John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Somebody interjects, ‘We have.’ The last time I checked we had almost 600 Australian military personnel in Afghanistan, so do not give me this nonsense about us withdrawing from Afghanistan. The other premise—and this is a very interesting premise—of the Leader of the Opposition’s attack this week—and I say this week because it is not only in his censure motion today—is that the Leader of the Opposition himself all along has been a ferocious opponent of the government’s policy in Iraq. The truth is that, on very careful examination, that is not quite in accordance with the facts and the truth. When you delve back into what the Leader of the Opposition had to say you get very interesting pieces of research. This is the Leader of the Opposition when he was not the Leader of the Opposition; this was the member for Brand who was keeping that respectable, magisterial distance from the decisions being taken by the then Crean-led opposition. He was just a little bit back and a little bit to the side so that, if it turned out a little bit differently from what the Labor leadership had said, he would have been able to say: ‘Well, of course, I would never have gone in as hard as Simon did. I would never have said all of these things.’

I came across an article dated Friday, 19 July. The heading is ‘There’s a case for taking out Saddam Hussein, but the challenges are great’. You bet there was a case for taking him out. There were about 1½ million cases of dead Iraqis for taking him out. But here he was—he was trying to get a little bit distant so that, if it all worked out a little bit differently, he would then be able to say, ‘Well, of course, I always thought they went a bit overboard in opposing Howard over Iraq.’ He says in this article:

Much discussion of US intentions in Iraq—

and this is July 2002; mark the date—

revolves around the credibility of claims that the Iraqi dictator is developing nuclear weapons. He may be. What he has done unquestionably is establish a substantial biological capability.

This is the Leader of the Opposition who now says that we lied about all of these things. He was to go on to say, at the beginning of 2003—

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