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

from November 1999, which has just been released by the Cole inquiry. Isn’t it a fact that this email refers to discussions with the AWB on your department’s concerns about the AWB breaching UN sanctions against Iraq back then, in 1999, but that your department concluded: ‘AWB may have been doing this for some time, but there is no benefit in launching a witch-hunt at this stage’? Why didn’t the government investigate the AWB’s activities at this time when the $300 million ‘wheat for weapons’ scandal was in its infancy? Or was this part of the government’s pattern of ongoing collusion with the AWB over the five years that this scandal then ran?

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