Honour Left In Political Graveyard

by Ross Fitzgerald - The Australian

As more material emerges about Australia's biggest political scandal - a fiasco that involved Australian money helping Saddam Hussein buy his bullets and bombs - spare a thought for those ministers of yesteryear who litter our political graveyard. Spare a thought for all those ministers who, under present standards, need not have resigned for their misdeeds.

Spare a thought for the United Australia Party's John Lawson, who resigned from the ministry in 1940 because he was leasing a racehorse from a man who had business interests covered by Lawson's trade portfolio.

Spare a thought for Liberal treasurer Phillip Lynch, who resigned during the 1977 election campaign over land speculation in Victoria. He was later cleared of any wrongdoing and reinstated in the cabinet.

Spare a thought for poor old Reg Withers, the Coalition minister who came to grief in 1978 for phoning the electoral commission to suggest some names for new electorates. One phone call and he was gone.

Or think, perhaps, of Liberal ministers Michael MacKellar and John Moore, both of whom resigned in 1982 after failing to pay Customs duties on a television set they brought back from an overseas trip. Or Labor's Mick Young, who resigned for a similar infraction of the Customs laws when he imported a teddy bear in 1984.

While Alexander Downer and Mark Vaile still sit pretty in their ministries, spare a thought for John Brown, the ALP minister who resigned in 1987 after misleading the house over a World Expo tender.

Spare a thought for Labor's Ros Kelly, whose whiteboard problems in 1994 seem tiny compared with the systematic rorting of regional partnerships by incumbent ministers to favour Nationals electorates, and positively minuscule when compared with the wheat-for-weapons scandal.

Spare a thought, even, for Jim Cairns and Rex Connor, who resigned in the dying days of the Whitlam government over the Khemlani loans affair. Think, too, of Graham Richardson, who resigned in 1992 over his intervention on behalf of a dubious family member doing business in the Marshall Islands.

Even these serious matters are dwarfed in significance by wheat for weapons, a scandal many times worse than Khemlani and the Marshall Islands combined. Frankly, the AWB scandal makes Richardson look like a boy scout.

Or remember, perhaps, David Jull, Peter McGauran and others: those former ministerial colleagues of Downer and Vaile who rightly resigned in the early years of the Howard Government because of dodgy travel allowance claims. They must be ropeable upon learning that there was one set of rules for them and another set entirely for the Deputy Prime Minister and the Foreign Affairs Minister.

The point of this trip down ministerial memory lane is to underscore the seriousness of the AWB scandal and of Downer and Vaile's refusal to resign, despite the damage done to our national security.

And although nowhere near as serious as the AWB scandal, it's been too easily forgotten, for example, that Treasurer Peter Costello appointed Robert Gerard, a million-dollar Liberal Party donor, to the Reserve Bank board despite a history of serious run-ins with the tax office. By the basic accountability standards of earlier federal governments, the Treasurer would have had to resign.

Costello and Downer are the two most-mentioned names when the post-Howard leadership of the Liberal Party is discussed. Yet these are ministers who have failed the ministerial standards adhered to by their predecessors.

A government that thinks it's bigger than the system should arguably be put out to pasture. Even the lame defence about AWB - that the scandal isn't registering in the living rooms of Australia - has been blown to smithereens by the latest polling data, which shows that three-quarters of us know and that half of us care about the scandal.

Here's a challenge for the citizens of Australia. Next time Downer or Vaile appears in parliament or the media, ask whether what they did (or failed to do) is worse than not declaring a TV set to Customs.

Ask whether Young's imported teddy bear was a bigger deal than buying Saddam's bullets, the same ones the evil dictator fired at Australian troops and our allies?

Ask how Withers's phone call to the electoral commission compares with the Prime Minister's office coaching the AWB on how to avoid the scrutiny of a UN inquiry.

And then ask how any of these scandals compare with Australia's contribution to the undermining of sanctions that created the Iraq war in the first place.

Australians should never forget either the misleading reasons offered for our military involvement in Iraq or the utter gravity of the wheat-for-weapons saga, which is by far the worst scandal in the chequered history of our federal political system.