Alexander Downer (Mayo, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, for the last year, the Leader of the Opposition, in particular—who now walks out, with all the courage he can muster; he is a weak and dishonest man—has engaged in some of the most egregious slurs that I have seen in my 22 years in politics. Let us just take this example, from an interview with Mr Carlton on Radio 2UE on 24 January:

CARLTON: Do you really believe that the Government knew that the AWB was bribing Saddam Hussein and his henchmen?

BEAZLEY: Absolutely.

The Leader of the Opposition went on to say at the National Press Club about a week later: ‘This episode exposes the immorality and the corruption besetting this government.’ He went on the Lateline program on 6 February and said:

What we’re interested is demonstrating as well what we believe to be the case and that’s that they turned a blind eye to it ...

He said ‘they turned a blind eye’ a month or so later. On 24 March on Radio 2UE—his favourite outlet, apparently—the Leader of the Opposition said:

On AWB they have been dissembling, not telling the truth for months ...

...             ...             ...

... they have been deceiving. They have been telling lies.

...             ...             ...

They have been doing everything to cover this up ...

The problem with this particular narrative is that it is manifestly untrue, and the Cole commission has proven the allegations made by the Leader of the Opposition and by the member for Griffith to be completely false. And of course these allegations have been picked up by some others and run all over Australia. So all over Australia we have had these allegations that we are liars, that we are cheats, that we were involved in cover-ups, that we are corrupt. Mr Speaker, excuse me if I say this to the House, but it is a preposterous thing to allege that against a member of parliament of any party at any time and for that subsequently to have been exposed as being simply untrue—and that is what has happened here.

The Cole commission has been an outstanding effort to expose the activities of AWB Ltd and its deceit of the Australian government; in that respect it has certainly been outstanding. Indeed, the government has been vindicated in the setting up of the Cole commission to get to the heart of what had been happening in terms of the wheat trade with Iraq.

But the Cole commission has incidentally taken out the Leader of the Opposition’s credibility. He has been standing in this parliament and at the National Press Club, and speaking over and over again on radio and television throughout the last year, telling manifest untruths. He has been lying over and over again. And that has been proven by the Cole commission. This commission is an enormous embarrassment to the Leader of the Opposition and the member for Griffith, whose only defence is now to turn around and say, ‘We don’t like the terms of reference. The terms of reference didn’t look into the government’—‘didn’t look into the government’! The Prime Minister, the foreign minister and the trade minister—the Deputy Prime Minister—spent hours in the witness box. ‘Didn’t look into the government’! I myself spent—I might be wrong—3½ to four hours answering questions from counsel, and not just counsel assisting the commissioner; I spent hours being cross-examined by various counsel representing AWB employees and the like.

The government was not only transparent in going before the commission; the government’s documentation was run through with a fine-tooth comb by Commissioner Cole and, of course, all the people who assisted him. And what did it show? It showed a lot of things. But one thing it showed is that what the Labor Party, particularly the Leader of the Opposition, and others, have been saying about the Prime Minister, ministers, and the officials of my department, is quite untrue.

We have silly questions today—no new information—and the Leader of the Opposition moves his entirely predictable censure motion. Well, it was not actually entirely predictable, because I did not think he would continue with his campaign of falsehood. The first point he makes is that the government was negligent in relation to the 35 warnings. The problem for the Leader of the Opposition and the problem for the Labor Party is that Commissioner Cole addressed the issue of the warnings. Although I know the Leader of the Opposition has not read any of the Cole report, or hardly any of the Cole commission report—

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