Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the statements by the Treasurer and the member for Fisher this morning concerning AWB’s $300 million payment to the regime of Saddam Hussein. They are displaying a much greater appreciation of the seriousness of the situation than the Prime Minister, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister for Trade. The member for Fisher has said there is now a question mark over the future of Trade Minister Vaile. He is absolutely right. For the Prime Minister to send Minister Vaile off to Iraq to try to retrieve Australia’s wheat contracts is to send a boy on a man’s errand. He has got us into this mess. Who really believes that he can get us out?

The member for Fisher is also right to raise question marks about the future of AWB and the decision to include AWB in the delegation to Iraq. The present Iraqi government has locked Australia out of wheat contracts. Money which should have gone to starving Iraqi men, women and children instead went as bribes to the Iraqi government. The Iraqi government has changed the locks because it thinks it has been burgled. We are sending a delegation to ask for the locks to be changed back, but the delegation includes the burglar. This is the wrong way to go. Like the member for Fisher, the Treasurer seems to have a greater understanding of the seriousness of the issue. He has suggested that AWB directors may have breached the law as well as the UN sanctions regime, and he has referred to the avenue of criminal prosecution. He is right to do so.

Both the Cole commission and the Australian Federal Police should examine whether AWB or any of its officers and directors have breached the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism Act 2002. This act, in response to a UN resolution which followed al-Qaeda’s September 11 attacks, established the offence of financing terrorism, providing that anyone who provides funds and is reckless as to whether the funds will be used to facilitate or engage in a terrorist act is guilty of an offence. The offence can be anywhere in the world; it is not limited to Australia. It can be committed by a corporation like AWB where the penalty is a fine of up to $1.1 million or by an individual where the maximum penalty is imprisonment for life.

There is now no doubt AWB provided kickbacks to the Iraqi regime and no doubt it did so after July 2002. The Prime Minister has said that the Iraqi regime funded international terrorism, including Palestinian suicide bombers. Therefore, I believe that breaches of the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism Act may have occurred here, and I call on the Cole commission and the Australian Federal Police to fully investigate these matters.