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

I seek leave to move the following motion:

That this House censure the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Government for its gross hypocrisy in sending Australian armed forces to Iraq while turning a blind eye to 27 warnings that the Australian Wheat Board was giving $300 million of funds to the enemy for guns, bombs and bullets.

Leave not granted.

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 Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Government for its gross hypocrisy in sending Australian armed forces to Iraq while turning a blind eye to 27 warnings that the Australian Wheat Board was giving $300 million of funds to the enemy for guns, bombs and bullets.

This is the sixth attempt by the opposition to censure this government for its gross neglect, for its turning of a blind eye and for its culpability in what has been the most substantial scandal in years in this country. It keeps defending itself by saying that it has a fully transparent process investigating it now. I want to say at the outset that, while I trust the commissioner and his assistant, they have not been given the terms of reference that would enable them to test the foreign minister’s statement that he is innocent of all of this, as indeed they cannot test the Deputy Prime Minister’s statements or the Prime Minister’s statements in that regard. They cannot.

There is an unequal burden being placed here on those in the AWB who are under investigation, and those who were complicit in permitting them to do the things they did. There is an unequal burden in this entire royal commission on the two of them. This royal commission is at risk of not being able to get to the bottom of the foreign minister’s behaviour, the Deputy Prime Minister’s behaviour and the Prime Minister’s behaviour. They are continuing, through this Cole process, to try to slip-slide out of the accountability that they owe the Australian people, that they owe Australian allies and that they owe the troops whom they sent to war to fight against personnel armed by them. It is no wonder—and this is why we have to be able to get a censure motion in here, after six attempts—that an individual as essentially conservative as Neil James, the editor of the Defender, the journal of the Australian Defence Association, says this:

The deeper moral question is what kind of person would have no apparent ethical qualms or commonsense reservations about contravening the very UN sanctions that fellow Australians were enforcing under difficult and, at times, even dangerous conditions. Never again must any Australian government risk the well-being, safety and loyalty of the men and women of the Defence Force in such a manner.

Mr Speaker, it is important that you understand and it is important that the Australian people understand that the sanctions regime against Saddam Hussein was upheld by Australian defence personnel, British defence personnel, American defence personnel and others. At substantial risk to themselves, they have been operating in waters at the head of the Persian Gulf for the last decade and a half—waters which it has never been entirely certain are clear of mines and where death inevitably would stare them in the face if anything went seriously wrong. In that period they were boarding boat after boat that was engaging in sanctions-busting activity in the Persian Gulf, at risk to themselves, to British sailors, to Australian sailors and to American sailors. We are not just talking about the war here—the war that was fought three years ago. We are talking about the enforcement of a sanctions regime that has been going on for the best part of a decade and a bit. These are the people whom this government traduced and whom, with a sleight of hand, it flicks away.

We have just seen again, now, in his answer to the question asked by our spokesperson on foreign affairs, yet another piece of ‘due diligence’ from the foreign minister opposite. His statement attempted—as no doubt he has attempted throughout this issue—firstly to turn a blind eye to and then to excuse the behaviour when confronted with it. He has the hide—after all the intelligence reports on the character of Alia, after all the reports coming in to this government about the character of Jordanian trucking companies—to say that you, meaning AWB, were not to be expected to know how Alia might use the funds. Not expected to know—of a company half-owned by Saddam Hussein’s regime—how those funds might be spent and that he might spend it on research into weapons of mass destruction, that he might spend it on arming his troops, that he might spend it doing any of the various things that the sanctions regime was put in place to deal with?

You are culpable here, Mr Foreign Minister, and I am not surprised that you would slip-slide away from a censure motion. If you really believed in your case, you would allow a censure motion to proceed and be properly debated. Your attitude and the attitude of your colleagues to censure motions are just another part of the cover-up, just another reflection of what your true diligence is and just another reflection of the utter pomposity with which you seek to defend yourself.

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