Arch Bevis (Brisbane, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Aviation and Transport Security) Share this | Hansard source

I am delighted to follow the member for Canberra. He made an excellent contribution that set out the key issues in this debate. It is a very thoughtful contribution that members of the government would do well to read. He referred to the black hole in accountability that this government hide behind in relation to this matter and indeed a number of others over the course of the last 10 years. I do not regard that as an accident. I think that is a carefully planned construct this government have fostered and have produced as an art form.

The report we are discussing is titled Report of the Inquiry into certain Australian companies in relation to the UN Oil-for-Food programme. That title is not by accident. It is an inquiry into, as it says, certain Australian companies. It is not an inquiry into the role and activities of this government, its ministers and their operatives; it is an inquiry into the activities of certain companies. Indeed, from the day it was set up, the Labor Party, amongst many in the community, has raised concerns about the way in which the government put blinkers on this inquiry to prevent it fully examining those involved in authorising and knowingly going along with the most corrupt activity, the most shameful activity, that I think Australia has been involved in.

To see $300 million provided as kickbacks to a repressive regime at a time when Australian troops were deployed to enforce those very sanctions and at a time when other Australian troops were being deployed and made ready to invade that country, ultimately to overthrow the regime, and to have operatives of the government involved in that subterfuge is, I think, one of the highest order acts of treachery that can be imagined.

It is not an accident that the government have hidden from their responsibility in these things. It has been a well-developed plan of this government to rely upon a doctrine of plausible deniability in which those who have responsibility for actions are able to stand and deny any knowledge of those actions in a plausible manner, notwithstanding the fact that by any fair interpretation of events it is their job to know. Plausible deniability is the sort of thing—and the reference by the member for Canberra reminds me of it—that Richard Nixon sought to hide behind. Not that you could prove a person was necessarily innocent; you just could not prove that they were guilty. There was not sufficient information to join the dots together.

We saw that perpetrated by this government in the ‘children overboard’ affair. A similar mechanism was used. You have political appointees of ministers, sitting in ministerial offices, who are not required to appear before Senate committees or other parliamentary processes, but for whom ministers claim to have no responsibility or, indeed, no knowledge of the actions they take or even knowledge of the important critical portfolio matters they are dealing with. That is what we have in this case.

I do not believe the defences of this government; I simply do not. I do believe the parliament and the people of Australia have been told the truth. But if you were to believe everything the relevant ministers have had to say about this, then you have to believe that, whilst senior people in their department knew about these problems and raised concerns and discussed it with one another and while senior people in their own personal offices knew about it, they had no knowledge. That is a completely unbelievable set of circumstances to attribute to any competent minister, junior or senior. To attribute it to two of the most senior ministers, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Deputy Prime Minister, who also was Minister for Trade, is mind-boggling. That people in those offices could pretend to have such scant knowledge of so vital a piece of information affecting their portfolio beggars belief.

But if that is true then they should resign out of sheer embarrassment because of their publicly acknowledged incompetence. Their confession of ignorance and maladministration should, by itself, cause them to leave office. But that was the important ingredient in affording those senior ministers plausible deniability: ‘We can deny it because there is no proof that we knew.’ Plausible deniability has undermined the entire process of parliamentary accountability. Forget the Westminster model of accountability. Under this government, that was lost years ago. There is now, under the standards set during the course of this Wheat Board scandal, no process of accountability that the Howard government accepts as bearing upon them and their actions.

Have a look at the way in which these senior ministers dealt with warning after warning—about 35 separate warnings—that there was a problem. In answer to a series of questions that Labor have been pursuing for months on these matters, the closest we got to an answer—as opposed to a piece of political spin—was that inquiries were made of the AWB officers. The AWB officers denied any wrongdoing and the government accepted the denial.

You might be forgiven for accepting that as a process if there were a sole, solitary complaint or if you thought the complaints were vexatious. But when they come from all manner of agencies—from the UN, from the governments of the United States and Canada, and from our own Department of Foreign Affairs and Department of Defence—it is simply not believable that a process like that could be seen as adequate. Of course, the reason that happened was also quite deliberate. The people who were being asked these questions are close confidants of this government. We are talking about people whose political connections are closely intertwined with the National Party in particular—not just the National Party but primarily the National Party. The people who were running this scam in the AWB were the mates of the senior political operatives of this government, including the ministers in this government.

I am reminded of a Yes Minister skit where they are talking about a financial scandal in the banking industry. Sir Humphrey said, ‘You simply don’t ask one of the chaps a question like that. If one of the chaps says he’s not doing things, of course you take the chap’s word for it.’ That is what happened here. One of the chaps who was one of the good old National Party cronies asked one of the other chaps, who was also a National Party crony, ‘Have you been breaking the law and sending a few hundred million dollars off to Saddam Hussein?’ And the chap said, ‘No.’ So they said, ‘Fine. We won’t ask any more questions.’ Then when the next complaint came along, they asked the chap again, and he said the same thing. After you have asked this chap 35 times and he has said ‘No, you don’t have to worry’ 35 times, you want to maintain plausible deniability. You do not want a paper trail. You do not want an investigation. You do not want to know what really happened, because by that stage you know it is your head that is in the noose. That was the thought process going on amongst those senior ministers involved in this. They knew their heads were in the noose, and the only way they had of saving their sorry hide was to pretend they knew nothing about it. As long as the chaps could keep the conversation going and the chaps would keep saying, ‘No, we weren’t involved in this sordid corrupt affair,’ then we could all maintain this veneer of plausible deniability.

Contrast the abysmal and disgraceful activity of the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister for Trade, in particular, with what the Australian public servants who were actually in the Middle East and charged with enforcing these sanctions were doing. While the government was happily enabling $300 million to be siphoned off to Saddam Hussein in breach of United Nations sanctions, we had hundreds of soldiers on ships enforcing the blockade. As the Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, reminded the parliament today: what did we expect of our naval officers when they confronted a vessel on the high seas en route to Iraq at that time? We expected them to ensure that those ships were interdicted and inspected, which they did with great care and professionalism, as our defence forces have a wonderful record of doing. When they went to the commander of the vessel, they did not say, ‘Well, chum, what’s going on? Have you got any contraband’ and then let them through when they said ‘No.’ They stopped the vessels and they searched them, and they made sure that there was no breach of United Nations sanctions.

The standard we expect of our military personnel, which they uphold, is to do the job properly, and they did it. They actually enforced the sanctions. What an outrageous breach of faith and decency at every level that, at the same time as our sailors and people in the Navy particularly were doing that work in the Middle East, people at the highest level in government were turning a blind eye and allowing hundreds of millions of dollars of breaches of those very same sanctions.

These were mates’ arrangements. They did not need to have documents. In fact, they needed to make sure there were no documents. They did not need to have formal meetings. It was a bit like another comedy skit I am reminded of, a Monty Python skit: ‘Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more.’ It was Eric Idle out there, running the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade: ‘Wink wink, nudge nudge. Don’t tell me. We all know what the game is here. We have been mates for a long time. Wink wink, nudge nudge.’ Nothing needed to be said. Everybody involved knew exactly what the game was. You do not get 35 warnings, you do not get cables from Washington, from Canada, from the United Nations in New York and from your own Defence personnel saying: ‘There is something rotten here. We think you should look at it’, you do not get that sort of information streaming in over the course of about three years and leave it at ‘Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more.’ But that is precisely what this government did at its highest level.

Now we are confronted with a report that has done what everybody who followed this in Australia knew would be the case from day one: it has not implicated ministers in criminal activity—because its terms of reference did not allow it. When the shadow minister for foreign affairs, the member for Griffith, Kevin Rudd, wrote to the Cole commission to seek the views of the commissioner on extending the terms of reference, Commissioner Cole made it clear that the terms of reference could not be extended in such a broad way, that that was not his job, that that was a major change in the scope of the inquiry, that his job was to inquire into the matters that had been put before him by the government. That is what he has done, and that is why the report we are talking about is an inquiry into certain Australian companies.

Do you know what this nation needs, what the soldiers and the sailors in the Australian Defence Force deserve? What they deserve, what this country needs and what democracy would demand is a full and thorough investigation not of the companies involved in this but of the whole sorry, sordid affair.

It is a disgrace to the process of parliament and what we call the Westminster system that this government has been able to construct this veil of secrecy, these misguided terms of reference for a committee of inquiry, this plausible deniability sham that they sit behind. It is a disgrace that they have been able to do that and it is a terrible reflection on this entire parliament and institution. This could not actually happen in the United States, because the executive is divorced from the legislature. It would be hard, even if you had the same party in both places, to get away with this sort of scam in the United States. You could not do it. You certainly could not do it in the United States today when you have a Democrat-controlled Congress and Senate and a Republican presidency, because the parliament would conduct thorough inquiries or would appoint a judicial officer to do the job and make sure that those responsible were held accountable.

But this government, after 10 years, has so debased the parliamentary process that everything has become a rubber stamp for the cabinet, for the executive—so much so that people of integrity in the government now find themselves tied into that obnoxious process and, in this case, find themselves having to silently stand by, if not defend, what is one of the most outrageous acts of treachery that this country has seen perpetrated by a government. I look forward to the weeks and months after the next election, when we are in government, and I look forward to a proper inquiry into this.

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