Alexander Downer (Mayo, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

In response to that particular point, let me say that I am enormously proud of what this government has achieved in the area of foreign policy. I think that has been very much reflected in the views of the Australian people, despite the editorial in the newspaper—which I have to confess is normally a newspaper I quite like, but not so much today. But I cannot write the editorials myself. Sometimes they are good and sometimes they are not. I have been in politics for 21 years and you have to put up with this sort of thing if you are tough in politics.

The second thing is that the opposition depends enormously heavily for its arguments here on drawing on handwritten notes from a second-hand account of a meeting. This is AWB Ltd’s defence. If they had been knowingly involved in paying kickbacks, they would have been committing a criminal offence. If that is the case, they will most certainly be held responsible. There is no question about that. But the government has made the point—and I have made the point on many occasions myself—that our policy was always to support the United Nations sanctions regime, always to support the oil for food program. Nothing has been brought forward in the Cole commission—including through the evidence presented to the Cole commission by, I think, up to 11 present or former officers of my department—to contradict that.

What is more, the suggestion that somehow my department and I, the Minister for Trade or anybody else were involved in a cover-up has never been established in any of the evidence in the Cole commission. The witnesses from my department have made the position of the government perfectly plain and perfectly clear. This is bodgie sexing up of a comment here or a comment there—in this particular case, second-hand comments. This is of course part of AWB Ltd’s defence, which appears to be the source of argumentation for the opposition—now the AWB is the source of argumentation for the opposition! It just shows how spurious and weak the argument is—and the public know it.

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