Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister representing the Prime Minister. I draw his attention to my statement to the Senate on 4 February 2003 regarding the Iraq war:

This is not Australia’s war. This is an oil war. This is the United States recognising that as the economic empire of the age it needs oil to maintain its pre-eminence.

I also draw his attention to the Prime Minister’s statement of the same day:

No criticism is more outrageous than the claim that US behaviour is driven by a wish to take control of Iraq’s oil reserves.

I ask the minister: in the light of the point of view of Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, as revealed today, ‘what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil’, why did Prime Minister Howard mislead this nation? How could he have gotten it so wrong? Will he now face up to the fact that he came behind George Bush to invade Iraq for reasons of oil, not the other reasons spuriously put forward?