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

First, I want to take out of question time lessons that we learnt on the question of lack of accountability and declining standards of integrity. The Cole royal commission will report either slightly before we return to this place or slightly after in what will be only a few days of sittings, some of which are likely to be taken up with hosting foreign guests. So we are now effectively at the conclusion of the period when this House, this chamber, can make a contribution to this government’s accountability on this, the worst scandal that there has been in living memory in federal history.

We had a further question time today. We established during the course of it that, firstly, the Deputy Prime Minister—contrary to what he had asserted previously in this place—had knowledge of the detail of the allegations about our involvement with subverting the oil for food program and financing Saddam Hussein. He acknowledged at last that he was briefed on that, in the same way as the foreign minister effectively owned up to it in this place.

The second thing we got in the process of the opposition seeking to render this government accountable was the joyous hubris of the foreign minister on the subject of people being able to wander around Iraq with very large sums of Australian money to be spent at their discretion, albeit in difficult circumstances. The problem is that we also know that, in the period of time that we are talking about, the corruption of that oil for food program persisted for some 18 months. Where the money went in that case we do not know. We know where it went before the war, but we do not know where it went after the war. There were substantial sums of money to be dealt with there. We know that very senior Baath Party officials were reappointed to the agricultural ministry on the basis of a relationship that they had had with Australia in the past. So we know those things, and we now know that the government was quite joyous about the fact that substantial sums of money were made available on a discretionary basis at that point in time. That is another thing we managed to establish here today during question time.

We have finally got a government—after 110 questions in this place, as the Prime Minister pointed out—with a completely different story now out there in the public domain from what there was at the beginning of the House of Representatives process. We had the Prime Minister stand up full of hubris, as he is on his 10th anniversary, proud of the fact that he renders himself accountable in this place. That is deceitful. He excluded the Senate estimates process, which is—or at least in the past has been—by far and a long way the most effective means of scrutiny of a government on the sorts of matters we have been dealing with here on the floor of the House. He managed to exclude them completely from the process, and he has spent most of those 110 questions stonewalling.

The problem for him has been that evidence that has been introduced principally by the member for Griffith and me at different points in time, combined with the evidence that has been coming forth from the Cole commission, has established a totally different picture of this government’s involvement in this scandal now than what we had towards the end of last year. And what is that picture? The picture is that this government has been culpably negligent in relation to its administration of our involvement in this critical program. This government has turned a blind eye to the subversion of the oil for food program. Whatever blah the foreign minister might like to go on with as he excuses the fact that this money may well have been used to fund suicide bombers, the money that was given to Saddam Hussein—we being the biggest contributors under the program—is still being utilised. It is still being utilised because those resources that came from the oil for food program were stolen at war’s conclusion by Saddam Hussein—that which was left after all the other things that he had spent it on—and subsequently funded the Baath component of the insurgency which is operating now in Iraq, placing Australian soldiers operating in Iraq under threat. More directly, because they operate more prominently in the Sunni areas than we do, it threatens the lives of American soldiers—our allies, about whom the foreign minister waxed lyrical.

The Prime Minister, during the course of these 110 questions, has been wont to defend himself from time to time by the implication that it was necessary for AWB to do these sorts of things because we were in bitter conflict and trade rivalry around the globe with American wheat producers and Canadian wheat producers, as though that justified this particular set of events—and seeking to justify it. The simple fact of the matter is that those two outfits did not participate in this crime and indeed one of them explicitly blew the whistle on this crime.

The government’s neglect of those facts has deeply, deeply dishonoured this country. And this scandal—which we on this side of this chamber of the parliament have used to effectively tease out the detail of the accountability and participation of ministers—dishonours this nation and dishonours the reputation of this government. They spent last night in an absolute orgy of self-congratulation. They began every speech with obeisance to the notion that there was more work to be done and ‘We mustn’t display hubris’—and then they went into it by the bushel. Hubris squared was the performance of our political opponents yesterday. They had their signs up there saying ‘Strong direction, mainstream values’; I say, after 10 years: wrong direction and, if it is anybody’s values, American values. What in fact this nation has needed over the last 10 years and what it needs now is nation building and Australian values—the Australian values which have been dealt with so cheaply by them in this scandal and in the way in which they have operated in their 10 years of government.

We need less backslapping from them and more attention to our skills crisis. We need from them less patting on the back, less self-congratulation and more attention to our crumbling infrastructure. We need some statement from them on our skyrocketing foreign debt and on the woefully limp export performance. If we are travelling so well, why aren’t average Australians sharing in it? If we are going so well, why have we turned away 300,000 young Australians from TAFE and brought in 270,000 foreigners?

What we have seen in these 10 long years is the threat of terrorism growing. We have seen, as I said, in these 10 long years 300,000 young Australians missing out on TAFE. We have seen in these 10 long years our dependence on foreign oil grow and grow. We have seen in these 10 long years our infrastructure crumble beneath us. We have seen in these 10 long years our children’s health get worse, not better. In 10 long years, with the globe getting hotter, we have seen a government doing nothing about it and in denial. In 10 long years we have seen the rights of working families being ripped away. In 10 long years our best and bravest have been sent to war only to confront an enemy funded by us. And 10 long years of nation building was what we needed, but nation building was not what we got.

I want to go to a couple of explicit features of this situation as I talk about the key squandered opportunities over the last 10 years. The first relates to skills and innovation amongst our people and in our industries—investing in our people. The fundamental philosophy of funding training and higher education in this country has changed from one of national investment to one of private opportunity. When every other country with whom we are competitive realised long ago that these are national investment issues, the consequence of this in the public tertiary education sector has seen funds spent at minus eight per cent over the 10 years when the next worst in the industrialised nations is plus 15 per cent. It has seen 300,000 kids turned away from TAFE and a substantial reduction in Commonwealth spending in training in a way that has now produced what all the employer organisations report as a massive shortfall—this is not a product of prosperity; it is a product of neglect—in the traditional trades.

We have seen the effect of this on innovation in our businesses, in the sort of product that attracts an overseas market. If we are to succeed as a nation, if our nation is to be built, it has to be built around an export culture. It has to be built around us making things and providing services that the rest of the world needs; instead, our industrial exports have stalled. The export of our services has stalled. The Deputy Prime Minister was up here, chuffed with himself about the global value of exports. What he did not mention was the value of imports and the fact that we have now had the longest period of trade deficit ever. We are the only major exporter of minerals in trade deficit. No-one else with our advantages—not the Brazilians, the Argentineans, the Russians or the Canadians—is in our position of a shortfall in relation to exports.

The problem with all of this is that chickens in the end come home to roost. If you do not invest in your skills, if you do not invest in your innovation, if you do not make an export culture a primary feature of your nation building and allow it to influence things like your attitude to infrastructure policy, education policy, the health of your community—assuring them that they can live healthy lives and work hard at the same time—if you do not reward a workforce for putting in that little bit extra, if you do not reward the long hours that they are prepared to work and if you strip away democracy from them in the workplace, what you have at the end of the day is a nation that will not succeed. If there is anything else going wrong with you, then you place your country in a very threatening situation indeed.

What else is going wrong? There is one thing, and that is the missing debt truck. I remember that debt truck very well. It had $180 billion attached to it when this government came to office, and it had sat there at about 40 per cent of GDP for the last decade before the Labor government fell at that point in time. That has got to $450 billion, and it looks like it is going to go to $500 billion by mid to late this year. It is heading rapidly to $500 billion. Almost all of it went into the housing boom, a little bit went to funding elements of the resources performance that we have put in place and hardly anything went into the manufacturing industry.

Unless we export our heads off over the next decade, the chickens that fly out of that huge burgeoning foreign debt will come home to roost big time on this economy, and that is when all the other injustices that we have been talking about will manifest themselves in unhappy lives for Australian people. The 10-year hubris of this government will never allow them to admit to any problem— (Time expired)

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