The System Is Crook

by Patrick Weller - The Australian

So the Cole inquiry has found that no individual minister or public servant can be held responsible for the failure of anyone to notice that AWB was paying bribes to Saddam Hussein and his cronies. AWB officials were clearly at fault, the UN should have done better, and behind the scenes lurks a shadowy, pipe-playing Scottish villain. For the Government it is a good story with no surprises. No sins were committed in Canberra, no explanations are needed, no resignations required. No one has expected anything else for a long time.

If we take it all at face value and accept that everyone told the truth and the whole truth, then our reaction should be one of great concern, not for what was done but for what was not done. The sins of omission suggest that our systems of accountability and delivery are at best ramshackle and at worst broken. There were several warnings that came into the ministerial and administrative systems that were overlooked, or even ignored.

More than 30 messages illustrating concern with wheat contracts were received by ministers' offices. Cables went to the Prime Minister's office and to those of the relevant ministers. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade had to sign off on some of the contracts. Still no one noticed.

Excuses are easy to construct. Cable traffic is constant from all over the world: no one can be expected to read it all, certainly not the ministers. Official activity inside the department can be frantic. Signals, especially elliptical ones, can easily be missed.

Hindsight has great advantages. What appears in retrospect to be an obvious message may at the time seem little more than a bleep in the traffic, easy to miss if attention is elsewhere. An inquiry fillets the process, following lines of investigation with a rigour and clarity that was missing at the time. Officials may have been concerned with other issues that seemed more pressing or more interesting than the detail of wheat contracts.

And yet we should expect more. Iraq was scarcely a sideshow. We had sent troops to fight once, there were UN sanctions imposed on the regime. It did not take an expert in international relations to know that the US President had Iraq in his sights. Everything about Iraq was likely to be sensitive. Yet no one picked it up.

The messages and cables came into the office of the Prime Minister and his ministers. The role of ministerial staff is to sift and evaluate which of the multiple issues that arrive need the attention of their masters. They are meant to be politically sensitive, to identify what was likely to create political flak. Their purpose in part is to ensure there are no surprises. The number of staff has increased in the past decades to provide a service that ministers need. Yet either they did not pick up the signals, or they did and chose not to pass them on.

Either is a matter of concern. If they don't see these signs, the system is not working. If they do and sit on them, the system is not working either. In theory - although long recognised as a rather rubbery theory - what staff are told, ministers can be assumed to know. Of course it never quite worked: staff must use their discretion in what they pass on. But surely they should appreciate that wheat contracts with the country's principal enemy come into that category.

A similar comment can be made about DFAT, perhaps even more so. Their raison d'etre is to provide intelligence about what is happening across the world. When Trade was combined with Foreign Affairs in 1987, the union was meant to ensure this oversight included economic, as well as political, intelligence. In the past, diplomacy was not to be dirtied by the grubby business of doing business; that had been Trade's remit. To sign off on wheat contracts without analysis, because that is what departmental expectations were or because DFAT couldn't be expected to know the details of wheat contracts, seems to be a path of least resistance, not due care.

The explanation was that they knew these guys and trusted that they would not do anything improper. In Britain this would be described as the "good chap" theory of supervision. There is no need to supervise because good chaps would never do anything wrong. Here it presumably can be seen as the "mates" approach. Since we know them, we can sign off without trying to understand the detail, because mates must be running their affairs properly.

But they weren't. Lax supervision allowed illegal practices to continue. No one was informed. They should have been.

The theory of ministerial responsibility never demanded that ministers knew everything that went on in their departments. It does require that, where failings are identified, they fix them. Secretaries of departments are required to manage the department "under the minister". They, too, should fix shortcomings where they are found.

Even if no minister or bureaucrat was found responsible in this case, the system of accountability has failed us. At the least we should expect that ministers will be able to tell us how they will ensure these problems are never repeated, and what procedures have been implemented by their secretaries to guarantee that future signals will be read by ministerial and departmental staff with the technical knowledge to understand the programs they are required to supervise.

If that happens, then some benefit will come from the Cole inquiry. Yet even that assumes everyone wanted to know.

And an afterthought. The Government will be relieved that it has the numbers in the Senate. Not only can it pass its legislation, but it does not have to submit to an investigation by an inevitable Senate committee whose questioning would have been far less gentle than the Cole inquiry.


Patrick Weller, author of Don't Tell the Prime Minister (Scribe), holds the premier's chair in governance and public management at Griffith University in Brisbane.

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