Saturday, 25th March, 2006

I have seen or heard nothing that makes me think Prime Minister John Howard was other than genuinely surprised when he received a departmental minute alerting him to a complaint by Paul Volcker that Australia was not providing sufficient cooperation to his UN inquiry into Iraq's oil-for-food program. Mr Howard's hand written notation of 11 February 2005 that "there must be maximum cooperation and transparency" strikes me as having an element of Prime Ministerial surprise that his intervention was even necessary.

To me it is quite believable that Mr Howard himself did not see the many cables and other pieces of paper about AWB bribes addressed to him in the months before the minute quoting Mr Volker as saying that the approach of the Australian Government was "beyond reticent, even forbidding." These days the words "Prime Minister" in the address line mean nothing more than letting someone in the office of the Prime Minister know. And there is a marked reluctance among staff members and public servants alike to send any minister pieces of paper saying things that they know their boss will want to be able to deny knowing about. The only reason the Volker comments were put in the Howard in-tray was because some staffer decided a failure to respond would eventually become public in a United Nations report.

These days ministerial responsibility means nothing more than ministers being responsible just for actions they directly perform. The need for ministerial deniability is now paramount so ministers do not directly probe into suggestions of maladministration or worse. There was a clear example of this approach when then Agriculture Minister Warren Truss back in August 2002 responded to suggestions that the AWB was making slings to Iraqi officials by saying "don't give me that bull shit. The Wheat Board is run by farmers of great integrity and honesty, they wouldn't do that sort of thing." (See There are None so Blind But Does it Matter?). The last thing Mr Truss wanted to do was to make an inquiry himself into whether there might by anything in the allegations being made by American and Canadian grain traders. He might have found the truth.

This ministerial policy of "see no evil, hear no evil" is not an invention of the Howard Government but a decade in office has seen it rise to new levels. For the Opposition Leader Kim Beazley this presents an opportunity. The Democrats in the United States are having considerable success in portraying President George W. Bush as a politician whose word cannot be trusted. There might be limited public interest in the ethics of an exporter paying bribes but there could be in a Labor policy to return honesty, openness and accountability to the system of government. A start would be a commitment to the traditional meaning of ministerial responsibility combined with a return to a public service that was independent and impartial in fact as well as name.