Alexander Downer (Mayo, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

How graceful the member for Fowler is. She calls it the ‘coalition of the killing’—in other words, part of the opposition’s general approach that it was a simple outrage to get rid of Saddam Hussein. The opposition argues that the sanctions regime should have remained in place, that the oil for food program should still be in place today and that if there were rorts in the oil for food program that was just too bad. But of course the opposition knows that if it had not been for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein then no-one would have found out about the rorts of the oil for food program; they would not have found out about the nature of the corruption. It is because Volcker was able to get to the documents of the Iraqi regime that it was possible to find out about the background to this systemic corruption in Iraq. If Saddam Hussein were still there—which is the opposition’s policy—the rorting would continue, and that apparently would not be of any concern to the opposition.

During the life of the sanctions regime, this government—as was true of the previous government—always had a policy of supporting the sanctions regime. When the oil for food resolution was passed, the Australian government supported it in the context of sanctions on Iraq. Throughout the life of the sanctions regime on Iraq, there was never an instruction from any minister or from any Prime Minister of this country to waive that regime in relation to Australian companies nor any instruction to Australian public servants to go slow or soft on enforcing the rules—and there has not been a skerrick of evidence to suggest that. Indeed, there has not been a skerrick of evidence that anybody in this government, be it the Prime Minister, ministers or public servants, was in some way corrupt, as the Leader of the Opposition claims, in addressing this issue. So the allegations made by the opposition are extremely dishonest. At the end of the day, hysterical claims of corruption, like the one from the Leader of the Opposition’s speech a moment ago, undermine the credibility of the opposition. You do not win an argument through hysteria, and maximising hysteria is not going to get you anywhere.

In his speech, the Leader of the Opposition suggested that the Australian government was responsible for the death and injury of American soldiers in Iraq. I think that allegation stands on its own. It is a disgraceful and disgusting slur. Let me put it this way: if we made an allegation like that against the Labor Party there would be uproar and outrage. But the Labor Party, having supported the retention of Saddam Hussein’s regime, now suggests that the Australian government was quite happy to fund the death and maiming of American soldiers and of course support Palestinian suicide bombers.

No country, no government, has been more supportive than the Australian government of what the Americans have been doing in Iraq. The American government is probably the only government that has been as supportive of Israel as this government has been. We have been enormously supportive of Israel. The ‘reasonable person in the street test’ here is quite a simple one, and that is of course that they know the Australian government does not support the killing of American soldiers or support suicide bombers. Saddam Hussein is not financing suicide bombers anymore and has not been able to since March 2003. But if we had not got rid of Saddam Hussein, he still could. He cannot do it from a prison in Baghdad, but he could do it from one of his presidential palaces when he was President of Iraq. We got rid of him. Whatever vile allegations are made against the government—and the allegations made by the Leader of the Opposition and the member for Griffith—

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