What was the answer to the following question, asked at the Cole Inquiry on Thursday:

MR AGIUS: Q. Prime Minister, your full name is John Winston Howard?

Was it:
(a) “It is.”
(b) “I have no recollection of that.”
(c) “Disclosure of my identity would be a threat to national security.”
(d) “No that was the last bloke, I’m Peter Costello.”

Answer at this end of this article.

After the agony of Mark Vaile’s amnesia on Monday, and the slapstick buffoonery of Alexander Downer’s arrival for Tuesday’s hearing via the Sydney monorail, we had an appearance by the Prime Minister on Thursday so perfectly choreographed that Ric Birch could not have staged it better.

From his morning power walk, to the triumphal front-door entrance to the courthouse, phalanxed by the usual crowd of security bovver boys, to the meticulously crafted answers under John Agius QC’s unusually powder-puff questioning, it was all predictable. And irrelevant.

Howard calls this inquiry “transparent”. It’s not. He set it up basically as a set-up, to investigate the conduct of companies directly implicated in the oil-for-food scandal. But not into a government under whose watch it all happened.

AWB’s reputation is in ruins and several of its executives have quit, some of them likely to spend their retirement years in custodial accommodation. Other companies, including BHP Billiton, are likely to get their wrists slapped.

However, the conduct of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and its “responsible” ministers are not accountable to the Cole inquiry under its existing terms of reference. Thanks to JWH’s carefully-worded terms for the inquiry, there can be no findings made in respect to the government’s role in this mess.

DFAT’s culture appears little different to that of the Immigration Department and that of the Attorney-General’s Department - a dangerous cocktail of slackness, “whatever it takes”, and reactionary ideological bias. The responsibility for all this rests solely with the man who rules his cabinet with an iron fist.

Every day I have more and more trouble understanding why anyone could think John Howard is a good prime minister.

In any decent Westminster-based democracy, the responsible ministers, and possibly the government as a whole, would have fallen on their swords by now. Howard has torn up the Westminster system in Canberra, made a mockery of the concept of ministerial responibility, and made selective amnesia an essential part of the job description for any politician or senior company executive. And, quite separately to all this, he is systematically dismantling democracy in this country.

Howard’s legacy to Australia is that he has turned impropriety and deceipt into acceptable “Australian values”, and made decency subservient to wealth accumulation and ideological jihad.

Don’t rule out a snap early federal election some time in 2006.

David Marr and Marian Wilkinson’s brilliant dissection of the AWB story so far appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald. All the hearing transcripts can be found on the Attorney-General Department’s website.

(The correct answer was (a). As boring as the man himself.)

“Short of a neon sign flashing ‘Saddam bribes hidden here’ it is hard to imagine what more Mr Downer and DFAT would have needed to comprehensively investigate AWB, long before the Volcker inquiry belled the cat. The most innocent explanation of Mr Downer’s behaviour is that he has been at DFAT too long, and, like his senior public servants, did not want to rock AWB’s boat. A worse one is that Mr Downer did not want to know what was going on and hoped that nobody would notice how renegade Australians were trading with the enemy, right up until the shooting started in 2003.”
- Editorial, The Australian, 29.3.06

Over the last couple of days I’ve highlighted some of the right-wing rhetoric emanating from The Australian’s op-ed pages (and, let’s face it, The Australian is a Murdoch outlet), but in fairness they have pursued the AWB scandal with a great deal of diligence. To the extent that yesterday’s editorial page called for the Global Village Idiot’s resignation.

Downer, of course, is not the only minister who should walk the plank over this astonishing episode. Mark Vaile and Warren Truss should both be there right behind him. John Anderson’s forgetfulness in not disclosing his ownership of AWB shares, which he disposed of last year, deserves a lot more scrutiny.

And then there’s the man with whom the buck, in any self-respecting democratic government, would stop. If John Winston Howard is to escape from this with his hands clean, then history is obliged to remember him as the Prime Minister who was unable to control, or effectively communicate with, his public service, and only ever made decisions based on incorrect advice.

Note for future reference: Terrence Cole, head of the inquiry investigating the AWB imbroglio, was a member of the Class of ‘61 at Sydney University’s law school. So too was John Winston Howard. This item in yesterday’s Australian does a fair bit of straw clutching, but keep it in mind just in case…

A grain of truth
Marian Wilkinson’s excellent, but necessarily long, summary of this week’s astonishing revelations at the Cole Inquiry into bribes allegedly paid by Australian companies as part of the UN oil-for-food scandal.

It’s fair to say that the loneliest man in Australia at the moment must be AWB managing director Andrew Lindberg, who spent most of the week telling Justice Cole that he couldn’t recall anything about the quite extraordinary scams that his staff were pulling to maintain wheat contracts with Iraq while sanctions on most non-humanitarian transactions were in place.

It seems, indeed, that the Pakistan government (before Musharraf’s time if I understand the chronology correctly) may be implicated in some of these bribes.

One small point to recap: while Australia was preparing to take part in the Coalition of the Willing, our monopoly wheat exporter was Iraq’s biggest kickback client.

More damage to Australia’s reputation, just as our Immigration Minister begins handling the claims of 43 West Papuan asylum seekers by shipping them to a processing centre at Christmas Island.

A big, big story is unfolding this week at a Royal Commission being conducted in Sydney by Justice Terence Cole into “Certain Australian Companies in Relation to the UN Oil-For-Food Programme”. Australia’s biggest agribusiness company appears to be up to its neck in it, and so too the Howard Government.

In short, AWB (formerly the Australian Wheat Board), Australia’s monopoly wheat exporter, was named in the UN report as one of the companies alleged to have been giving kickbacks to the Iraqi government whilst sanctions were in place. Testimony before the Cole Royal Commission is supporting those allegations, with some extraordinarily bad attempts at arse-covering by AWB executives this week.

The most interesting revelations surround the evidence that AWB’s kickback activity began before July 1999. That was the date when the AWB was privatised - before that it was a Government-owned business enterprise.

I’m not going to attempt to analyse the nitty-gritty of this latest scandal to stain the Howard Government’s CV, rather give some links by which you can follow the development of this extraordinary story:

• The website of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the UN Oil-for-Food Programme, which handed down its findings on 27 October 2005 (press release in PDF)
• The UN news website’s coverage and official reaction to the Oil-for-Food Inquiry
• AWB’s reaction to being named in the report (press release in PDF)
• BBC Online’s coverage of the Oil-for-food Scandal
• The Australian Attorney-General’s Department’s website for the Cole Royal Commission.
• I have also set up a playlist of nine MP3 files from the ABC website covering news reports of the Royal Commission so far this week (about 36 minutes of listening all up). Here’s a link to today’s latest story on the ABC website.
• Here’s an op-ed by The Australian’s Mike Steketee in today’s edition, which also featured an extraordinary letter to the editor by Global Village Idiot Alexander Downer (he’s on holidays you see and therefore can’t issue an official press release).

In addition to AWB there were two other Australian companies named in the Volcker report commissioned by the UN: Alkaloids of Australia Pty Ltd and Rhine Ruhr Pty Ltd.

Significantly, the terms of reference for the Royal Commission only refer to investigating the role of “certain Australian companies” in the Oil-for-food program, not the role of the Australian government. The circumstantial evidence forthcoming from this hearing will, nonetheless, be dynamite. Federal Parliament resumes sitting on February 7.

Planning a distraction yet, JH?