Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade and International Security) Share this | Hansard source

Next month will mark one year since we in this place first started asking questions of the government about the biggest corruption scandal in Australia’s history—the $300 million wheat for weapons scandal. One year later it is worth reflecting on what exactly we have managed to extract from that mob opposite—otherwise called the government of Australia. It is interesting to have a look back at just how cocky they were a year ago. Take this, for example: in December last year the Prime Minister said in this place:

I begin ... by pointing out to the member for Griffith that it has not been established that AWB paid any kickbacks.

I thought that was a little novel, a little brave, a little unusual in defence. The Prime Minister goes on in a different answer:

... the people who run that company—

that is, the AWB—

are people of—

wait for it—

complete integrity.

That is the Prime Minister’s statement to the parliament, which puts a very interesting slant on the Liberal Party’s definition of integrity. Then, we have the real doozy. The Prime Minister says, referring to the member for Griffith again:

... is seeking through false allegations to blacken the reputation of ... the members of the Australian Wheat Board.

Poor petals, indeed. Twelve months later it is worth reflecting on how much things have changed. Man of steel these days barely mentions the ‘I’ word, that is the Iraq word, the war that dare not speak its name. It is the most spectacular failure of Australian foreign policy since Vietnam. Not only do we have problems mentioning the ‘I’ word in this place, there is the ‘A’ word—the AWB, the company that dare not speak its name. It is a company that, judging by at its employment record, becomes an employment agency for Liberal Party and National Party apparatchiks once they slither out of this place. The company that used to have untrammelled access to any government ministerial office it wanted at any time and at any place over the five years that this corruption scandal ran is suddenly a company that today dare not speak its name. It is a noncompany, erased entirely from the government’s public vocabulary.

There is a big linkage between these two—the Iraq war and the AWB. The Prime Minister said that the invasion of Iraq was necessary in order to deal with the global terrorist threat. That was an interesting argument in national security policy: you bankroll Saddam Hussein one day before bombing him the next. But the stupendous hypocrisy of this government’s foreign policy on Iraq is this: the Prime Minister has said on multiple occasions in this place, ‘The reason we have to invade Iraq is because the UN sanctions are not working.’ We now know, courtesy of the Volcker inquiry, why they were not working. This government, this mob opposite, these ministers, presided over the single largest source of illegal cash funnelled into the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein while those sanctions were in place. The stupendous hypocrisy of this government in doing so allowed $300 million in cold hard readies to be tipped into the Iraqi finance ministry to enable the Iraqi regime to buy guns, bombs and bullets for use against Australian troops.

I believe this entire scandal speaks volumes about the values for which this government stands. This government preaches values day in and day out but I say look carefully at what this government does, not just at what this government says. Look at what happened in this $300 million wheat for weapons scandal: it has totally undermined wheat exports from regions like that represented by the member for Maranoa—he should hang his head in shame.

The Cole inquiry is due to report by the end of this month. More than a year later it is therefore important to draw together the facts we have thus far established in this parliament, because this is the only place we can do that, as to what complicity the government has had in this, the worst corruption scandal in Australian history.

Fact one: we now know that this government is guilty of gross negligence. There were 33 separate warnings over a five-year period about what the AWB was up to and each one of those warnings was ignored, including by the minister at the table, Minister McGauran. Fact two: once this $300 million scandal started to leak out, they tried to cover it up. They misled our allies the Americans on at least three separate occasions and told them that everything was just fine and dandy and that there was no problem at all with the AWB, knowing full well that it stank to high heaven. But they did not seek to cover up just with the Americans; they also sought to cover up with the UN and the Volcker inquiry. They gagged Australian officials from appearing before the Volcker inquiry or being interviewed by that inquiry. This is quite staggering—they actually coached the AWB on how to answer questions put to them by the Volcker inquiry. We have put questions to the Prime Minister over the last few days about his foreign policy adviser, about how he should seek to restrict the AWB to some sort of small target: ‘Do not answer too many questions; do not be too forthright.’ This is quite extraordinary.

They sought to cover up their behaviour through the Volcker inquiry and to cover it up through misleading the Americans, but the grand cover-up of them all is this: the rorted terms of reference of the Cole inquiry itself. Anyone who looks at the text of these terms of reference knows that it is set up to do one thing alone, and that is to establish whether the AWB is guilty of criminal offences. There is no head of power and nothing to grant Commissioner Cole the power to determine whether ministers have done their job under Australian law—nothing whatsoever. This Prime Minister today stood at the dispatch box and tried to say that black was white yet again. So fact two is the cover-up.

Fact three is the gross damage to Australia’s national security and national economic interest. Our reputation around the world, though this government would perhaps not know it, is shredded. This country has prided itself for generations on being a bunch of people who respect international law and who uphold UN sanctions. We now discover that, of 2,100 companies investigated worldwide by the Volcker inquiry, we get the gold medal as the single largest provider of illegal cash to Saddam Hussein’s regime. I do not know how you blokes get out of bed in the morning and look in the mirror.

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