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One month in and it's already been a great year for political scandal. Overseas the GOP is on the back foot over Abramoff and unwarranted spying on US citizens, while in Australia we've been treated to internal backbiting over party preselections and defecting senators. Now it's emerged that the country's monopoly wheat exporter was defrauding a UN trust fund to underwrite Saddam Hussein's regime. But the red meat is the growing evidence of the federal government's role in this sorry affair, which each day looks less like a wink-nod arrangement and more like application of strategic pressure to keep the grain flowing.
It's settled ground that AWB inflated sales to Iraq under the Oil-for-Food program to cover $300 million of kickbacks to Saddam's government, disguised as transport fees and laundered through a Jordanian trucking company. Apart from the fact that this scheme was cooked up before AWB was privatised, we now know (inter alia) that in 2002 DFAT officials accompanied an AWB mission to Iraq ending in a $2 million bribe; that this mission followed correspondence between AWB execs and the Prime Minister; that DFAT was aware in 2003 0f a pervasive kickback culture surrounding oil-for-food contracts; and that Australia's Washington ambassador helped scuttle a US congressional probe into AWB's Iraq deals in 2004.
The right's counterattack has run a national interest line, examples of which can be found in the comment threads here and here. The argument boils down to claims that a) everyone else was rorting oil-for-food and b) this was no different from greasing business in any third-world country. Even if one accepts that bribing government officials is legitimate under normal circumstances, this was no ordinary squeeze. Iraq bought this wheat via a UN fund set up to allow purchases of humanitarian necessities. Every cent that went to Hussein's regime as a kickback was a cent denied to Iraq's citizens, who were otherwise blocked from buying such goods by international embargo.
Our government's probable complicity in the swindling of a UN program designed to relieve child-killing sanctions is a matter for public concern, pace the Herald Sun and the RWDB crowd. Commissioner Cole should get an expansion of his terms of reference, because if this goes where it's heading then the implications are far direr than an ALP or Fairfax beatup. Our elected leaders, going right to the top, made decisions to undercut a sanctions regime justified by the charcter of Hussein's government and its failure to come clean on WMDs - the same justifications for invading Iraq in 2003. And it's a fair bet that some of that $300 million was squirelled away in private bank accounts that now fund the Iraqi insurgency.
Leftie conspiracy-theorists will see this as more evidence of a grand Western design to squeeze blood out of the third world. We centrist joes see opportunism and moral bankruptcy on the part of our government.
But a large number of Australians, judging from newspaper op-ed pages and blog posts, see nothing wrong at all.
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