SATURDAY Mercury columnist warns that if one of Australia’s neighbours ever decides at short notice to declare war on us, we’d better hope that Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has not been too busy to scan through his daily summary of the diplomatic and military intelligence cables.
Otherwise, any warnings from spies and diplomats might go unnoticed and the Government’s first inkling that there is something up could be when the bombs actually start to fall and the foreign troops make their beachhead landings.
Crawford says it hardly instills great confidence in the direction this nation is heading under a Government which — with control of both Houses of Parliament and being run in the most presidential style in the country’s history —long ago debauched and then ditched the time-honoured democratic doctrine of ministerial responsibility. For years now grievous errors of judgment, major mistakes, miscarriages of justice, and downright incompetence have resulted not in those responsible being brought to account for their actions and those of the increasingly authoritarian executive, but — often as not — with the promotion or reward of those involved.
Under the Howard Government the very culture of accountability and responsibility has been turned on its head. This applies not only to ministerial responsibility — a doctrine which used to demand that a minister accept full responsibility for the administration of departments under his or her control — but also to the responsibility of the Public Service to give frank and fearless advice to ministers. By sacking a third of the departmental heads when he took office 10 years ago, Howard put the rest on notice. Effectively Howard has erected a bureaucratic firewall to protect ministers from knowledge which might cause them political embarrassment, or worse legal problems.
“Plausible deniability” has become a key doctrine. It involves constructing a chain of command which is so lax that dodgy directions can be denied if they are exposed to public gaze. The consequence is that ministers have been able to claim not to have been made aware of the clear signs and warnings that came as early as 2000 about kickbacks being paid to Saddam in breach of United Nations sanctions which allowed Iraq to sell oil to obtain food and medicine for its starving people. In fact, importers were expected to pay massive “transport fees” which actually went towards Saddam’s purchase of weapons and construction of his network of presidential palaces.
Crawford points out that just before sending Australian troops to join the Coalition of the Willing, Howard listed among his reasons for going to war that Saddam had “cruelly and cynically manipulated the United Nations oil-for-food program. He’s rorted it to buy weapons to support his designs at the expense of the wellbeing of his people,” Howard said.
But, he insisted in his evidence to the Cole inquiry this week, it never occurred to him that AWB might have been involved in this rorting — even though the Australian wheat exporter was one of the Iraq’s biggest suppliers.
It is hardly evidence of a Prime Minister with an open, inquiring mind that Howard was determined to believe the worst of the Iraqi dictator (despite the mountain of evidence which correctly indicated that Saddam was not stockpiling Weapons of Mass Destruction) — and was always prepared to think the best of AWB (despite an equally huge amount of evidence and warnings dating back as far as 2000, that the wheat exporter was involved in dodgy dealings).
It was the same with children overboard. Howard and other ministers were warned repeatedly by senior defence bureaucrat Mike Scrafton that asylum seekers had not thrown their children overboard as it had been claimed — but ignored the advice and continued to publicly defend the original claims that children were thrown into the sea.
Then when Scrafton went public with his revelations which proved the Government had wilfully misled the Australian public on the eve of a Federal election, he was given the usual “whistleblower treatment” with attacks on his integrity and character made under parliamentary privilege.
This is the reason it is highly unlikely a so-called “smoking gun” will be discovered to prove ministers acted illegally in knowingly defying United Nations sanctions. Even if the “wheat for weapons” scandal did involve anything more sinister than an unspoken, and therefore unprovable, policy to look the other way while AWB paid bribes to Saddam as merely one of the expenses of getting Australian wheat into Iraq, it is highly unlikely anyone will be prepared to sacrifice career and reputation for the thankless role of whistleblower.
Crawford concludes:
A recent AC Nielsen poll showed 70 per cent of Australians did not believe the Government’s denials and thought ministers had been aware of the AWB kickbacks to Saddam’s regime. But as with the last Federal election campaign — when most Australians thought Howard had lied about “children overboard” and the reasons going to war against Iraq — very few seem to rate political honesty as important enough to affect the way they vote.
Like the $300 million in kickbacks being regarded by AWB as merely one of the expenses of ensuring Australia did not lose access to the lucrative Iraqi market, a certain amount of political mendacity — with its “never-evers,” its “cast iron guarantees,” core and non-core promises and a willingness to look the other way in the interests of the a “greater good” — now seems accepted as being among the expected costs of government.
Also: The Guardian eviscerates Howard: Here
