Michael Forshaw (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

With friends like that, yes, who needs enemies? The problem is that, when it came to AWB, Saddam Hussein was not really the enemy. Whilst this government had the stewardship of trying to ensure honesty and integrity in the export marketing of our wheat, we had a situation where it was full of scandal. The share price of AWB has collapsed and the company effectively is going to have to be wound up or disappear or whatever because the administration of the wheat export industry is a joke. We actually recommended to this government back in 2003 that the Wheat Export Authority should be wound up because the growers had no confidence in it.

This is a scandal of monumental proportions. I have sat in this parliament now for 10 years. I heard members of the now government when they were in opposition—and they still do it today—try and blame the Labor Party because when we were in government there were some scandals, such as the meat substitution situation with AQIS or the Midford situation with Customs. On those occasions the Labor Party took responsibility. We said, ‘Yes, these things happened on our watch and we have to fix them up.’ But what is the position of the government now? They conveniently want to ignore the history of this scandal up until Commissioner Cole’s report on Monday. They now somehow want to claim some credit, some high moral ground, and award themselves a medal, as Senator Eggleston said, because they established an inquiry. The fact of the matter is there would never have been the need to have an inquiry if the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Minister Downer had been doing their job. Mr Cole himself acknowledged that when he said:

The critical fact that emerges is that DFAT did very little in relation to the allegations or other information it received that either specifically related to AWB, or related generally to Iraq’s manipulation of the Programme. DFAT’s response to the information and allegations was limited to seeking AWB’s assurance that it was doing nothing wrong.

They asked the question: ‘Is anything corrupt going on here?’ AWB said no, and they said, ‘Oh, well, that’s all right; we’ll accept that and go off.’ But that sort of scrutiny was totally inadequate. It is not the sort of scrutiny that even this government have applied to other issues, but why did they apply it to this issue?

We know now that the ‘best friends’ that Mr Howard talks about may be people like Trevor Flugge, a person who has a long history of association with the National Party and is even a former candidate for the National Party. For once I actually agree with Mr Tuckey in his criticisms. The government cannot escape responsibility. It was under their stewardship that this gross scandal occurred. The fact is that the Liberal and National coalition parties are not the best friends of the wheat growers; they are the best friends of the best friends that Saddam Hussein ever had. (Time expired)