knew and why they did not act upon the knowledge of warnings which came in their direction. When did they first know of these warnings? If the warnings came early, then they could have acted early in order to prevent the $300 million scandal from unfolding. The Deputy Prime Minister knew today when the Leader of the Opposition put questions to him that he was in deep trouble—very deep trouble—because, on the one hand, he has this undertaking to the parliament that he did not know anything by way of warnings or concerns until April 2004, but now he has a cable, released through the Cole commission of inquiry, dated April 2001.

What did it have to say? It warned about hard evidence that Iraq was using the oil for food program to breach sanctions and that this was linked to discussions between the AWB and Iraq which they were having at the time and which were known to the government. That was in April 2001. The Deputy Prime Minister’s claim is that he knew nothing until April 2004. That was three years later. The Deputy Prime Minister would have us believe that he had no knowledge of the contents of that cable. Problem No. 1 for the Deputy Prime Minister is that it is on the distribution list as being copied to his office—something he did not want to admit to in the chamber today. Problem No. 2 is that he had a massive Trevor Flugge moment in here today. He had a comprehensive Trevor Flugge moment, because three times he was asked by the Leader of the Opposition, ‘What’s happened to this cable? Did you have any knowledge of its contents?’ and he said he did not.

But, having had his Trevor Flugge moment, he then had, unfortunately for him, an Alexander Downer moment. What happens when you have an Alexander Downer moment? You say too much. As a result of that, in response to a further question from me about an Austrade cable he went on to say that these were certainly known to the government at the time because DFAT was dealing with it. That cable in fact came from earlier, back in 2000. So we have the Deputy Prime Minister saying he and the government knew of these matters back in 2000. It fundamentally contradicts his assertion to the parliament that he did not know about these matters until 2004. He deserves to be censured. (Time expired)

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