Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I would like to talk about the real cost of the Australian Wheat Board scandal. So far we have been focusing on the dollars, on how the Australian system could have failed, on who should have known what and on who knew what. The three-monkey routine is still going on: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. It is no good saying, ‘It’s okay; there were others in it.’ We were the biggest culprits. We were the leader of the pack. However, what seems to have been missing from this debate is what this in fact means. What has been missing is any real discussion of the impact on the ground in Iraq of AWB doing over an aid program—an aid program whose aim was to stem a humanitarian crisis. What we need to talk about, using economic parlance—as much as it pains me—are the ‘opportunity costs’: what funnelling a slice of aid money to Saddam Hussein meant in terms of missed opportunities to help out Iraqi families in a time of crisis.

There has been much discussion of the impact of AWB’s involvement in corruptly funnelling money to Saddam on the falling share prices and the potential loss of foreign markets, as well as the impact it may have had on Australian wheat farmers. While we are rightly concerned about the livelihood of our farmers, I believe it is a dirty and sneaky trick to try and lay the blame for these impacts on those of us who have been trying to expose this scandal. The blame lies clearly with those who have broken the rules and misled their shareholders. We cannot align ourselves with the attitude of ‘export dollars at any cost’. We cannot be so parochial as that when the ‘opportunity costs’, the real costs of our actions, can be counted very clearly in Iraqi lives lost.

We know from the media that about $US225 million was diverted by AWB from the UN oil for food program. This money was diverted from spending on medical resources essential to the Iraqi people, whom we know were then in desperate need. This came on the back of a system of sanctions and then a bombing campaign which between them had destroyed the fundamental health infrastructure of Iraq. People did not have power, clean water or access to medicines. This is a well-known fact and it was well documented. That is why these aid programs were there in the first place.

If you divide the amount of money diverted—which is, as I said, $US225 million—by the number of Iraq people at the time, 26.9 million, the money that was diverted was $US8.40 per head. Using publicly accessible World Health Organisation data, Dr Gideon Polya has plotted infant mortality rates versus annual per capita medical expenditure for Iraq and its neighbours. He has estimated that in 2003 an extra $US8.40 of medical expenditure in Iraq would have saved an extra 22 under-five-year-old infant lives per 1,000 births. There were 972,000 births in Iraq in 2004. Hence the number of infant lives saved would have been about 22 times 972—that is, 21,384 lives. Let us round that off to 21,000 lives. That is what this money means: 21,000 lives.

Now let us look at the $100 million that was given by AusAID for wheat shipments caught when the war was declared. We know that $45 million of that was used for bogus transport payments. That has also been in the media. That equates to $US26 million. By my calculations, that means that 2,471 Iraqi children’s lives were lost that could have been saved if we had done the checking. If we had bothered to check out this problem, that $A45 million would have saved 2,471 Iraqi children.

Then let us look at the one-million dollar man much hyped by the media. The $1 million paid to Mr Flugge, if you translate it to US dollars, would have saved the lives of 55 Iraqi children. A total of $US1.8 billion was diverted illicitly from the $35 billion UN oil for food program as estimated by the Volker Report, this yielding an upper estimate of 180,000 avoidable Iraqi under-five infant deaths due to foreign corporate scams in the period from 1997 to 2003. Australia’s incompetence, lying and failure to review this program directly contributed to the lives that have been lost in Iraq. That is what it means. That is why we care so much about this: it is what it has meant in the human tragedy that Australia has actively participated in.

The Australian government has made large capital out of the war on terror. The Australian government was very big on how we needed to deal with this terror and how it was having untold impact on the Iraqi people. What was having an impact in 2003 and 2004 on the people of Iraq was the scandal that was unfolding, which was funnelling money from an aid program into the pockets of Saddam Hussein to buy guns and bombs instead of buying medicines and food for over 21,000 children who could have survived.

We do not know yet about the level of involvement of people from DFAT, WEA and AusAID. We do know that this is being investigated by the Cole inquiry, and it has stymied our getting access to a lot of this information. What we keep failing to do is to equate what this scandal has meant on the ground. The Cole inquiry will hopefully get to the bottom of who knew what and when, but in all the rush to point the finger it may be forgotten what it equated to on the ground. What it meant on the ground was that 21,000 lives that could have been saved were in fact lost. The aid program was helping to buy the guns and bombs that were being used to terrorise people instead of saving lives, which is what the program was designed for. It may very well be that those guns and bombs actually contributed to more deaths and more maiming of people in Iraq.

So, in fact, probably far more lives that were lost could have been saved if we had bothered to check when flags were being raised about this scandal. We know of many instances where these flags were being raised. The scandal is that our system in Australia failed to find these and that people turned blind eyes, did not bother to listen when the warning was raised, believed lies that were being told by the AWB and believed the hail-fellow-well-met approach that is being taken to business in this country, when supposedly when you look somebody in the eye and they say, ‘We didn’t do it,’ that is okay. That is okay; that is the way we run the aid program in this country, when we forget that it actually cost over 21,000 lives.

Australian incompetence has resulted in the deaths of at least 21,000 people. Australia should hang its head in shame that we failed to pick up this ongoing problem. Now we have ministers, the AWB and the WEA running for cover, saying: ‘It wasn’t us! It wasn’t us!’ That is an absolute scandal. How can we ever look people in the eye again and say that our aid program is carried out properly unless we actually get to the bottom of what happened in this instance and never allow it to happen again?