Twenty years on, the recent release of previously secret federal Cabinet papers by Australian Archives has revealed that John Howard’s government was even dodgier than it appeared at the time.
Although the documents are incomplete (much of the record relating to East Timor is redacted), the gist is clear. This was a government that put its own interest ahead of the national interest, and which didn’t bother too much with facts to inform its decisions, if they didn’t suit the agenda of the prime minister.
It has now been confirmed that John Howard deployed Australian military forces to the Middle East months before Australia’s involvement with the Iraq war became official. The government fought hard to keep this secret, especially after the justification for going to war (Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction), turned out to be entirely fictitious.
As early as January 2003, Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer gave an internal briefing on the UN search for these weapons in which he admitted ‘there was no confidence that the inspection process would uncover clear evidence of continuing Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs’.
The latest release confirms that in spite of this knowledge, the Howard government decided to emphasise concerns about these imaginary weapons in its public messaging, softening the Australian public up for involvement in yet another foreign war, which ended up killing hundreds of thousands and further destabilising the world.
John Howard’s status as an unindicted war criminal remains.
Money, wheat and East Timor
Federal money was shuffled around to cover the growing cost of the war, including retrospective costs, in spite of concerns from high ranking public servants in the finance department.
After Saddam was gone, more dodginess ensued with regard to the wheat trade between Australia and Iraq, leading to international controversy in 2005. We will have to wait until January next year to discover more about what those in Cabinet knew about that.
As for East Timor, in August of 2004 the Cabinet was briefed on negotiations with Timor-Leste over maritime boundaries. The detail of what was discussed is mostly redacted from the current release, but presumably it included intelligence gathered from ASIS’s illegal bugging of the Timor Leste Prime Minister’s office in Dili that year, in order for Australian companies to get control of the fledgling country’s oil and gas reserves.
The official history of this shameful era remains unpublished, presumably mired in the censor’s office at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Several 2004 records relating to terrorism also remain sealed.
The more things change…
The Cabinet papers show that Howard’s hardline policy against asylum seekers and migration in general was not just PR, with Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone’s request to modestly increase the number of skilled migrants and refugees into Australia being rebuffed by the prime minister’s department on grounds of cost and the risks of ‘unsuccessful integration into the broader community’.
Beyond foreign policy issues, the papers reveal a government and nation deeply concerned with all the same issues troubling PM Albanese and his colleagues now, including housing affordability, supermarket checkout costs, and problems with the aged care sector.
Instead of dealing with any of this in a deep, structural way, the latest Cabinet papers reveal that almost $4 billion of sweeteners were signed off by Howard and his ministers in the final hours of their government before parliament was dissolved for the 2004 federal election, giving the lie to their claims of being responsible managers of money.
As it turned out, John Howard was rewarded for all this with another term, before finally being ousted by the momentum of Kevin 07 three years later, losing his government and his seat in the process, but still somehow becoming a hero of the Liberal Party.
You can read the latest Cabinet papers release from Australian Archives here. What will we discover about 2024 in 2044?
Originally from Canberra, David Lowe is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and photographer with particular interests in the environment and politics. He’s known for his campaigning work with Cloudcatcher Media.
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