Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

There you go. It came out in the inquiry that Dominic Hogan, who, as I say, had a nervous breakdown over concerns about what was going on at AWB, told the Cole inquiry it would have been impossible by looking at the contracts to determine how much the price represented the split-up of the price. With regard to the Volcker inquiry, there was much excitement earlier in the week about the idea that somehow DFAT knew all about it because the AWB had got permission from DFAT to use Alia. It turns out AWB had been using Alia for a year before they wrote the letter for permission.

I think the Cole inquiry is doing great work and certainly raising and lifting a lot of myths. If the outcome is that people have broken the law then, as I said earlier on radio, we have a wonderful institution in Junee. It is not a bad set-up. It is pretty hot at this time of the year, but that is where they will probably end up if they have done the wrong thing.

With respect to the inquiry—as I say, no-one here has been following it in person—a couple of interesting things have come out of it. One is the sale of wheat proposed through AWB Ltd from the Argentine to Iraq. Some of the greatest critics of the Wheat Export Authority in the last few years have been a couple of members of the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Committee, and a mixture of politics is involved in that. We are determined on my committee not to play politics with people’s livelihoods. We are seriously fair dinkum. I think my committee and all the members on it do great credit to this place. One of our criticisms has been that we think the Wheat Export Authority have been, using my language, and I apologise for it, a bed of pansies where we need a cage full of gorillas. They have not been equipped to do the work. The discovery of events in the Cole inquiry cements two things in my mind: that we were right about the Wheat Export Authority—