Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade and International Security) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is also to the Minister for Foreign Affairs. I refer to evidence presented to the Cole inquiry yesterday that as late as June 2005 the minister told the AWB that he was delighted with AWB’s cooperation with the Volcker inquiry and that the AWB had been exemplary. I also refer to the editorial in the Australian newspaper today, which states:

Short of a neon sign flashing “Saddam bribes hidden here” it is hard to imagine what more Mr Downer and DFAT would have needed to comprehensively investigate AWB ...

It went on further to say:

... Mr Downer has demonstrated he no longer has the judgment to serve as Australia’s foreign minister—or in any higher office. His department needs a shake-up and a new minister.

Finally, it said:

The wheat-for-weapons scandal has claimed its first scalp—Mr Downer’s credibility is crippled.

Minister, do you accept any responsibility whatsoever for this scandal?

Alexander Downer (Mayo, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Incorporated in one question were many questions. Let me say first of all that editorials in newspapers sometimes praise me and sometimes do not. But I think that as a government we can be enormously proud of what we have achieved in the area of foreign policy. I doubt that there has ever been a government in the history of this country which has done more in the area of foreign policy.

Honourable Members:

Honourable members interjecting—

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The level of noise is far too high. The minister has the call and the minister deserves to be heard. I call the Minister for Foreign Affairs.

Alexander Downer (Mayo, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In response to that particular point, let me say that I am enormously proud of what this government has achieved in the area of foreign policy. I think that has been very much reflected in the views of the Australian people, despite the editorial in the newspaper—which I have to confess is normally a newspaper I quite like, but not so much today. But I cannot write the editorials myself. Sometimes they are good and sometimes they are not. I have been in politics for 21 years and you have to put up with this sort of thing if you are tough in politics.

The second thing is that the opposition depends enormously heavily for its arguments here on drawing on handwritten notes from a second-hand account of a meeting. This is AWB Ltd’s defence. If they had been knowingly involved in paying kickbacks, they would have been committing a criminal offence. If that is the case, they will most certainly be held responsible. There is no question about that. But the government has made the point—and I have made the point on many occasions myself—that our policy was always to support the United Nations sanctions regime, always to support the oil for food program. Nothing has been brought forward in the Cole commission—including through the evidence presented to the Cole commission by, I think, up to 11 present or former officers of my department—to contradict that.

What is more, the suggestion that somehow my department and I, the Minister for Trade or anybody else were involved in a cover-up has never been established in any of the evidence in the Cole commission. The witnesses from my department have made the position of the government perfectly plain and perfectly clear. This is bodgie sexing up of a comment here or a comment there—in this particular case, second-hand comments. This is of course part of AWB Ltd’s defence, which appears to be the source of argumentation for the opposition—now the AWB is the source of argumentation for the opposition! It just shows how spurious and weak the argument is—and the public know it.