Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

He did not know, but for your government to claim that it has done no investigations and can prove that the money did not come from Australia and all this feigned outrage that we had from the member for Sturt yesterday is deluded, frankly. These people gave money to deluded Palestinian youths, who blew themselves up on civilian targets, as we know. The money came from the Arab Liberation Front paid by Saddam Hussein—fungible money which came from the discretionary money that they had available, the biggest portion of which came from Australia, $300 million. All that is disputed in this matter is whether the Australian government, the Minister for Trade, the Minister for Foreign Affairs or the Prime Minister knew these payments by the AWB to the bogus transport company were being made. No doubt the truth about this will eventually come out of the Cole royal commission and from the forensic questioning of ministers in this place by the opposition.

My point today is simple: whether ministers did or did not know about these payments, they should have known, because plenty of people did and other people were able to deduce fairly readily, from differentials between the market price of wheat at the given time and the price Iraq was paying to the AWB, that there was a fraud going on for many years. At the very least, ministers were too ready to turn a blind eye to AWB’s pandering to the Iraqi regime during the period of the sanctions from 1997 to 2003. Of course we have to sell our wheat abroad and not to governments we always approve of, but at a time when, according to the government, Iraq was a dire threat to the peace of the world—we had to invade the country and overthrow its government—surely ministers should have been more curious about what the Wheat Board executives, most of them National Party mates, were up to in Baghdad.

Last night the member for Sturt made a very unfortunate speech where he tried to claim all good in issues of Middle East politics were on one side. He obviously does not remember the record of past governments, which have been very even-handed and of course have defended Israel’s right to exist very strongly under a very passionate Prime Minister, Bob Hawke. Any attempt to portray these issues as one-sided is an example of partisanship. You would have to be a blind partisan, thick or malicious to know that Australia does not run a dual foreign policy—a foreign policy where we say one thing to the Americans and to the commentariat here and another thing to people where we are running a secret National Party rort in foreign policy in the Arab Middle East. (Time expired)

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