Risky Global Adventures

The quarterly national journal of the Australia Defence Association, Defender, has criticised the Howard Government for its failures over the wheat sales scandal, saying the lives of Australian troops in Iraq were put at risk.
The journal said Australia's wheat exporter AWB was still a government agency when it began paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein in 1999.
"Australians were serving with the multinational inspection force enforcing the sanctions," the journal said in an editorial.
"If the ADF (Australian Defence Force) is to be tasked with enforcing UN resolutions or sanctions, every available step must be taken to ensure that the rest of the government apparatus, and indeed the rest of the country, is supporting them fully."

However, revelations from Australians inquiry into Oil for Food scandal reveal the Howard governments total contempt for it’s obligations to the Australian or International communities.
Despite repeated and vehement claims by the Government on its co-operation with the UN’s Volker Inquiry, evidence shows that the government tried to block Volker’s access to trade officers and damning documentation related to the scandal.
Volcker complained to Australia's ambassador to the UN, John Dauth, at a meeting on February 7 last year that the Howard Government was not providing sufficient co-operation, and that its approach was "beyond reticent, even forbidding".
Volker told Australia’s UN Ambassador that his inquiry had evidence that AWB had corrupted the oil-for-food program and that it would be in the Howard Government's best interests to co-operate.
On November 7 last year, Downer told parliament that he had told his department "quite some time ago that I wanted them to co-operate fully, to pass all documents they could possibly find to the Volcker inquiry".
However, a classified document tendered to the Cole inquiry yesterday shows that Mr Downer agreed on November 19, 2004, to provide the UN "with assistance but not to the requests to interview officials, provide material already held by the UN (such as contracts) or access to classified transmissions (such as cables)".

If the Australian Government believed it had nothing to hide, as Ministers have asserted from the beginning of this saga, it had a strange way of showing it. More likely it was a strategy designed around denial and bullying, hoping all along the issue would simply wither on the vine.
The evidence, hard evidence, of what this writer has consistently claimed, is now in the open. The Howard Government had known as early as 1998 that a company AWB regularly did business with the Jordan-based firm Alia and was "involved in circumventing UN sanctions on behalf of the Iraqi government".
The ace up the government’s sleeve, the one they are still relying on, is that the people they represent couldn’t care less. The Australian voters, it would seem, have not the slightest qualms that the Federal government has brought the country’s international trade and diplomatic sectors into serious disrepute.
The international community might not have a say at the polls, but the potential economic fallout, the reluctance to deal with Australian exporters, will bite in time. The voters will care when it hits them personally, in the back pocket.

Sources:
THE AUSTRALIAN
Sydney Morning Herald
Cole Inquiry Transcripts