Mr GIBBONS (5:39 PM) —Tonight in this debate on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2003-2004 I want to talk about what was and what was not included in the eighth Costello budget. What was missing was a commitment to fund the federal government's contribution to the redevelopment of the Calder Highway—a contribution of around $165 million. What was included was $645 million for our involvement in the invasion of Iraq because of the potential disaster resulting from that country's alleged possession of and use of weapons of mass destruction.

I will first address the issue of the Calder Highway. I was disgusted at the hypocrisy that oozed from the transport minister during question time recently when he boasted about how he allegedly insists on keeping his promises on roads of national importance. This is utter rubbish and it proves what a phoney this minister is. I represent the federal seat of Bendigo. Again and again I have seen how the Howard government has ripped up its promises to fund and finish the duplication of the Calder Highway from Bendigo to Melbourne. The Howard government promised in 1996 to pay 50 per cent of the costs of duplicating the Calder. Today his promise is just a wreck dumped at the side of the road. The Calder Highway is a road sealed with Liberal untruths and its surface is pot-holed with broken Liberal and National promises!

This government uses Calder motorists as milking cows. It is more interested in duplicating taxes on the Calder than on duplicating the road! Since the Howard government came to office, it has added the GST to fuel taxes and it has added the GST to CityLink tolls paid by Calder motorists driving into and out of Melbourne. In short, it has doubled the number of taxes that motorists pay on the Calder. Originally there was fuel tax and the CityLink toll. Now there are fuel taxes, plus the GST on fuel taxes and CityLink tolls plus the GST on CityLink tolls. This government has now stopped paying for the upgrade of the Calder, it has wiped its hands of the Calder and it has wiped off central Victoria, but it is still raking in the taxes from Calder motorists. Where have Calder motorists' taxes gone? Certainly not to the Calder. They have gone everywhere else but to the Calder.

I have seen this government time and time again treat road funds and RONI funds as just one big party political slush fund to advance the interests of the Liberals and the Nationals. Recently during question time the transport minister went on and on in this House about how he likes to keep his RONI promises. On the Calder, he is the man who does not keep his word, and now on the Calder he does not have a word to say. He did not show up at the official opening of the Carlsruhe to Kyneton section of the Calder upgrade a few weeks back and he did not show up in 2001 at the opening of the Woodend section of the duplication. He does not show up because he does not want to be challenged over his government's betrayal. He was actually invited to a meeting with the Calder Highway improvement committee three days after the recent budget. He rejected it. He is coming to Bendigo shortly, but he cannot find the time to talk to the City of Greater Bendigo Council and interested organisations about his abysmal plans for the Calder.

The `Invisible Man' will be in Bendigo, but nobody can see him. He will be in Bendigo on 16 July to speak at a luncheon to be held by the Australian Institute of Company Directors. No doubt he will be lecturing them—with a forked tongue—on why they need to listen to their shareholders and why their companies need to make long-term investments in major capital works. These are not principles he applies to the Calder. The transport minister does not to want to listen and he does not want to be seen.

We have a Prime Minister who will not see any deputations from Bendigo either. The Prime Minister refused to give a Bendigo delegation just 20 minutes of his time to discuss the most important issue confronting central Victoria. The Prime Minister has told Bendigo that any deputations that want to talk to him should go away and book up to talk with the transport minister—who will not see them either. The Howard government is systematically sabotaging the Calder Highway. It promised in 1996 to join with the state government and pay 50 per cent of the cost of duplicating the Calder Highway because it is a RONI, a road of national importance—but it is obviously not a road of National Party importance.

Treasurer Costello repeated that promise in Bendigo in 2001 during the federal election. The Howard government refused to fund the Calder in last year's budget and again in this year's budget. The Howard government is subjecting the Calder Highway to at least five years of financial strangulation, showing that the Howard government is determined to torpedo the state government's plans to complete the Calder Highway upgrade by 2006. The Howard government has a clear-cut strategy to wreck the duplication of the Calder Highway. This is a gross betrayal of Treasurer Costello's promise to Bendigo in the last federal election to continue fifty-fifty funding of RONIs—and the Calder Highway is, obviously, a major RONI in that area and the Bracks government has committed funds to it.

All the evidence suggests that the Prime Minister has actually made the decision that he will never again fund this particular project. The PM's promise to complete the Calder is as fraudulent as another 1996 election promise—that he would not privatise Australian Defence Industries in Bendigo. He broke that promise and, in doing so, he wiped out 250 jobs at ADI Bendigo. He is breaking his Calder RONI promise for at least five years running, according to the government's own forward estimates projections.

I remind the House of the promise Treasurer Costello made to Bendigo during the 2001 federal election, when he was reported in the Bendigo Advertiser on 1 November as saying:

They were the Treasurer's precise words to Bendigo two weeks out from an election. That was accepted by large number of voters in Bendigo. I was fortunate enough to win the seat, but a considerable number of Bendigo voters would have taken the Treasurer's word and voted for his party because of that commitment. Yet here we are two years down the track and not only have they not funded it but all of the forward projections for the next three to four years do not even mention the Calder Highway, whereas previously they did. He has deliberately broken his word, and I suspect that they will pay a major political price for that when the next election rolls around.

I now turn to the second topic that I indicated I would address—the US invasion of Iraq and the phoney pretext on which it was justified by the Bush administration and its `Little Sir Echo' in Australia, the Australian government and the Prime Minister of Australia. On the Internet there is an estimate of the Iraqi civilian war dead compiled by the Iraq Body Count Project. Last week its estimate was that the number of civilians killed in the US war of invasion against Iraq was a minimum of 5,531 and a maximum of 7,203. These are conservative estimates and they do not account for the even larger numbers of Iraqis seriously injured in the bombing and shelling and the numbers Iraqi soldiers killed and injured—nor does it mention the number of American troops and British troops that were killed.

The grounds used by the invading governments to justify inflicting the horror of war on the people of Iraq were the claim that Iraq at the time of the invasion had weapons of mass destruction; that Iraq was engaged at the time in developing weapons of mass destruction; and that these were a clear and imminent danger to other states, especially the United States. It was claimed at the time the US launched its invasion that the danger from Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction was so big and so immediate that the United States was compelled and entitled to bypass the United Nations Security Council, act without the authority of the United Nations and launch war unilaterally on Iraq.

Let us remember, however, what is the real background to this invasion: it is the aggressive agenda of the neoconservative clique in the US that has masterminded this invasion. This is the right wing of the right-wing Republican Party. They are the hard core of Cold War leftovers that have nowhere else to go. The attack on Iraq is part of their blueprint for using so-called pre-emptive wars and for imposing so-called regime change on outlawed states to re-organise the world to suit the power interests of the United States. This is not actually a new world order; it is a new world disorder. It is not a program drawn up by nations of the world but by one nation alone. It junks the body that has been the forum and legislator for world order since World War II—that is, the United Nations—and it replaces that authority with the whim of one man, the President of the United States, and whatever faction of string-pullers is controlling him at the time. This neoconservative agenda does not create or maintain world order; it generates war and the threat of war against any state or head of state that is outlawed unilaterally by the Bush administration. It is, in fact, a system of international lynch law! It is the Republican Party's `declaration of independence' of the United States from the rule of international law.

The real agenda of the United States in attacking Iraq was not removing weapons of mass destruction but so-called regime change and pre-emptive war. The Bush administration was never really genuine in going to the United Nations for authority to remove Iraq's weapons of mass destruction: it was always going to attack Iraq. The weapons of mass destruction slogan was a cover for the invasion that was always going to happen once the Bush administration had brought forward its doctrines of pre-emptive war and regime change and the rogues gallery of the `axis of evil' and of rogue states, including Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Because of this, Iraq has now been bombed, invaded, devastated and occupied. It is and remains in ruins.

I hold no brief for Saddam Hussein and his murderous dictatorship, but I also hold no brief for wars of aggression and for deception. What has happened to the weapons of mass destruction? They have not been found. In all the time since the final capture of Baghdad, the alleged weapons of mass destruction have not been uncovered. They have become the weapons of mass disappearance! They are weapons of mass delusion! A massive arsenal of weaponry has simply failed to materialise. No magician could have done the job so well. In reality, there remain no confirmed finds of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no definitive physical evidence has emerged that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction in March when the US launched its invasion.

The Prime Minister of Australia is a new variant of Basil Fawlty, who used to say, `Don't mention the war.' The Prime Minister's mantra today is, `Don't mention the weapons of mass destruction.' Before the war was launched, the hawk had his tongue; today, the cat has got his tongue! He is reduced to running away from the issue. He latches on to any other excuse for signing Australia up with George Bush. Today all he can say about weapons of mass destruction is:

That was his comment in the Bulletin of 6 May. Suddenly he no longer `knows' there are weapons of mass destruction; he only `believes' there are. In 2001, before the election, he told us he `knew' that asylum seekers at sea had thrown their children overboard. Later on, he only `believed' they had tossed their children into the sea. He is now virtually admitting they did not. There is a big difference between knowing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and believing it. The difference is a figure of up to 7,203 dead innocent Iraqi civilians. It is a joke that at home this Prime Minister likes to fancy himself as a man of steel. In America and Britain, he is regarded as a man of putty at its soft and pliable worst!

Let us now have a look at the verbal antics of the arch war hawk in the US administration, the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Mr Rumsfeld has been reported as saying:

That staggering admission was reported on 28 May in the US Evening Standard newspaper. On the same day, the BBC reported:

Two days later, the UK Independent newspaper quoted the US Deputy Secretary for Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, as stating:

Mr Wolfowitz revealed that the weapons of mass destruction reason for the war was just something that the conflicting views within the US government could be persuaded to settle on.

Let us look at Britain, the only large power in the world that joined the US invasion of Iraq. Back on 21 February, before the invasion was launched, Foreign Minister Jack Straw made this claim about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction:

What a staggering contrast to read the comment which he made to the Independent newspaper on 14 May:

They were, of course, crucially important originally as a way to inflame incredulous Britons to go along with a war that they massively rejected. It is only now, when weapons have not been found, that they do not matter.

I conclude this part of my speech by urging all those here in the House tonight to read the article in the Melbourne Age on Monday, 16 June, by Robert Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University, which has a major presence in my electorate. Robert Manne describes the US claims about weapons of mass destruction as spurious. He says:

I support an investigation into the grounds of Australia's involvement in the war, and I am delighted that one is about to take place.

In conclusion, on a far more pleasant note, I take this opportunity to congratulate Mr John `Blue' Ryan on receiving the Centenary of Federation medal. Blue is the national president of the federation of totally and permanently incapacitated war veterans and is a Vietnam veteran. He is in Canberra at the moment, along with hundreds of his colleagues, to highlight the plight of the members of his organisation and the problems that they confront. Blue Ryan is a warrior who defends the rights of veterans vigorously and was presented with his medal by my colleague the member for Cowan, another tireless warrior for the veteran cause. Both received a huge round of applause from the hundreds of veterans who were outside this House today. I was privileged to attend this emotional presentation; I congratulate Blue and his organisation and wish them every success in the future.