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

The simple fact of the matter is that we have to debate this censure motion, because of the significance and the importance of the issues involved. The fact is that, even after the Prime Minister’s alleged intervention to talk about collaboration, evidence has been presented that officials of the Prime Minister’s office were suggesting to the AWB officials appearing before the Volcker committee that they should keep themselves limited just to technical issues and that they did not have to volunteer information. The cover-up continued.

But, even so, the reason this government is culpable in all the horror stories of the breaches of those sanctions is that there is no other government anywhere else in the world which has been so deeply linked to the people who were breaching the sanctions, the approval processes associated with the way in which the sanctions were breached and, at the very outset, the actual ownership of the agency which breached the sanctions. There is no government so intimately committed in this way anywhere else in the world—only here. That is why the government’s activities and the AWB’s activities must be examined, and that is why we have to have this debate now.

Last night the Prime Minister said:

... it stands to reason that if Cole finds that Downer or Howard were told by AWB that it was paying kickbacks and we did nothing about it, it would be game over.

Well, Prime Minister, it is game over. That is his own judgment and his own say. But I say this today, Prime Minister: with a government that ignored 27 warnings of AWB sanction-busting bribes, what should the verdict be? Game over. With a government that has deliberately hampered the investigations of the Volcker inquiry, what should the verdict be? Game over. When a government ignored the warnings of its own intelligence agencies, warnings which included the name of the company doing the defrauding of the sanctions—a company owned in part by Saddam Hussein’s family—and ignored all that was revealed to the government, and did nothing about it, I would say, Mr Prime Minister: game over. When you have a government up to its neck in a cover-up, full of bluster and bluff, rorting Cole’s terms of reference to save the political life of its incompetent, disgraced and discredited foreign minister, it is game well and truly over.

The Prime Minister now says that he wants to know just how the ‘wheat for weapons’ scandal came about; how Australia rorted United States sanctions and helped propel Australia into the war in Iraq; how it was that AWB donated $300 million to Saddam Hussein’s regime—money to buy the guns aimed at our troops; how Australian dollars strengthened the pre-war Iraqi regime and gave support to the insurgency; how his government ignored the 27 warnings about AWB’s kickbacks—the flashing red lights, the flood of cables to the Prime Minister and his foreign minister alerting them, warning them, telling them just what AWB was up to; and how his government, after the war in Iraq, allowed the AWB, despite the warnings, to continue its corrupt dealings for another year and a half.

On television last night the Prime Minister looked down the camera and declared that he wanted to know three things: whether any crime was committed by his ministers; what his ministers knew about what AWB was doing; and what his ministers did about what they knew. I commend the Prime Minister for his new-found and apparently forensic interest in getting to the bottom of this shameful mess of deceit and corruption. I am pleased to tell him that uncovering the truth rests entirely with him. It is very simple, Prime Minister: just walk out of this parliament, pick up the suggested reference we tabled for you today and give it to the Cole commission. Unless the Prime Minister does that, there will be no determination on those matters. They will not follow forensically the trail of intelligence advice they have been presented with; they will simply note it. They will not follow forensically the advice that came to the government immediately after the war that every single contract contained a bribe; they will not follow that. They will not follow all the other evidence associated with the cables that came in advising the government that there ought to be some investigation of matters, when it was being suggested that rorting and sanctions busting were taking place. The Cole commission will not go down that road.

The Cole commission will not go down the road of making a determination on the competence with which ministers handled this matter when they so massively traduced the international reputation of Australia by permitting and turning a blind eye to the most corrupt of dealings with the most savage of dictators, who used those funds subsequently against Australian troops, who continued to have those bribes delivered, for all intents and purposes as far as we know, some of it ending up in funding the insurgency which is now taking place and which is killing American soldiers, killing allied soldiers and killing Iraqi citizens.

A decent government would want to get to the bottom of that. A decent government with a sense of responsibility, ministers with a sense of responsibility, would want to get to the bottom of that. We were praising Tony Blair here a day or so ago. You would never have got away with this in the Westminster system and you should not get away with it now, which is why we must debate this censure motion. (Time expired)

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