Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade and International Security) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. I refer to his statement of 30 January 2006 when he said in relation to the AWB’s dealings with Iraq:

We had no suspicion, no suggestion there’d been any bribes paid ... there were no alarm bells.

I refer the Prime Minister to yet another cable, this one of 13 January 2000, in which the UN requested the Howard government to make ‘high-level inquiries’ to ensure that the AWB was not breaching the sanctions regime. I refer to the government’s reply five days later on 18 January 2000, in which DFAT stated, ‘We think it is unlikely that AWB would be involved knowingly in any form of payment in breach of the sanctions regime.’ Prime Minister, given your earlier statement today that the UN was satisfied with your assurances, what high-level inquiries did the government make between the 13 January cable and the 18 January reply to satisfy yourself that the AWB was not rorting UN sanctions?

John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What the member for Griffith has done is to selectively grab a couple of cables and put his own interpretation on them. The reality is that if you look at the totality of these cables they support in every respect the answer that I gave to the Leader of the Opposition.