Kerry O'Brien (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Transport) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked by opposition senators today.

I particularly want to focus on the answer by the Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation, Senator Abetz, to my question and part of Senator Coonan’s answer to Senator Conroy’s question. Firstly, isn’t it remarkable that when a minister of the Crown stands up in this place, answerable to the Australian people, he relies upon the reference of certain matters to a commission of inquiry in order to deny the public and the parliament information?

The minister could not answer, for example, a simple question as to whether the Wheat Export Authority is responsible under the Wheat Marketing Act to monitor, examine and report on the performance of AWB Ltd. Apparently, because of that inquiry, the minister cannot answer that question. He could not tell us whether the Wheat Export Authority was required to examine contracts entered into by the AWB and analyse, assess and report on AWB’s pricing performance and supply chain arrangements, allegedly because there is a commission of inquiry. He could not answer a question as to whether he had a brief on the matter. That must have also been because of certain matters being referred to a commission of inquiry.

He certainly could not tell us whether the government had any knowledge as to why the Wheat Export Authority apparently did not know anything about the $300 million paid by AWB to Saddam Hussein under the UN’s oil for food program. Enough comment has been made about that publicly by ministers of this government to the media and in the other place to know that this government hitherto has not had a problem in answering questions about the AWB and the oil for food program, but apparently it has decided that it has become too hot and it is making too many mistakes so it has shut down its accountability through the parliamentary process and is refusing to answer questions.

I think the Australian people ought to know that under the Wheat Marketing Act the Wheat Export Authority is required:

... to monitor nominated company B’s—

that is, AWB International’s—

performance in relation to the export of wheat and examine and report on the benefits to growers that result from that performance.

It has, under section 5 of the act:

... power to do all things that are necessary or convenient to be done in connection with the performance of its functions.

So the Wheat Export Authority has wide powers. Under part 5D of the act it has authority to get any information, documents and copies of documents in custody or control of the nominated company, which is AWB International, or a related body of the nominated company that it considers relevant to the operation of the export pools that AWB has control of. Of course, the export pools are the pools of wheat which provided the wheat exported to Iraq and the basis for the $300 million in payments, allegedly for trucking, that AWB managed to funnel to Saddam Hussein’s accounts.

So the Wheat Export Authority has, since its inception, had enormous powers—indeed, a responsibility and an obligation—to investigate the performance of AWB in terms of these contracts. If it was doing its job, wouldn’t it have seen some remarkable payments being made to AWB Ltd? The government is saying, ‘We’re not going to tell you what we know about that because there’s an inquiry.’ I want to know what it has told the inquiry about that, what access the inquiry has to the Wheat Export Authority’s documentation, when it is actually going to pull the Wheat Export Authority before the commission and whether the commission is going to ask them what they told the government in those secret reports that have not been provided.

In the short time available I want to deal with the false and misleading misrepresentation that Senator Coonan made regarding a press release by Dr Emerson and me in June 2003—it has been done in the other place before, and frankly I would have thought the government would have learned—in which Dr Emerson and I called on the government to investigate claims that there were kickbacks being paid with respect to the AWB’s performance. In the last paragraph, after calling for the inquiry, we say that in the absence of any evidence we would have to dismiss the claims that this had occurred. But the previous eight or so paragraphs and the heading call for an inquiry—an inquiry which the government refused to conduct. (Time expired)