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

At least Senator Heffernan knows which party he wants to be in. Senator McGauran has had a lot of trouble in that regard. The point has been made that, since Senator McGauran joined the Liberal Party, they have done worse in Victoria than the National Party has—whose vote has actually gone up. But let us not touch upon that. What we are talking about is the absolute incompetence of this government. It is no excuse to say that the nobbled Cole commission of inquiry, with its limited terms of reference, could say anything about the incompetence of this government. Of course it could not.

You only have to look at Steve Lewis’s column in the Australian yesterday where he says that, because the government has control of this Senate, they are not going to be asked the questions that they should be asked. They could not have been asked those penetrating questions at the Cole commission of inquiry because the commission had no power to investigate how incompetent this government was, what they really knew and what they did about it. In fact, when the three wise monkeys of this government appeared before the inquiry, there were very great limitations on the questions that could be asked of them. We now know that, certainly in respect of Mr Vaile and Mr Downer, they made sure that they saw no evil, because they would not read anything; and they heard no evil, because they would not listen to anything; and, of course, they did not say anything that had anything to do with the wheat export corruption, because they claimed they knew nothing about it.

Time will tell whether or not that is true, but the fact is that the Cole commission of inquiry was nobbled from the start. It could not do its job because its terms of reference were limited. In effect, what Commissioner Cole said was that he could not inquire into matters other than those specifically contained within the terms of reference. It was immaterial whether the government was incompetent or not; that was beyond the terms of reference of the inquiry. So here we have a government that is prepared to hide behind its own nobbling of a commission of inquiry. It is prepared to try and attack the opposition and say how terrible we are for attacking this government for incompetence. But everyone in the public knows that this government, in relation to AWB, was totally and utterly incompetent. It missed every signal. It closed its eyes, it closed its ears and it did nothing. (Time expired)