Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This evening I would like to associate myself with comments made by the member for Chifley last Thursday in this place, when he referred to a visit by federal members of parliament to the Palestinian Authority and Israel. As a member of that delegation, I acknowledge the honour it was to visit a region that has such deep and abiding historical, cultural and religious significance to so many people throughout the world. It is of course also a place of much sadness, pain and seemingly irreconcilable conflict. We were fortunate to meet with Israeli and Palestinian representatives, and we found remarkable goodwill, hope and optimism in the face of wanton violence and despair.

Of the many extraordinary visits I was able to make and people I was able to meet, one of the most confronting experiences for me—and, indeed, for the member for Chifley—was meeting with a former Melburnian and journalist Arnold Roth, who recounted to us the tragic loss of his 15-year-old daughter, Malki. Malki was senselessly and tragically murdered in a suicide bombing in a pizza restaurant in Jerusalem in 2001. This awful and tragic story for us then, and certainly I hope for the House now, underlines how vigilant the Australian government must be in properly examining not only its foreign policy but also the nexus between the alleged—and I think it is beyond ‘alleged’ now—$300 million bribes to the former Iraqi regime and the payments made by that regime’s bank to families of suicide bombers.

There is prima facie evidence to suggest that a proportion of the $300 million could well have found its way into the hands of the families of suicide bombers, given that, under the control of the former Iraqi regime, the bank in Iraq in which the bribes were deposited was the same bank paying $25,000 to the families of the suicide bombers. Clearly, the government needs to ensure it is not aiding and abetting, wittingly or otherwise, terrorists.

Its decision to invade Iraq without United Nations sanctions and, as we have found, without material evidence of weapons of mass destruction was, in my view, wrong. It is also my view that that invasion without international legal sanction has greatly increased the dangers to this nation and its citizens compared to what would have been the case if we had not pursued that action. It is clear now that there were no weapons of mass destruction and the government based its entire decision—and, indeed, the Prime Minister in this place based his decision—on a lie.

As I said, we as a nation have been put at a greater risk. Given the extraordinary facts that we now know about the wheat for weapons scandal, I think it is important to find out the extent and the nature of the Australian Wheat Board’s involvement—and, indeed, the government’s involvement—in this process. The government needs to provide the parliament with answers about the extent of its culpability and involvement in the fiasco and about whether or not any of the Commonwealth bribes made their way to payments made to arm Saddam’s troops or suicide bombers in the region.