Andrew Murray (WA, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I want to draw the Senate’s attention to volume 4 of the Report of the inquiry into certain Australian companies in relation to the United Nations Oil-For-Food Programme. Volume 4 covers the findings. At pages 120 to 122 the question is put in this manner:

Did AWB mislead the United Nations?

In the response to that question, the commissioner says the following things:

First, AWB denied to the United Nations and the Commonwealth that it was making payments to Iraq outside the Oil-for-Food Programme.

Second, AWB knew that the fee it was paying to Alia was not for the provision of transport services. It knew the fee was a payment to Iraq.

Third, AWB knew it was not responsible for transportation within Iraq. AWB knew it had no contract with Alia to provide transport services. It was obliged to pay a fee.

Fourth, AWB went to extraordinary lengths to hide the payment of the fee to Alia.

              …              …              …

Fifth, AWB knew that its contracts submitted to the United Nations did not reflect the true agreements it had with Iraq.

              …              …              …

Sixth, the proposition in paragraph 51 amounts to a contention that, the United Nations having imposed sanctions to prevent payments to Iraq, if told that such payments in breach of sanctions were to be made to Iraq, would have approved contracts which so stated.

That section ends:

I find that AWB did mislead the United Nations.

Mr Cole has found that the AWB misled the United Nations, so the question is: how could that happen if DFAT and the ministers were doing their job? The thing we should pay attention to in reacting to the Cole commission is the abysmal immediate response of the government. They immediately said to the world at large: ‘We were not to blame. We did not know what was occurring.’ They should be saying that there are real problems in government systems and processes, in government competency and in government’s ability to do the job that it is supposed to do on behalf of the Australian people—and they should address those problems.

One question that Mr Cole was not asked was: how could DFAT and the ministers remain ignorant of wrongdoing going on under their very noses? What is wrong with our oversight and accountability systems? What is wrong with our mechanisms? We should be able say to the Australian people, when Australia commits itself to United Nations resolutions and accountability and sanctions regimes, that there will be the ability to conduct proper oversight. The Cole commission had limited power to look at the most important player in this whole sorry AWB scandal. The government itself did not, could not and would not do the job which it is required to do, and that is to run the department properly and to properly examine the 35 separate contracts it had to look at. AWB not only misled the United Nations but also, in doing so, misled the Australian people and the Australian government. And we trusted the Australian government to make sure that they did not do so.

If the government—and two ministers in particular—had an obligation to know what was happening under their very noses and they did not do that job, they were therefore delinquent and negligent. They did not have to turn away or turn a blind eye; they were not even looking. That means incompetency. That means a dereliction of duty. What the government have to say to us senators and members, representing the Australian people, is: ‘This will not happen again. We will institute systems and processes and accountability and oversight mechanisms such that this cannot happen again.’ How do we know that this sort of scandal is not going on somewhere else if we do not have the proper systems in place to oversight these matters?

The inconvenient truth is that the government should have known about the $290 million paid to the Saddam Hussein regime. The government failed to protect Australia from breaching the resolutions and the sanctions that we had agreed to stand by. We know that the Australian coalition government has a poor accountability and probity record. As with many important issues of domestic and international concern, when it has acted it seems to have been mostly reactive and a follower not a leader. It has gone backwards on electoral disclosure, freedom of information and public accountability laws. In making progress in corporate governance and standards, it has mostly just responded to international pressure, except where it has wanted to protect revenue, where it has been proactive. In my opinion, the coalition is good at money and poor on morality and accountability. It minimises ministerial responsibility and specialises in blame shifting.

We have here a failure of the government to do the job for which it is appointed, and that is to properly protect Australia’s interests. With respect to the AWB, the Howard government has failed on three major counts. Firstly, it has failed to comply with its obligations under international law to institute to the full the OECD and United Nations conventions with respect to bribery and corruption and ensure that our law made such things absolutely prohibited. In that respect, Mr Cole has been obliged to make recommendations to increase and improve our law.

Secondly, the Howard government has failed to enforce vigilance and probity in public sector oversight and management of sensitive foreign dealings. That is not just a minor issue. The oil for food regime required the Minister for Foreign Affairs to be directly responsible for 41 contracts that were approved and which passed through DFAT’s hands, and yet on not one of those occasions was a warning taken seriously and taken up to such an extent that AWB was warned off. AWB should have been warned off from practices which—it is quite clear from the evidence—it regarded as perfectly normal commercial dealings. If that was so in one company dealing in exports from this country, how likely is it to be the case in many other companies? It seems very unlikely to me that AWB stands alone in these sorts of practices, and that therefore means that our laws and our oversight need be strengthened.

Thirdly—and I am particularly offended by this—this failure to exercise proper ministerial responsibility has resulted in a diminishing of the reputation of Australia. Because of my background and my contacts, I am very well aware of people who deal with Australia on an international basis. This scandal has affected our reputation, not because people are surprised that we have some criminals in our community—because that is perfectly well understood and expected in any country—but because they are surprised that our government systems, our government mechanisms, are so poor are that this was allowed to go on under the very noses of the department that was responsible.

The Cole inquiry should have highlighted the delinquency, the negligence, of our systems, but of course it could not do so because the terms of reference were too limited and it was solely focused on whether anyone in government knew, or was known to have known, about these matters. On that count, of course, it found that they did not know. That they did not know, to me, is the greatest failure of all. They should have known.

The Democrats call on the Labor Party to commit, if it wins the next election, to guaranteeing a return to the Westminster tradition of ministerial responsibility and to implement the recommendations of the former Senate Finance and Public Administration References Committee in respect of ministerial staff. We think that we have to return accountability in this country to a far more rigorous standard than is employed under the Howard government. Under the Howard government, money reigns supreme but accountability comes a distant second. We think that right from the start the terms of reference of the Cole inquiry were too limiting. We think that it was wrong that the Senate was prevented by the government from inquiring separately into the Cole matter through the estimates process. We are concerned that some material from the relevant bureaucrats and departments arrived too late for proper analysis and that other documents might not have been supplied. (Time expired)