Sunday, 5th February, 2006

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer on Friday described headlines that Canberra Knew of Kickbacks as "preposterous" and his media adviser Chris Kenny called The Australian's coverage "tendentious and inaccurate". All of which had very little impact on changing things. If anything they made things worse.

Saturday's edition might have led page one with BHP Billiton's involvement in the Iraq affair but right underneath it was "Active choice to see no evil" in which Caroline Ovington summarised the Cole Inquiry so far as:

JOHN HOWARD insists nobody in his Government knew Australia's monopoly wheat exporter, AWB, was funnelling money to Saddam Hussein's regime.
However, The Weekend Australian has identified at least five separate occfasions on which the Prime Minister's Government received clear warnings of illegal payments.
And on each occasion the Government chose to ignore the red flags, or to conduct a lame investigation, that uncovered nothing.
In other words, if the Government did not know that AWB was making kickbacks to Saddam it is only because it did not want to know and did little to find out.

Toss in The Australian's tough editorial and it suggeests that Messrs Downer and Kenny have some work to do if they are to win this spinning contest.