Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industry, Infrastructure and Industrial Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The core of the Australian Wheat Board scandal, or the ‘wheat for weapons’ scandal, is really no longer a case of whether there were kickbacks or bribes, because we all know for a fact that there were $300 million worth of kickbacks and bribes. That is a fact. What we now need to understand is just how culpable and involved the federal government was in all this. The fact that this government has denied that it had any knowledge of the bribery and about what has taken place in terms of the kickbacks should not diminish the fact of the government’s involvement. By any measure, this government should have known, and would have known by a range of ways, that there were massive kickbacks directly back to Saddam Hussein. There has been plenty of discussion about where that money ended up and what it was used for.

I want to deal quickly today with a number of issues. I want to list all the occasions on which the government should have been made aware of the situation, apart from the occasions on which the Labor Party raised questions of concern and issues with the government directly in questions about potential breaches, saying that the government should look into it. That is not to mention that halfway through the election campaign itself in 2004 the Prime Minister sent his most highly qualified diplomat to Washington to stave off, cut off at the pass, a possible inquiry into this very issue in case it was damaging to the government’s re-election chances. In my mind, I think it is unbelievable how the government can continue to come into this place and say, ‘Well, you can’t prove it because you haven’t got the documents; provide us with some documents.’ We say, ‘Give us the keys to the locked cabinets and we’ll find you the documents—give us the key to the bottom drawer and we’ll find them.’

On no less than 14 separate occasions were the warning alarm bells ringing. In January 2000 UN customs experts warned Australia’s UN mission about the Iraqi government demanding some $US700,000 from the Canadian Wheat Board to cover suspect trucking fees. In March 2000 Austrade commissioner Alistair Nicholas briefed AWB’s executives in Washington telling them of official corruption in this area. In June 2000 trade minister Mark Vaile apparently met with AWB chiefs Flugge and Lindberg over the kickback claims. He denies that the meeting took place, even though records of the meeting showed it did. In September 2000 there were emails between former BHP executive Norman Davidson Kelly telling senior AWB manager Charles Stott about the Tigris petroleum deal. In November 2000 and July 2002 the Prime Minister wrote to the AWB head.

The list of correspondence goes on and on: August 2002, May-June 2003, July et cetera. There was a plethora of warning bells, of signals of government ministers being involved at some level in the information trail. Surely the government must have known, would have known and should have known—and should have done something about it. But, of course, when you are deeply involved you will do everything you can to hide it and not let anybody else know.

I want to quote something very important which may explain why we have not been able to find that specific evidence—that smoking gun, as it were—to prove the government’s direct involvement. It comes from an article in crikey.com. It is a very interesting piece about how ASIS, our intelligence organisation, is involved in what we just heard about from the member for Riverina, in terms of US wheat farmers and how Australia protects our wheat exports through our intelligence services. I will read some passages:

When the Prime Minister says that nothing has been reported to him about knowledge of the oil for food scandal, he is skipping through a semantic and procedural minefield. Crikey understands the procedures go like this:

If ASIS, the Australian government intelligence agency responsible for collecting foreign intelligence gets information regarding an Australian company, they are forbidden from naming it in formal reports.

And if such information came into ASIS, it would not necessarily be passed on to ONA, the security body cited by the Prime Minister on the Sunday program last weekend in a formal report.

However, Crikey is told anything of any significance is certain to be disclosed to the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade—but not necessarily on paper.

This whole government’s defence is that you cannot find a piece of paper. We do not necessarily need to find a piece of paper, because I think there is already enough evidence of the government’s complicity in this whole issue. Just because it is not in writing does not mean it did not happen. The government knows this and understands this.

The questions need to be asked: has the Prime Minister any knowledge, or has there been any reporting to him, in any form? Has he got anything in any form? I would be very interested to hear his response on that. How common are these sorts of things? How commonly does this happen? Is this only happening with AWB or is this happening elsewhere? The Treasury secretary, Ken Henry, who is well known to many people, made some interesting comments on this. (Time expired)