Focus on smoking gun obscures collective fault

If that were the policy, it succeeded for many years, with much profit to AWB and Australian wheat farmers. DFAT officials, far from being incompetent, carried out government policy with consummate professionalism.

That AWB and the government were eventually unmasked was due to unexpected factors: the tenacity of the UN's Volcker inquiry and the limitations of the Australian Government's credit in Washington, especially in agricultural trade matters.

A policy of deliberate negligence was a high-risk strategy that dare not speak its name. But, so far, no minister has had to articulate what government policy was or to admit where it had gone wrong and why.

All interest has switched to the smoking gun. The assumption seems to be that if no smoking gun is discovered, and therefore no individual is found to have been personally at fault, nothing has gone wrong.

But even if it is unclear who pulled the trigger, the fact of the murder is undeniable. Ministers must admit that the policy (whichever version they choose to own up to) failed.

The collective failure, and the consequent damage to Australia's international reputation, is the elephant being overlooked in the AWB kickbacks affair.

Why are the relevant ministers, including Prime Minister John Howard, not being pressed on what the government as a whole was trying to achieve in its supervision of the AWB contracts in Iraq?

Concentrating on personal fault provides a diversion from the core function of ministerial responsibility: making ministers take collective responsibility for government policy.