Mr RUDD (3:43 PM) —National security is the first responsibility of government. The questions before the parliament are these: is this nation more or less secure than it was before the Iraq war, is the nation more or less secure from terrorism than it was before the Iraq war, is the nation more or less secure in South-East Asia than it was before the Iraq war, is the nation's intelligence machinery in first-class working order, and are the nation's intelligence-sharing relationships with our friends and allies in the region and beyond in first-class working order?

These are reasonable questions to ask eight long years into the history of the Howard government—the self-proclaimed party of national security. Regrettably, the answer to each of the questions I have just asked lies in the negative. It is a puzzling thing that, when it comes to this party proclaiming itself to be the natural party of national security, the Prime Minister is permanently draped in the Australian flag but when it comes to the crunch, whenever there is a doubt, the Prime Minister will always be found down there, playing politics with the core questions of national security before our nation. When it comes to national security under the Howard government, our experience in this place is that we are always up against the Howard doctrines.

The first Howard doctrine is: never tell the truth. Honest John is loose with the truth. That is the first cardinal principle, the first Howard doctrine. The second Howard doctrine on national security is: always blame somebody else. The doctrine of ministerial accountability in this government has become the doctrine of the ministerial hospital pass. We saw it with `kids overboard'. We remember `kids overboard'. It was not the Prime Minister's responsibility; it was the responsibility of those 16 officials and advisers who mysteriously knew that there was a problem. It was never the PM's responsibility; it was always someone else's. We saw it with Iraqi POWs: do not blame the Prime Minister; just blame Defence, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the 10 situation reports from Baghdad which detailed prisoner abuse in that country. Do not blame the Prime Minister; blame the Public Service. And now we see it with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction: do not blame the Prime Minister; just blame the spooks—blame the Australian spooks, blame the British spooks, blame the American spooks, blame Iceland, blame French Guiana, blame Uncle Tom Cobbly, blame anybody except the Prime Minister, because he is not responsible for anything these days. The core element of the Howard doctrine is this: when there is policy failure, it is always the responsibility of the Public Service; it is never the responsibility of the Prime Minister. It is the doctrine of the ministerial hospital pass.

But here is the problem: the Flood report, for all its limitations, makes it very difficult for the hospital pass to be sold when it comes to our intelligence agencies over Iraq as the Prime Minister has sought to do. The Prime Minister is well skilled in these crafts. Of course, we saw what he tried to do when the Flood report came out, and that was engage once again in setting up a straw man. What was the straw man on this occasion? Ask: did I, John Howard, personally influence the intelligence bureaucracy to produce each of these reports? Add a Philip Flood who says, `No,' then John Howard self-proclaims innocence, closes down debate and the situation is over. John Howard created the straw man, then said, `There is the test. Wacko, I happen to have passed it. No problem.'

Leave aside a few complications, including that the Jull committee report warned about the intelligence bureaucracy being subject to policy running hard—that is, policy decisions already taken and therefore potentially influencing intelligence assessments. Leave to one side also what Jull reported in terms of the conclusions of the DIO in its testimony, when it said that the Americans were going to go to war anyway in Iraq, irrespective of what the intelligence said. Of course, if that was the case, here in Australia the intelligence bureaucracy would have concluded: `Oh no, our John Howard will be completely independent. If the Americans have decided to go to war, our Prime Minister will not automatically go to war.' Of course these conclusions fell into the collective consciousness of the Australian intelligence bureaucracy as they shaped their analyses. That is the point that was made, sensibly, in the Jull committee report. However, the whole point of this debate is that John Howard constructed that as a straw man to distract us from the core elements of the entire proposition before us. That is what he has done in his eight years as Prime Minister, because he sought to absolve himself of any responsibility—any attention in this place or beyond—for what he should have done as Prime Minister.

You are Prime Minister of Australia, and you are about to take a country to war in a country in which we have not often been to war. It is called Iraq. It is a fairly novel experience for this country to go to war, so there are a few basic questions for the Prime Minister. Prime Minister, who was responsible for ensuring that your own intelligence agency had enough assets in it to deal with this problem? We found out that it did not have enough assets. Prime Minister, why were the ONA's total appropriations higher in Labor's last year in office than in each of the Prime Minister's subsequent seven years in office? How could that have been? Prime Minister, who was responsible for the fact that in the lead-up to the Iraq war there were only three—one, two, three—individuals in the Office of National Assessments responsible for providing, on behalf of the Prime Minister himself, a totally independent intelligence assessment of this mountain of material coming in from Washington and London? According to Flood, none of those three had one skerrick of WMD expertise—not one.

This is our Prime Minister, underresourcing his own intelligence agency and not allowing there to be sufficient staff to handle the material and tasks they were given, and then they were expected to somehow produce an independent assessment. Prime Minister, who was responsible for the fact that there were no more staff in the ONA in Labor's last year in office than in any of your subsequent eight years in office? Prime Minister, who also was responsible for not initiating a national assessment on Iraq? This is made play of in the Flood report—and quite rightly so. Why is it an important matter? It is because, when it came to not calling for a national assessment on Iraq, plainly in the lead-up to the Iraq war you had varying opinions from the ONA, the DIO and other elements of the international intelligence community. This Prime Minister, who has a formal responsibility to draw the threads together, did not see it as his job to say: `We need a formal and final national assessment on Iraq before we go tripping off into war.' He failed to do that as well. He failed to do the things that were contained in the question which the member for Brand put to the Prime Minister before. As Flood also notes, there was a lack of intelligence assessment on such key things as:

I would have thought that the Prime Minister of Australia had some responsibility to undertake these tasks. Instead, the prime ministerial doctrine of non-responsibility takes over. Whack! The hospital pass. It is over to the intelligence community. It is their job, and their job alone.

So where do we get to as far as the Prime Minister's handling of this matter concerning the war is concerned? He failed to resource his intelligence agency to meet the demands they faced; he failed to ask the intelligence community for a formal pre-assessment in Iraq; on the basis of the intelligence he did have on Iraq, which Flood said was `thin, incomplete and ambiguous', he then decided to take the country to war; then we have a Prime Minister who exaggerated the intelligence information he had in his possession. If you wish to find evidence of that, you only need to go again to the Jull committee, which found:

And Jull's conclusion—remember, it was a Liberal chair and a Liberal-dominated committee—was:

There you have Jull on behalf of that Liberal-dominated committee saying that basically the Prime Minister exaggerated the case. So far we have a very sobering record indeed for the Prime Minister. Where does all this leave us? Well, we have seen the first Howard doctrine in full flight: never tell the truth. We have seen the second Howard doctrine in full flight: always blame the Public Service; never blame the Prime Minister. Remember, the doctrine is the doctrine of the ministerial hospital pass, not the doctrine of ministerial accountability. But when all else fails—when doctrine 1 fails and doctrine 2 fails—there is always the government's secret weapon. The government's secret weapon when they find themselves in a national security jam, the weapon of last resort, is Alexander John Gosse Downer—lion of Manila; hero of Madrid; friend of East Timor. That is him, right over there: this nation's answer to Talleyrand.

You would think that after a few failures in the foreign policy field he would have a bit of modesty about him—a bit of intelligence failure here, a bit there; some problems with Bali; some problems with Iraq; what happened with Brigitte—well, it is not going too flash overall. You would think our foreign minister, with all of that happening, would say, `I think it is time we just toned it down a little in terms of providing moral lectures to our friends and neighbours,' but, oh, no—not our Alex. What does he do? He declares war on the Spanish socialist government. Not content there, he heads rapidly eastwards to Manila. We are off to Manila, because we are in the business of Alexander Downer's school of diplomacy called `Winning friends and influencing people'. We are off to Manila, and there he applies his same craft to the poor old Filipinos. Here we have Captain Cream Puff describing the Filipinos as a bunch of marshmallows. I have to conclude that when it comes to Labor policy—

Miss Jackie Kelly —Ms Deputy Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I request that members be referred to by their correct title.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Ms Corcoran)—Member for Griffith, I ask that you take the point.

Mr RUDD —Labor policy, like the government's, is this: we do not believe in negotiating with terrorists. But I tell you where we do not have the same approach as this government; our approach is this: when you are a diplomat, the job is to use diplomacy to convey a message. This is a novel doctrine for the Minister for Foreign Affairs. I had thought, until recently, he was our chief diplomat. No. Instead he takes out the megaphone, holds it up to our friends in Manila and blasts them for their recent actions. Why does this matter? The reason it matters is that we have a fundamental continuing challenge to Australian security called terrorism in South-East Asia. There are two countries in the front line of this: one is Indonesia and the other is the Philippines.

In the Philippines there are three significant organisations of great interest to Australian intelligence and security authorities: MILF, Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiah. We are told in reports which are declassified that Jemaah Islamiah has recently re-established two training bases—where? In the Philippines. And my question to Talleyrand opposite is this: how, without the political cooperation of the government in Manila, does he expect to deal with this terrorist threat in the Philippines? Is he going to take a leaf out of John `Lionhearted' Howard's textbook by adopting again the doctrine of unilateral military pre-emption and going in there and sorting out the mess himself? Is that his view?

I thought that the correct policy approach was to work with your friends and partners in the region. Pardon us, Minister, for just being a little old-fashioned on these things. It certainly brings back some memories, Minister—memories of when the Prime Minister some time ago announced his doctrine of military pre-emption. Do you recall what happened then, only a couple of years ago? Reactions from the Philippines, reactions from Malaysia and reactions from Indonesia put our bilateral security intelligence cooperation arrangements with these governments into the sin-bin for several months, at a time when we had a responsibility to deal with these things at the front line.

And why is it important? How many Australians travel through South-East Asia each year? In the year 2002-03, one and a half million Australians travelled to or through South-East Asia. How many Australians live and work in South-East Asia? Forty-five thousand Australians. I would have thought it was smart to get on with our neighbours; to work with our neighbours rather than against them. The minister's response to ambassadors being called in, told to pull their heads in and warned of breaches in the bilateral relationship is, `It's all perfectly normal.' Minister, when you stand up at the dispatch box, tell us how many times our ambassador in Manila has been hauled in in the last eight years to be formally diplomatically reprimanded by the government of the Philippines. Tell us how many times that has happened in the last eight years when it comes to Madrid.

Minister, the bottom line is this: you are out of control. You are not doing your job. You are not up to your job any more. The bottom line is, when it comes to you exercising the high office of foreign minister of the Commonwealth of Australia, you act as a permanent commentator on the Labor Party and a permanent commentator on other governments around the world, when your central tasks as foreign minister of the Commonwealth of Australia remain unattended to—challenges of terrorism here in South-East Asia, an emerging crisis in the Taiwan Strait, the Korean peninsula and unresolved humanitarian crises in Sudan. Minister, it is time you went! (Time expired)