Gavan O'Connor (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I hold here a copy of the Cole commission Report into certain Australian companies in relation to the UN oil-for-food programme, which documents one of the greatest scandals in Australian corporate history. That scandal came about, as the commissioner has documented, as a result of a culture that grew up in the Australian Wheat Board. Subsequent actions which have damaged wheat growers around this nation damaged the good reputation of this industry and damaged the trading reputation of Australia.

As I read through this report—the whole five volumes of it—it comes home to me just how far the standards have slipped in this parliament. AWB, in its privatised form, was a creation of legislation enacted by the Howard government. In that particular structure is an organisation called the Wheat Export Authority. It is the Wheat Export Authority that is the subject of one of the particular recommendations in the Cole commission report.

This is a scandal of immense proportions. The damage it has done to the wheat industry is extraordinary and substantial. And, of course, it occurred on the watch of the Howard government and its negligent and incompetent ministers. We ought not to feel sad about what has happened to the wheat industry; we ought to feel angry, because the wheat growers of Australia must now face the second drought in some three years. This has been described not as a one in 100 event but as a one in 1,000 event. The wheat industry has to stomach the sight of a coalition government celebrating the fact that, despite rorted terms of reference and the exonerations that supposedly came in this report, they have had to sit and watch, on their televisions of a night, minister after minister denying any culpability and responsibility for this negligence.

The crowning hypocrisy of the government’s position is that we went to Iraq, as the Prime Minister so often tells us, to defend democracy and encourage democratic government. He says that we will be there when all the rest are gone, apparently, because both the Americans and the British are seeking ways to get out of that terrible waste of a conflict. But at the heart of any democracy is the notion of ministerial responsibility. That has been the cornerstone of the Westminster system. As you read in this report of the incompetence of at least one department, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, we have the government denying any ministerial responsibility for the actions of its bureaucracy.

This is another betrayal of another great industry in Australia by the National Party. There was the betrayal over Telstra. There was also the betrayal over the US FTA and the exclusion of sugar from that agreement. Now we have the betrayal over the single desk and the betrayal of the wheat industry. In the text of the US FTA, in terms of the American perception of what was agreed at the table by the then Minister for Trade, Mark Vaile, the Americans are very clear: the Australian government has agreed in the forthcoming Doha Round to work with it for the dismantling of state trading enterprises—which is code for the single desk. The single desk has already been traded away. It has already been given away by the National Party minister at the negotiating table in the US FTA. Yet the party members come into this House and they go into the public arena deliberately stating that they are supporting a single desk when in fact they have betrayed the constituency they purportedly represent. (Time expired)