Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, the member for Wide Bay permitted AWB to rort the UN oil for food program on his watch. As Minister for Transport and Regional Services, he defended AWB’s rorting and attacked its critics. Perversely, he has now been appointed Minister for Trade. Today I am joining the call for the minister’s resignation.

In March this year Lachlan Heywood from the Courier-Mail reported a remarkable speech by the minister to the Queensland National Party’s Central Council. Heywood and the Courier-Mail did the nation a service, because the speech cannot be found on the minister’s website. It is not every day a senior minister excuses corruption, but that is exactly what the member for Wide Bay did in his address on 26 March. Let me quote the minister’s own words responding to allegations of AWB misconduct aired by the Cole commission of inquiry. The minister, a man now charged with the protection of Australia’s trading interests, said:

… deals are not done by gentlemen just sitting across the table, and some of the language that is being used in this inquiry reflects a total lack of understanding about the way in which business occurs around the world.

… if you are paying commissions to an agent to sell wheat in another part of the world, there is hardly anything odd about that. When we sell our house, we pay commissions to a real estate agent. We may think he charges us far too much, but we don’t say that is corruption or a bribery payment, it is a fee for service.

This idea that has become prevalent in some of the newspapers to cross out the word commission and write bribery or kickback is a reflection of the imbalance in the reporting there has been on this particular issue.

But even if, and I am not conceding it happened, somebody was told many, many years ago that the Australian Wheat Board was paying commissions for wheat sales in Iraq. That would not cause any great worry. The payment of commissions is quite normal in sales.

So if ever there were any kickbacks to the Iraqi grain, then I guess they would end up with the government. So that is not terribly unusual.

I guess it is not, under this government. These comments are staggeringly stupid. This is now our Minister for Trade. He does not just defend AWB; he attacks the Cole commission and the media for exposing the rorts. These were not the only targets of the minister’s criticism. He also attacked the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for doing its job—the department now forced to serve him as a Minister for Trade. The minister complained about the work of the department, saying:

Our diplomatic posts around the world think it is their duty to rain confetti through cables to Canberra every morning.

The minister might reflect that it could be worth reading some of those cables after what we have heard about the absolute neglect by cabinet ministers during the whole wheat for weapons scandal that is unfolding through the Cole commission. We know numeracy and literacy are not National Party strong suits, but this is a very thin defence of the minister’s failure to heed cabled warnings delivered to him years before the AWB scandal blew up in his face. But the March comments are not the only occasions on which the minister has defended AWB. In January he told Australian Associated Press:

I think that whilst we’ve all now got the benefit of hindsight and we can look back on who maybe should’ve known what, the reality is that even with the benefit of hindsight the things that were happening at the time were reasonable.

Did everyone get that? He said that ‘the things that were happening at the time were reasonable.’

We know why the minister thought AWB’s conduct was reasonable. It is now becoming clear that the minister was a party to it. The minister was responsible for the Wheat Export Authority, which monitored AWB’s relationship with Iraq and other customers. The minister appointed senior AWB officials to key advisory positions. The minister ignored repeated warnings about its sanction-busting activity and, when the dirty dealings by the AWB were exposed, the minister defended the company and attacked its critics.

This minister’s appointment is contrary to Australia’s national interest. The minister ought to resign now as the Minister for Trade. If he will not resign, the Prime Minister should sack him before he does any more damage to Australia’s trading reputation.