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

I thank the Minister for Foreign Affairs for taking the time to come to the Main Committee this morning. I want to ask some questions about Budget Paper No. 2. The first is about an issue on page 80 in respect of the Cole inquiry and possible criminal offences arising from that inquiry. I want to focus on not so much the issue of the possible criminal offences but whether the department will be conducting an investigation into what we would submit is clear evidence of flawed processes. I am not going to the integrity or honesty of any person in raising this issue, but clearly there appears to have been, just as a basic matter of administration, failure of communication in respect of the weapons for wheat issue.

Going back to as early as 1998, the Australian intelligence community had certainly been warning of the involvement of the trucking company Alia in paying kickbacks to the regime of Saddam Hussein. Indeed, Saddam Hussein’s family had interests in Alia. There had also been warnings by Bronte Moules, from the Australian Permanent Mission to the United Nations, regarding bribes generally as far back as 13 January 2000 and on other occasions. There had been cables from DFAT in Canberra mentioning the occurrence of irregularities generally in respect of the oil for food program. There had been specific warnings going back to Colonel Michael Kelly, who was based in Iraq at the time. He said in May 2004 in one of his emails:

Looks like the jig is up on AWB and the OFF scandal.

Subsequently, in July 2004 he told an Iraq task force meeting that AWB were up to their eyeballs in the illicit payments of the oil for food program, had cosy relationships with the Iraqi ministry and regime figures, and understood where the money was going.

I have a number of pages here documenting those warnings—in the order of 32. Albeit some of them are general warnings, others are very specific. As a matter of effective and efficient administration, we would think—and the public would expect—that the senior departmental administration would have called people in and asked them: ‘What did you know and when did you know it? Who did you communicate it to?’ Or ‘Why didn’t you communicate it?’ One would think the department would have been looking at some system to address what has been, from the point of view of basic administration, unquestionably a gross failure of effective communication.

I note by way of passing that the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee report on the detention issue in Iraq in August 2005 pointed to this characteristic within the department. It said that ineffective record keeping, unclear, haphazard reporting processes and poor communication networks meant that both departments—that is, DFAT and the Department of Defence—were unable to present a coherent, detailed and accurate account of the matters of concern to the committee. In its recommendations, the committee raised concerns about the communication and reporting processes within the departments for falling short of what is expected of a highly skilled and professional organisation.

With respect to the kickbacks issue, the AWB scandal, irrespective of issues of criminality, there are clearly further examples of failures of communication, transparency and accountability. We want to know what, if anything, is being done to find out what went wrong and what needs to be done to fix either the culture or the system of communication.

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