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March 25, 2006
The AWB affair--the wheat scandal--- continues to grind away, thanks to the stirling work of the Cole Inquiry. We citizens have lost all sense of the details of events and we often feel that the issue is like this:
Leahy
However, we know there is more at issue under the surface. An interesting quote in an article by Mike Skeketee in The Weekend Australian, which indicates the politocal reality of power in Canberra, opens up to look beneath the surface:
Departments used to be sources of independent advice for ministers, offering them the benefits of long experience and expertise on issues that they perhaps were confronting for the first time. But, according to former senior Department of Defence bureaucrat and foreign affairs official Allan Behm, "the current public service doesn't proffer advice. It simply carries out what it is instructed to do. I think there is a very serious dumbing down of the public service in that sense."
Well gone are the days of frank and fearless advice delivered by the mandarins of the federal bureaucracy.
If this is the case, then the Government bears responsiblity for AWB lining Saddam's pockets through bribes on wheat exports as the Howard government was going to war with the Barthist regime. From this perspective the senior Ministers (John Howard, Mark Vaile, Alexander Downer) consistently turned a blind eye to 26 warnings before the Volker inquiry began in April 2004, and they initially failed to cooperate with Volker for up to 4 months by handing over classified documents.
The inference?
The Government did not want to know about the allegations against AWB for the use of bribes and its deliberate deception. Trade was more important than busting UN sanctions against Saddam Hussein. The inference? Contempt for the UN sanction regime.
As Sketekee points out the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade the department had a serious conflict of interest: foreign policy required it to help enforce sanctions but trade policy demanded that it promote wheat exports. The Minister, Alexander Downer, would give the direction and the priorities. That's his responsibility---and it was trade not foreign policy.
Downer should be made accountible for his actions, like any one else. The charge? Negligence, at the least.
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and don't forget that Downer was also at the time holding both A and B class shares in AWB in his "hands off" private investment portfolio. So a total conflict of interest that means if he does not resign he must be pushed in order to stop the rot that now undermines Howard himself - all this is no thanks to the largely apathetic Australian public who don't seem to mind Mr Howards's lies as long as they personally aren't harmed (present company excepted). Rather than concern over backhanding millions to the enemy they only seem to worry about if the wheat trade will suffer. And still they call themselves patriotric Australians and defend Howard, Downer and Vaile and their callous disregard for Australia's international reputation.