A Blight On Our Reputation; A Potential Blow To Security

by Stephen Loosley - The Australian

Senator Sam Ervin (Democrat, North Carolina) was the folksy but lacerating chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee. He was fond of biblical quotes and the American classics. Citing Mark Twain, he once observed: "The truth is very precious; use it sparingly." This then prompted him to remark of Richard Nixon: "He used it sparingly."

How sparingly the truth has been used by AWB is yet to be confirmed by the Cole inquiry.At first glance, AWB falls short of Watergate. It lacks the daily drama of the Senate Watergate Committee, which was televised into millions of offices and homes throughout 1974. It was the most devastating live political TV since the Army-McCarthy hearings of an earlier generation and it went to the heart of American government.

However, in the Australian context, the terms of reference do not point the Cole inquiry in the direction of government and the Prime Minister should thank his lucky stars for a working Senate majority.

Without it, a probing Senate committee would have ranged far and wide on open-ended terms of reference, in televised hearings, subpoenaing Government witnesses not sought by the inquiry. Most significantly overall, the AWB scandal lacks the type of smoking gun that linked Nixon directly to the Watergate cover-up by senior White House personnel. The smoking gun tape was Nixon's canvassing of options with his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, on June 23, 1972.

Having said this, AWB is an Australian equivalent of Watergate on one critical point. It is the worst political scandal in the history of the commonwealth. Nothing comes close in its scale of corruption and nothing has ever reflected worse on the Australian reputation for probity.

The Americans had experience of the Whiskey Ring, which tarnished the Ulysses S. Grant administration, and the Teapot Dome, which destroyed Warren Harding's reputation. Watergate was dimensionally different because it constituted a systemic corruption not previously witnessed at the core of the American presidency.

In Australia, nothing approaches AWB as an Australian entity breaking international undertakings in the most breathtaking manner and either deceiving the Australian Government by design, or simply being ignored in its misconduct.

Unlike Watergate, the AWB scandal does not seem to have resonated with the electorate at large. True, much of the serious media in Australia have given the Cole inquiry prominent coverage and analysis has often been exhaustive. But conservative commentators are right to maintain that most punters are unaffected and could not care less. This is probably true for a variety of reasons.

Governments of any persuasion are excused much by way of error when economic times are good. Economic buoyancy means mistakes or maladministration can be downplayed, especially in marginal provincial seats that determine who has the keys to the Lodge in Canberra. As well, the national security environment continues to favour the Coalition.

But it is here that the AWB controversy really looms as politically volatile. Above all else, AWB is actually a national security issue. If it is demonstrated, or commissioner Cole were to make even passing reference to AWB kickback dollars assisting in arming the Baathist insurgency in Iraq, then there are serious political consequences.

Should the emerging Iraqi civil war spread to Al Muthannah in the south of the country, where the Australian military is principally deployed on the ground, then the political problems for the Coalition multiply dimensionally. For the real politics begin with the release of the report of the commissioner.

The Prime Minister is right when he says the commissioner may find matters of fact related to the Australian Government as he determines. If the commissioner were to make adverse references to ministerial or governmental performance, then Coalition headaches again multiply in Canberra.

And no one should ignore the fact that the Watergate scandal took a very long time to develop ultimately into a long, national nightmare for Americans, to use the unusually eloquent words of president Gerald Ford.

Administration defenders of the time dismissed the early reports of a Watergate conspiracy as relating simply to a "third-rate burglary". Nixon actually won the 1972 election convincingly over senator George McGovern in a landslide that November, after the burglars had been arrested and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had begun investigating. Watergate took hold gradually but remorselessly as the conspiracy untangled.

Commissioner Cole is most unlikely to deliver as blistering a judgment as Ervin on Nixon. No one, for example, has seriously suggested that AWB's misdeeds were sponsored or encouraged at senior levels of government. This is not to say that the electorate will not form a conclusion that the damage done to Australia's international reputation should be a matter of accountability. But it is unlikely to change a government, in the manner in which governor Jimmy Carter surfed to victory against the Nixon-Ford administration in November 1976.

For the Watergate scandal not only destroyed a presidency but changed the way Americans saw government. The deep and abiding suspicion of the American media, sparked initially by the deceit of the Johnson administration over Vietnam, has grown with each succeeding American president taking office.

Watergate has coloured not only the way American media report their politics but the way Western media generally see the nature of government. Cynicism was entrenched as a consequence of Nixon's coarse deceptions of his own citizens as revealed on the White House tapes. AWB is far from having this impact, although it has surely confirmed the doubts that many Australians have about government in Canberra.

AWB may not have the consequences of Watergate, but it is a corrosive scandal that should never have occurred, which potentially has compromised our national security and which has recklessly stained the Australian reputation abroad for some time to come.


Stephen Loosley is a former Labor senator and ALP national president.