Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I will resist that temptation. It is therefore only a matter of time before this happens again. I also wish to comment on some of the commission’s findings in relation to this issue. While 10 AWB senior managers below the chief executive officer, Andrew Lindberg, have been recommended for consideration of criminal charges, as has the chairman above him, somehow the chief executive officer is cocooned in the middle ignorant of all this. It is a remarkable conclusion. People I have spoken to who have followed the proceedings are frankly astonished. Some of the evidence at the commission went along the lines that Mr Lindberg was shown a memo which bore his signature showing that the Iraqis wanted AWB to inflate the prices of one of the UN wheat contracts so that an old debt to a company called Tigris Petroleum could be paid. Mr Lindberg said he could not remember seeing the document, but the senior counsel, John Agius QC, said to him:

... there’s no doubt you’ve read it ... Your initials are on it.

Mr Agius made the point that such a plan, if implemented, would clearly have been a breach of the United Nations sanctions. Mr Agius also asked Mr Lindberg at the inquiry to study an AWB report from February 2001 which openly discussed the transport fees and the fact that the money was going not to Alia but directly to Iraq. It said:

The trucking fee is now $25 ... We believe the increase in trucking fee and addition of the service charge is a mechanism of extracting more dollars from (the UN’s oil-for-food account).

That is clear evidence in relation to kickbacks, and the significance of that report is that it was expressly prepared for Mr Lindberg. Given these matters, and the fact that Mr Lindberg was forced to say to the inquiry, ‘I don’t recall,’ on more than 250 occasions, it is quite remarkable that the Cole inquiry could reach a conclusion that all of those below Mr Lindberg should be recommended for consideration of criminal charges, as has been the chairman above him, but somehow Andrew Lindberg was cocooned in the middle blissfully ignorant of all those things.

I also make the observation that I do not believe that the Cole inquiry got to the bottom of the AWB scandal. I have mentioned in the House previously that two Austrade officials, Ramzi Maaytah and John Finnin, met with the al-Khawam family, who are the 51 per cent owners of Alia, to talk about wheat contracts. Do we know any detail of what they discussed? No. Do we know what they reported back to their minister about these discussions? No. The reason we do not know is that the Cole inquiry never called them as witnesses. They should have been called. And now, mysteriously, both these Austrade officials have resigned from Austrade. It will make it pretty much impossible to call them before a Senate committee. But the Cole inquiry says that there is no evidence that Austrade knew anything about these deals.

This conclusion is plain wrong. To reach it, the Cole inquiry completely overlooked the evidence of the Austrade meeting and it also ignored the evidence of Othman al-Absi, the Alia official, that Austrade knew all about the wheat deals. It discounted Mr al-Absi’s evidence concerning the Austrade official Mr Ayyash, but at other stages in the report it uses Mr al-Absi’s evidence, treating it as accurate. The al-Khawam family were the 51 per cent owners of Alia and it was Saddam Hussein, as we know, who owned the other 49 per cent.

The Cole report also fails to deal with other issues. It did not call the AusAID personnel who took over the AWB contract just before the outbreak of war. So we do not know just how the AusAID personnel were greeted when they contacted Alia to arrange delivery of the wheat, as documents before the Cole inquiry said they did. But we can imagine that not since Pauline Hanson’s ‘Please explain’ would there have been such galloping incomprehension as that which Alia would have shown on receiving such inquiries. Alia, after all, delivered kickbacks; they did not deliver wheat. But did the Cole inquiry investigate these matters? No. AusAID personnel were not summoned as witnesses, so we do not know what AusAID found out about these contracts or what the government’s own aid agency reported back to the minister about them.

I also am surprised at the inquiry’s conclusion that there was no evidence that Norman Davidson-Kelly had any influence over the Howard government. Mr Davidson-Kelly was the mastermind of the Tigris deal, an extraordinary scheme to defraud the UN oil for food program. Yet we know that Mr Davidson-Kelly is a long-term friend of a former Leader of the Government in the Senate, Robert Hill, and dined with him regularly over a 10-year period. There certainly is evidence that he could have influenced the Howard government.

Sadly, the government have sought to avoid responsibility for the AWB scandal. They gave the Cole inquiry restricted terms of reference. They then hid behind that inquiry, refusing to answer questions in the Senate, refusing to answer questions in the House and refusing to respond to freedom of information requests. The Australian people are entitled to get to the bottom of this scandal and are entitled to a government with a greater sense of responsibility and accountability than this one.

See this speech in context