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

Yes, I will direct my remarks to you here, Mr Speaker, about why it is absolutely necessary that we now look at this clearly through a censure motion. We have our British allies here with us at the moment. We have our American allies here with us frequently. This government owes them an explanation as to how we permitted $300 million to fall into Saddam Hussein’s hands to buy the guns, bombs and bullets used against British and Australian troops.

We have subexplanations within that general explanation, but they should go to this: this government has to explain how it got a report—an authoritative report—out of the authorities in Iraq, immediately after the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, who warned that every contract entered into by AWB involved a 10 to 19 per cent kickback that went into the pockets of the Saddam Hussein regime; and how the ‘due diligence’—the ‘diligent’ attitude—of the foreign minister permitted that report to stand inside his department without any proper detailed investigation.

As a direct result of that, for another 18 months the scam continued—to what effect we do not know. But it is at least possible that those resources that were being paid in bribes for 18 months after that report, following the conclusion of hostilities, went to funding the insurgency. There is at least a substantial possibility that that is the case, and the government can give no guarantees—to us, or those British and American troops who now daily face threats to their lives, or those Iraqi people who face bombs and bullets from people who wish to terrorise them—that the funds that went into buying the equipment to do that were not funds that came through a process that the foreign minister’s lack of due diligence permitted to occur.

Every time the foreign minister and the Prime Minister get up and talk about this, they say that no evidence has been presented. Evidence has been presented in detail that ought to have alerted anybody with half a brain and half the necessary skill as a foreign minister that something was required of him. It ought to have alerted him to do something on behalf of the service personnel already engaged in the Gulf, as they have been for the last decade and a half. Those service personnel in most recent times went in to fight the war and are now there engaged, with very great difficulty, in trying to enforce a peace. You would have thought that a halfway-decent foreign minister would have done something about that.

The problem for this foreign minister, and why he ducks and weaves on these censure motion debate requests, is that there is an example of another government handling these sorts of matters. As pointed out by Mr Steketee over the weekend, the difference is that of chalk and cheese between Foreign Minister Gareth Evans’ handling of these matters and the hard attitude to AWB he adopted, and the worthless, wet, wimpish, pompous, asinine, incompetent ratbaggery that went on with the foreign minister—

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