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

The problem with this Prime Minister is that once the Australian people actually believed him. They heard him as a man responsible for this country’s national security and it did not cross their minds that he would tell them blatant lies. But what they have seen over the last 3½ years is a Prime Minister who ducks and weaves around the truth at each opportunity. Each time he is pinned down and asked a difficult question, each time as a clever politician he slips and slides his way around it, never answering it directly—as he slips and slides his way out of this parliament right now. Your credibility on this war, Prime Minister, collapsed a long time ago and it is no wonder you cannot bear to face this parliament in the context of this debate.

The Prime Minister said today that his credibility rests on the fact that the intelligence community assured him, the government, the parliament and the people of Australia of the accuracy of the government’s claims about prewar intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Here is the problem: the Australian people, the opposition and the parliament actually believed him. This is the problem. We actually believed that the Prime Minister of this country would not exaggerate, that on something as grave as taking his people to war he would not be loose with the truth and that he would actually level with us, the Australian people. What we now know is not through any agency or accusation on our part. What we now know from their own side is exactly what happened with the misleading information they provided this country and this parliament.

I turn to the Jull committee. Most of us in this place know David Jull. He is a member of the Liberal Party and the Chair of the investigation of the Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security’s into prewar intelligence in Iraq. This is where this Prime Minister’s entire argument collapses in one smouldering heap, because the Prime Minister and his claims to the parliament about Iraq’s stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons were put to the test by Mr Jull. What did Mr Jull and his committee find?

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