Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to move the following motion:

That this House censure the Prime Minister for:

(1)

deliberately restricting the terms of reference of the Cole Inquiry to ensure the actions of the Prime Minister, his office and his Ministers for allowing AWB Limited to rort the UN Oil-For-Food Programme are not subjected to proper examination; and

(2)

cravenly hiding behind Commissioner Cole to defend the Government’s continuing cover-up of its improper conduct in relation to the Wheat for Weapons scandal.

Leave not granted.

I move:

That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the Leader of the Opposition moving immediately: That this House censure the Prime Minister for:

(1)

deliberately restricting the terms of reference of the Cole Inquiry to ensure the actions of the Prime Minister, his office and his Ministers for allowing AWB Limited to rort the UN Oil-For-Food Programme are not subjected to proper examination; and

(2)

cravenly hiding behind Commissioner Cole to defend the Government’s continuing cover-up of its improper conduct in relation to the Wheat for Weapons scandal.

This is the seventh attempt we have made to censure the government on this matter, and the government have cut and run on every one of them. They have absolutely refused to take a censure motion in this place, apart from on day one, on a matter which is the greatest scandal this country has ever confronted. The Prime Minister, in his last answer to me, continued the deliberate misleading of this chamber and the Australian people. Let me quote from the correspondence of the Cole commission to the opposition, when we pointed out to the Cole commission that we did not consider that the commission had sufficient powers to make determinations about the conduct of ministers in relation to a number of matters and that there was in fact unequal treatment between those people who are involved with the Wheat Board’s activities and those who are government agents, including ministers, associated with the approval regime. This is what the commission said to us:

Seeking amendment to clarify terms of reference, or to address peripheral and anomalous circumstances which arise during the course of an inquiry may be regarded as appropriate conduct by a commissioner. However, it would not be appropriate for a commissioner to seek amendment of the terms of reference to address a matter significantly different to that in the existing terms of reference. The suggestion, implicit and perhaps explicit in the opinion and submission forwarded by you, that the commissioner should seek amendments to the terms of reference to enable him to determine whether Australia has breached its international obligations, or a Minister has breached obligations imposed upon him by Australian regulations falls, with respect, within the latter category.

That is, outside their frame of reference.

There is no question that the Cole commission does not have powers to make those determinations. The Prime Minister wants in his answers in this place to clothe himself with the Volcker committee report on the activities of the Wheat Board—the report that revealed those most shameful and scandalous of circumstances. That committee, we find out, was deliberately frustrated for a substantial period in its considerations by the activities of the minister and the minister’s department, no doubt on the directions of the minister. The Volcker inquiry was deliberately misled by the Prime Minister, and we find out subsequently—

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The Leader of the Opposition has moved a suspension; he has not moved a censure motion.

Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a censure motion, Mr Speaker. We have to have this mentioned.

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The words ‘deliberately misled’ are more appropriate for a debate on a censure motion.

Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is precisely the point, Mr Speaker. On seven occasions now we have attempted to move a censure motion in this place. I would have thought the job of the Speaker in this House was to facilitate the procedures of the House and the accountability of the government.

Honourable Members:

Honourable members interjecting—

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I recognise the Leader of the Opposition.

Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The simple fact of the matter is that we have to debate this censure motion, because of the significance and the importance of the issues involved. The fact is that, even after the Prime Minister’s alleged intervention to talk about collaboration, evidence has been presented that officials of the Prime Minister’s office were suggesting to the AWB officials appearing before the Volcker committee that they should keep themselves limited just to technical issues and that they did not have to volunteer information. The cover-up continued.

But, even so, the reason this government is culpable in all the horror stories of the breaches of those sanctions is that there is no other government anywhere else in the world which has been so deeply linked to the people who were breaching the sanctions, the approval processes associated with the way in which the sanctions were breached and, at the very outset, the actual ownership of the agency which breached the sanctions. There is no government so intimately committed in this way anywhere else in the world—only here. That is why the government’s activities and the AWB’s activities must be examined, and that is why we have to have this debate now.

Last night the Prime Minister said:

... it stands to reason that if Cole finds that Downer or Howard were told by AWB that it was paying kickbacks and we did nothing about it, it would be game over.

Well, Prime Minister, it is game over. That is his own judgment and his own say. But I say this today, Prime Minister: with a government that ignored 27 warnings of AWB sanction-busting bribes, what should the verdict be? Game over. With a government that has deliberately hampered the investigations of the Volcker inquiry, what should the verdict be? Game over. When a government ignored the warnings of its own intelligence agencies, warnings which included the name of the company doing the defrauding of the sanctions—a company owned in part by Saddam Hussein’s family—and ignored all that was revealed to the government, and did nothing about it, I would say, Mr Prime Minister: game over. When you have a government up to its neck in a cover-up, full of bluster and bluff, rorting Cole’s terms of reference to save the political life of its incompetent, disgraced and discredited foreign minister, it is game well and truly over.

The Prime Minister now says that he wants to know just how the ‘wheat for weapons’ scandal came about; how Australia rorted United States sanctions and helped propel Australia into the war in Iraq; how it was that AWB donated $300 million to Saddam Hussein’s regime—money to buy the guns aimed at our troops; how Australian dollars strengthened the pre-war Iraqi regime and gave support to the insurgency; how his government ignored the 27 warnings about AWB’s kickbacks—the flashing red lights, the flood of cables to the Prime Minister and his foreign minister alerting them, warning them, telling them just what AWB was up to; and how his government, after the war in Iraq, allowed the AWB, despite the warnings, to continue its corrupt dealings for another year and a half.

On television last night the Prime Minister looked down the camera and declared that he wanted to know three things: whether any crime was committed by his ministers; what his ministers knew about what AWB was doing; and what his ministers did about what they knew. I commend the Prime Minister for his new-found and apparently forensic interest in getting to the bottom of this shameful mess of deceit and corruption. I am pleased to tell him that uncovering the truth rests entirely with him. It is very simple, Prime Minister: just walk out of this parliament, pick up the suggested reference we tabled for you today and give it to the Cole commission. Unless the Prime Minister does that, there will be no determination on those matters. They will not follow forensically the trail of intelligence advice they have been presented with; they will simply note it. They will not follow forensically the advice that came to the government immediately after the war that every single contract contained a bribe; they will not follow that. They will not follow all the other evidence associated with the cables that came in advising the government that there ought to be some investigation of matters, when it was being suggested that rorting and sanctions busting were taking place. The Cole commission will not go down that road.

The Cole commission will not go down the road of making a determination on the competence with which ministers handled this matter when they so massively traduced the international reputation of Australia by permitting and turning a blind eye to the most corrupt of dealings with the most savage of dictators, who used those funds subsequently against Australian troops, who continued to have those bribes delivered, for all intents and purposes as far as we know, some of it ending up in funding the insurgency which is now taking place and which is killing American soldiers, killing allied soldiers and killing Iraqi citizens.

A decent government would want to get to the bottom of that. A decent government with a sense of responsibility, ministers with a sense of responsibility, would want to get to the bottom of that. We were praising Tony Blair here a day or so ago. You would never have got away with this in the Westminster system and you should not get away with it now, which is why we must debate this censure motion. (Time expired)

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

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

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As the member for Lalor famously said of the Leader of the Opposition in her now notorious Australian Story interview, he is trying—he is very trying—and, on today’s evidence, he certainly is not succeeding in making any kind of a case against this government and its ministers. By his behaviour in this House today and throughout this week, he is confirming the correctness of the member for Lalor’s criticism of the parliamentary tactics that he has been pursuing for these last two months.

The Leader of the Opposition has claimed in his suspension motion that the government has deliberately restricted access to the Cole royal commission. This is a total untruth. This is completely unfair to the record of this government, as is recognised by a very senior official of the Volcker inquiry who was reported in the Australian today. As that senior official made very clear, no government on earth has cooperated with the Volcker inquiry more fully or responded with more openness and transparency to the Volcker findings than this government of Australia.

It is absolutely obvious from the Leader of the Opposition’s speech—carefully written and typed out for him and badly read with the kind of falsetto passion for which he has become notorious—that members opposite are not interested in the Cole inquiry. They do not care what the Cole inquiry investigates. They do not care what the Cole inquiry finds. As far as they are concerned, this government is guilty. It does not matter what Cole talks about or investigates; as far as members opposite are concerned, the government is guilty. We are always guilty as far as they are concerned. It does not matter what we do, we are guilty of incompetence and impropriety! It shows the desperation of members opposite—it does not matter what we do, their tune is always the same. If there is one characteristic of this opposition that distinguishes it and debases it compared with the Labor Party in times past, it is that it is never prepared to give any credit to anyone, particularly anyone from this government.

Today we saw absolutely nothing new—no new material, no new arguments. It was just the recycled leader recycling his indignation. The reason that all this bluff and bluster from the opposition in every question time since December last year is simply not washing with the general public is that the general public understand that there is something utterly implausible about the allegation that a government which was contemplating military action against Saddam Hussein should have simultaneously been knowingly funding Saddam Hussein. It is utterly implausible that this would be the case. That is why the general public are perfectly content not to listen to the bluster of the Leader of the Opposition but to wait for the forensic investigations of former Justice Terry Cole, a judge of the highest integrity and the highest standing, who should be allowed to get on with his job.

Every day that the Leader of the Opposition focuses on this matter is another day when he does not have to deal with what is really his most pressing responsibility, and that is sorting out the problems inside his own party. As the member for Lalor said very rightly in her excellent—in many respects—speech to the Sydney Institute, the Australian people will never trust with government someone who cannot govern his own party.

Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I would really love to hear all this in a censure motion debate, if we had the opportunity. But, as we do not have the opportunity, could you confine the Leader of the House in his remarks, as I was confined, to the motion before the chair.

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I call the Leader of the House. I will listen carefully to his comments and I remind him of the motion before the chair.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The fact is that the Leader of the Opposition was given licence to speak widely across this issue, and I am doing no more and no less than the Leader of the Opposition. I am speaking to the same topics that he spoke to. He claims that this government has shown a lack of competence and a lack of propriety in government. I say to him that he has shown a lack of competence and a lack of propriety in opposition. If he is not capable of running a decent and a competent opposition, he certainly is not capable of running a decent and a competent government. This Leader of the Opposition was a failure as a defence minister, he was a failure as a telecommunications minister, he was a failure as a finance minister—

Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The simple fact of the matter is that all of this could be properly discussed in a debate on a censure motion to which he had moved an amendment. But, quite frankly, with this particular motion he is precluded by the tactics he has pursued from an opportunity to discuss me.

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Leader of the Opposition moved a motion and spoke in a reasonably wide-ranging debate. I believe that the Leader of the House is in order and I call the Leader of the House.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I am only too happy to debate this issue up hill and down dale. This government has debated this issue non-stop in every question time since December last year. We have never gagged any motion that the Leader of the Opposition has sought to move.

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! I remind members on my left that the Leader of the Opposition was heard in silence.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We have never gagged any of them. We have allowed him to move his motions for suspension day in and day out. We are perfectly happy to let him keep moving these motions, because every time he moves these slightly hysterical motions, every time he sits opposite and interjects maniacally, people are starting to understand that the decent Kim Beazley who they thought they knew has somehow transmuted into a man who is visibly losing it.

Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I raise a point of order. All of this is entirely justified in a censure motion, if they want to move a censure motion on me.

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Leader of the Opposition will resume his seat. The Leader of the House is in order, and I call the Leader of the House.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Leader of the Opposition gave his censure speech in the guise of discussing a suspension motion. We know he did, because he had a long typescript—

Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Not at all.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

which he read, and read badly. So I am perfectly entitled to respond in kind.

Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, you’re not.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What we are seeing from this Leader of the Opposition, who cannot keep quiet for a moment, who constantly has to psych himself up with this non-stop chatter, is someone who is visibly losing it. I never thought—

Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, on a point of order: this has absolutely nothing to do with the motion.

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Leader of the Opposition will resume his seat.

Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

He ought to allow the debate to proceed if he wants to offer insulting remarks.

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Leader of the Opposition will resume his seat! The Leader of the House is entirely in order.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, on the point of order from the Leader of the Opposition: I refer you to page 333 of House of Representatives Practice.

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Grayndler will resume his seat. I have already ruled on that point of order.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I used to think that the former member for Werriwa, Mark Latham, had been very unfair to the Leader of the Opposition. I thought it was very unfair, but I now think he is right. Mr Latham said—

Graham Edwards (Cowan, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary (Defence and Veterans' Affairs)) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On a point of order, Mr Speaker: what can this possibly have to do with the motion that is before the House?

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Cowan will resume his seat. The Leader of the House has hardly been able to get back to his speech without another interruption. I call the Leader of the House.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Let me make it very clear: as Commissioner Cole has said in writing, he has every capacity to consider what ministers knew and what they did and he will make findings on those—(Time expired)

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

What a gutless Leader of the House, what a spineless Leader of the House, what a pathetic Leader of the House to not have the courage to allow a censure motion to be properly debated here. Instead he uses this as an opportunity to engage in personal ridicule of the Leader of the Opposition. If you had any guts at all, you would agree to the debate on the censure motion proceeding. You have demonstrated your gutlessness today.

This is a matter of urgency because we do not have a Prime Minister in this parliament anymore; we have the king of cover-up. And that is the essence of the motion which we have sought to have debated in this parliament today. The king of cover-up started his work with Dubai, did his further studies when it came to ‘children overboard’ and did his postgraduate work when it came to pre-war intelligence on Iraq. But I have to say that his post-doctoral work is now done with this ‘wheat for weapons’ scandal and the rorted terms of reference he has provided to the Cole inquiry. This is a cover-up from beginning to end, and any reasonable observer of these events knows it.

Why is it that this Prime Minister is engaging in cover-up? There is one core reason, and that reason sits on the government front bench. It is a very big reason, and its name is Alexander Gosse Downer, whose credibility day by day in the week that has passed—

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The member for Griffith will refer to ministers by their title.

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

The foreign minister sits over there, and his credibility day by day has evaporated before our very eyes. He is incapable of providing any answer to any question concerning his responsibility for this $300 million ‘wheat for weapons’ scandal—a ‘wheat for weapons’ scandal which delivered money to the enemy. No greater act of treachery could be delivered to the Australian armed forces than to allow $300 million to go into the hands of an enemy with whom you are on the cusp of going to war.

This minister, who does not have the guts to be present during this debate, had the responsibility under Australian law to ensure that did not happen. And this minister, the foreign minister, failed to discharge his duties to the Australian people. More importantly, he failed to discharge his duties to our men and women in uniform. He allowed money to go to the enemy to buy weapons for use against Australian troops.

This Prime Minister has sought to defend his rorted terms of reference—terms of reference which he has rorted for one reason alone, which is to defend the foreign minister. He has tried to advance two reasons as to why these rorted, narrow terms of reference are somehow defensible. The first is this: he says, ‘The United Nations didn’t ask us to do any more.’ If you look at the UN report, the Volcker inquiry, you will see that it was established to examine the role of the UN and UN suppliers. It had no mandate to examine the role of national governments in the first place. But even given that, when the Secretary-General of the United Nations made his statement after the Volcker inquiry report was delivered, even he referred to the fact that each of these supply contracts had to be certified. By whom? By national governments. And which national government certified the biggest slosh bucket full of money over to Saddam Hussein? This government here.

There are three players in this scandal: the United Nations is the first, AWB is the second and the Australian government is the third. Guess what? We have had an inquiry into the United Nations—that is, the Volcker inquiry; we are having an inquiry into AWB—that is, the Cole inquiry; but have no inquiry whatsoever into the third player, which, of course, is the Howard government.

The Prime Minister’s second defence is that findings of fact can be made. He knows full well as he stands at the dispatch box that those findings can only be made in relation to whether the AWB should be charged with a criminal matter. He knows that. He stands before us in this act of defiant cover-up each day. We have before us a government which has failed its most fundamental task of national security. Instead of acting as a government and recognising that it has a case to answer, or at least recognising that it has a sense of responsibility—and, I have to say, shame—its recourse is one standard extract from the John Howard text of political survival: cover-up, cover-up and cover-up. (Time expired)

Question put:

That the motion (That the motion () be agreed to.

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

Mr Speaker, I ask that further questions be placed on the Notice Paper.