Robert Ray (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Once again today we have seen a government minister claim that we are asking questions on operational matters when we have asked about matters of process. This pathetic excuse is trotted out. Have we ever had a record on this side of the chamber of asking about operational matters? The answer is never. What we are pursuing is whether government ministers fulfilled their duties as a minister with full diligence. These questions refer to events that occurred six or seven years ago. We are entitled to ask why—when these infractions were known, at least to DFAT and almost certainly to Customs—they were not referred for investigation six or seven years ago. Why did it only happen in February this year as the opposition was sniffing around on the issue? We are entitled to an answer on that, and we have got nothing.

That is nothing compared to what happened at estimates last Thursday. Already we have had evidence from a previous estimates committee that this matter is not before Cole and is outside the terms of reference. So we asked officials at the table for details on this. What answer did we get? ‘Yes, the matter is not before Cole and is not within Cole’s terms of reference; however, the broad subject matter is before Cole—that is, oil exports—therefore we cannot answer any questions.’ What a miserable, invented excuse—primarily given carriage this time by public servants wanting to avoid their duty to answer questions truthfully before an estimates committee. How pathetic we have become when we get to that situation.

This question was raised last Monday with Mr Downer, the foreign minister. He assured everyone that everything was okay. Then six hours later, under the cover of darkness, what did we get? We got a qualifying statement that, yes, certain matters had gone to the Federal Police and are under investigation. There was no explanation given as to why it went six or seven years. The one thing we do know is that BP behaved properly in one sense. When their audit discovered they did not have proper authorisation, they wrote to DFAT seeking retrospective approval. They never got a response. Can you imagine the flap over at the RG Casey Building when this letter arrived—when they found that the foreign minister or his delegate, who should have given written authorisation for the import of this material, had not done so.

It is bad enough that we forked out $290 million to fund this despicable regime of Saddam Hussein; what we do not know is how much they got paid for sending materials to Australia that were not properly authorised. Why was this not sent to Cole? Surely, having referred the extra issues of Tigris Petroleum and BHP to Cole, this matter would have gone to them. But, no, under the cloak of secrecy they slipped it off without announcement to the AFP. Do not send it to Cole where there will be the full glare of publicity on yet another bungle over Iraq by the Australian government. No, do not do that at all. Slide it off to the Federal Police and hope that no-one gets to hear about it. But our shadow minister in the other place, Mr Kelvin Thomson, certainly heard about it and started asking questions. So too did The 7.30 Report. There have been 15 documents identified as being relevant to this in Customs. They were refused disclosure on the basis that it was not in the public interest.

Why is it not in the public interest to expose the incompetence of this government? Why is it not in the public interest for us to know why this matter was sat on for six or seven years? I am not saying that Senator Ellison sat on it for six or seven years; from memory, he has been in the portfolio for four or five years. But who preceded him? It was the great proselyte, the great lecturer, the great moraliser of the Senator, Senate Vanstone. I want to know what role she played back in those days after she was demoted into the position of Minister for Justice and Customs. I want to know why she did not refer it to the Federal Police.

I thought it was bad enough that we paid bribes to Saddam to send stuff over there. Now we find that he has been sending stuff here without proper authorisation. Of course, that was outside the Cole terms of reference and outside the Volcker terms of reference and they thought they could get away with it. But do not come in here today and say that this is an operational matter. We know what parts of it are an operational matter and we know what parts of it are a political matter. (Time expired)