Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

bribes allowed under the government’s watch to a regime it was committed to topple. Wheat for weapons. Shame, as the member for Kingsford Smith says. Shame indeed! This is a disgraceful outcome, and the government has not been exonerated. It was found not to have been corrupt, but that was never the charge. The charge is negligence because that was allowed to happen under its watch. It should never have happened. In fact, through those bribes the Australian government became Saddam Hussein’s best friend.

It is also a culture that has cost Australian wheat growers $500 million in lost contracts so far. It is a culture which has seen the Australian Wheat Board shareholders lose half the value of their investments. And it is a culture which has exposed the Australian Wheat Board to potential future legal actions including: actions by wheat growers in the United States; a class action on behalf of B-class shareholders; action by the Australian tax office to recover tax forgone in respect of the illegal payments, the bribes paid by AWB; and a class action on behalf of some wheat growers seeking to recover performance bonus payments made by AWB International, the pool, to AWB Ltd. Industry estimates put the ultimate impact on AWB of just those cases—not the shareholder loss, not the bribes, not the lost contracts but those legal actions—at another $1 billion dollars. Some management! Some scrutiny! Some rigour! And the government, particularly the National Party, come into this place saying that they have the interests of the growers at heart. If they had the interests of their members at heart, how did they allow this shambles to occur?

See this speech in context