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

My question is to the Minister for Foreign Affairs. I refer to the Cole inquiry’s conclusion that by June 2004 the minister’s department knew that AWB’s wheat prices included inland transport costs within Iraq, that AWB paid money to a Jordanian trucking company and that the Jordanian company might have provided kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime. Does the minister agree with this conclusion by Commissioner Cole?

Alexander Downer (Mayo, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is a follow-on from the question the Leader of the Opposition asked yesterday. Let me not dissent from Commissioner Cole at all and urge the Leader of the Opposition to read the whole of that chapter—and, indeed, to spend a bit of time reading all of the relevant parts of the commissioner’s report—because the conclusion the commissioner reaches is that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade did not know that AWB Ltd was paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime. It does not say that in June 2004 the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade knew that AWB Ltd was paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime. If the Leader of the Opposition chose to read the report, he would see that in continuing his reading through that chapter the commissioner draws his conclusion, and that is a simple conclusion, like it or loathe it: the Department of Foreign Affairs did not know that AWB Ltd was paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime.