Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

A spurious attempt to prevent the facts of this matter from being revealed. The member for Moncrieff’s lack of respect for parliamentary processes is clear. I do not claim that the campaign donations were the only ingredient explaining the government’s conduct. I referred in parliament earlier this week to the six Howard government ministers and MPs who had AWB shares. There is also the role of appointments of National Party personnel such as Trevor Flugge and former Anderson staffer Daryl Hockey. But the campaign donations contributed to a culture of cronyism which went from Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade bureaucrats all the way up to the Prime Minister. Everyone in the government trusted their AWB mates. Whatever AWB directors and executives said was always good enough for the Howard government. AWB was a creature of the coalition government and, in our international dealings, the government returned the favour and acted as an arm of AWB.

We know from evidence tabled at the Cole inquiry that, under the previous Labor government, these contracts were subjected to rigorous scrutiny. DFAT was all over the original BHP deal to provide wheat to Iraq, but DFAT officials have repeatedly testified to the Cole commission that under the Howard government they acted as a mere postbox and did not check the contracts for compliance with UN resolutions. What a shocking abdication of their responsibilities. What were they collecting their salaries for? The fact is that the closeness of the relationship between AWB and the Howard government, reinforced by campaign donations, made the government incapable of objective judgment. It was unable to take the action needed to give these contracts proper scrutiny.

Instead, it covered for AWB. We had Prime Minister Howard saying AWB was ‘a very straight up-and-down group of people’. He said, ‘I can’t, on my knowledge and understanding of the people involved, imagine for a moment that they would have been involved in anything improper.’ We had the Minister for Trade and the Minister for Foreign Affairs denying the allegations and attacking anyone who made them.

See this speech in context