Robert McClelland (Barton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

The minister at the table interjects that perhaps they are one and the same. Perhaps we have delegated our foreign policy responsibility on such an important issue to the United States administration and perhaps, in that context, their plan is our plan. The Labor Party are very strong allies of the United States—always have been and always will be—but we will never delegate our national security responsibility to any other regime.

Looking at the government’s strategy in respect of Iraq, you will see that it is delusional. We invaded Iraq for the purpose of ridding that country of weapons of mass destruction. As it turned out, those weapons of mass destruction did not exist. The invasion occurred despite the fact that the United Nations inspectors had not completed their reporting on that matter.

Why was the invasion necessary? The invasion became necessary—as the Prime Minister said in a speech on 4 February 2003—because international sanctions had failed. He said:

The old policy of containment is eroding. Saddam Hussein has increasingly been able to subvert the sanctions.

He also accused Saddam Hussein of ‘cruelly and simply manipulating the oil for food program’. There is no doubt that that was occurring. The Prime Minister said:

Tragically for the Iraqi people, Saddam Hussein has rorted the program, violated its provisions and evaded its constraints.

Regrettably, again he was dead accurate—dead for many Iraqis and allied troops, indeed. He was quite correct. Saddam Hussein had bypassed the sanctions and rorted the oil for food program. And who were the biggest international rorters, the world champions of rorting, of that program that led to the invasion of Iraq, in the Prime Minister’s own words? Australia was. Australians have been disgraced in that it was our government—a government that was responsible for signing off the work of AWB—that was responsible for the greatest rorting of that oil for food program and for bypassing the sanctions regime.

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