Gavan O'Connor (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries) Share this | Hansard source

Tonight there are wheat-farming families sitting around the kitchen table looking at the scarcity of food. They look out on the devastated, drought ravaged landscape of their farms and they shudder in despair about their future. Last night in the bowels of this parliament, a collective sigh of relief came over the coalition as they popped the champagne corks and celebrated the fact that the rorted terms of reference and the subsequent report had exonerated ministers in the government.

Let us call this for what it is worth; let us call it for what it is. This is the greatest corporate scandal in Australia’s postwar history and it occurred on the watch of the Howard Liberal and National Party government. This is a Liberal-National Party scandal—no more and no less. And every member of the coalition tonight should put the champagne glasses away and reflect on the enormous damage that they have done to this great industry of this country and what damage they have done to the democratic processes of this parliament and this nation.

We are talking about a five-volume report of over 2,600 pages which documents the deepest corruption of the international wheat market we have seen in our lifetimes, under the auspices of the Liberal and National Party government of Australia. There is no escaping this fact, members opposite. It is on your watch that the greatest scandal in Australia’s corporate history has occurred. Every one of you ought to hang your head in shame. Because, as you popped the champagne corks last night in glee that your ministers had got off the hook in your eyes, many wheat-farming families around Australia are starving because of this drought—while members opposite have presided in their incompetence and in their negligence over the worst scandal in Australia’s corporate history.

Let us call this report for what it says. This is what Commissioner Cole had to say:

It is not my function to make findings of breach of the law.

Well, why were they celebrating last night? The government rorted the terms of reference to insulate itself against scrutiny and then, when the commissioner delivered a report within those terms of reference, its members breathed a collective sigh of relief. The commissioner said:

It is not my function to make findings of breach of the law; my function is to indicate circumstances where it might be appropriate for authorities to consider whether criminal or civil proceedings should be commenced. I found such circumstances to exist.

Five volumes of it he found—five volumes of evidence that shines a light on the worst corporate scandal in Australia’s postwar history, courtesy of the Howard government and of Liberal and National Party members.

The commissioner, in the prologue—and if you only read two pages, read those two; it is enough—asks the question: ‘Why did it happen? How is it so?’ His words are a description of this government and the culture that is spawned not only in the political system but throughout corporate Australia, including rural corporate Australia. He has this to say:

The answer is a closed culture of superiority and impregnability, of dominance and self-importance.

There are no two lines, or one and a quarter lines, that sum up the culture of the Howard government better than the words of Commissioner Cole: ‘The answer is a closed culture of superiority and impregnability’. The Prime Minister and his ministers for years had a firewall set up—as only they know how to do and as only a corrupt government knows how to do—to make sure that there were no paper trails that led to the desk of any minister in the Howard government, including the Prime Minister. There is this terrible sense of impregnability, of dominance and self-importance: ‘We can swan around the rural sector and betray them on Telstra, like we betrayed them on the US FTA on sugar.’ And now there is the ultimate betrayal, in five volumes, of corrupt practice courtesy of the Howard government and its ministers.

What has it cost the great wheat industry of Australia, the communities that depend on it and the farm families that make their living proudly in this great industry? The ultimate hypocrisy and the ultimate insult was made on the floor of the House of Representatives when the Prime Minister said about the ethics of this government, in that glib one-liner that says it all, that the wheat growers of Australia have no better friends than the Liberal and National parties. Who needs enemies when you have friends like the coalition?

This scandal has cost wheat growers $290 million of their hard-earned income, paid in bribes courtesy of the Howard government and its negligence and incompetence to a dictator in Iraq at a time when the government was spinning out a line to commit Australia in a grave conflict that has now claimed the lives of over 650,000 Iraqi civilians and thousands of American lives—untold suffering spun out by a deceptive Prime Minister who has the ethics of a snake. The ethics of this Prime Minister and his moral depth are about the distance between the rattlesnake’s belly and the ground.

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