Trying to work out the government’s position on the flow of millions of taxpayer dollars to Israel’s Elbit Systems, especially in the wake of the company’s role in the murder of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, has been difficult, to say the least.
In June, Greens MPs tried in Parliament to pursue the handing of over $900 million to Elbit as part of a contract with South Korean firm Hanwha for infantry vehicles. In response, senior Labor ministers, up to the prime minister himself, aided and abetted by Speaker Milton Dick, refused to answer questions and repeatedly tried to deflect to other issues. The line from Labor, when ministers were eventually forced to answer questions, was that Hanwha’s contract with Elbit was no business of the government.
It took some persistent questioning of Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy from the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas several days later to get anything more out. Conroy initially tried to run the same line of attacking a Greens straw man, until Karvelas cornered him. He was forced to admit that in fact who Hanwha subcontracted to was entirely controlled by the government.
Then Conroy resorted to another straw man: “If they’re saying that we shouldn’t contract with Israeli or Jewish businesses, which is what they’re implying, they are calling for, effectively, a boycott of Israeli and Jewish businesses. That is not our policy. That’s not the policy of the Australian government.”
Except a boycott of Israeli or “Jewish” businesses was not the issue (Conroy clearly wants to link the Greens to antisemitism). Rather, it was why the government was so richly rewarding an arms company complicit in the massacres of so many thousands of Palestinians, and the murder of an Australian. Conroy’s fallback position was that responsibility for atrocities like the murder of aid workers was on the Israel Defense Forces, not the companies that supplied their weapons. “Responsibility for how weapons are used is the responsibility of the defence force in question, in this case, Israel,” said Conroy. “Does that mean, for example, Qantas and Virgin should be banned from buying 737s from Boeing, because Boeing has sold F15 fighter jets to Israel?”
To point out the obvious problem with this statement, Qantas and Virgin are not the Australian government. And the line that the government doesn’t boycott companies because of how other governments might use their products sits very oddly with the government boycott of Huawei products, because of claims the Chinese government could use information harvested from such devices. Or, similarly, the government’s refusal to allow TikTok on government devices.
Particularly given Elbit stands accused not merely of complicity in genocide and the murder of an Australian aid worker, but of placing a backdoor in the software provided for the Australian Defence Force’s Battle Management System.
The Conroy interview was, by Australian standards, an unusually candid moment around defence procurement. The Department of Defence itself completely stonewalls any attempt to obtain information about serious issues around its spending of billions of dollars of taxpayer money. Its laughably named “media unit” refuses to respond to any questions. Its freedom of information area stonewalls and drags out requests on issues such as Elbit, or the corruption revealed by the now notorious Australian National Audit Office review of its dealings with defence contractor Thales, as long as possible, or insists even tightly targeted requests are too large for it to consider. The office of Defence Minister Richard Marles — regarded by current and former Labor MPs as a buffoon — is no better in its willingness to respond to media queries.
This is despite extensive evidence from one of the few sources of Defence accountability, the auditor-general, that the Department of Defence is the most scandal-ridden, conflicted and incompetent department in the Commonwealth — whether it’s the bungled Hunter-class frigates, or ADF health services or rehab services, the ANZAC frigate servicing contract or base services.
The department relies on the fact that there are now few specialist defence journalists — the ABC’s excellent Andrew Greene excepted (he recently revealed that precisely zero action would be taken about the unethical conduct revealed in the Thales audit) — to cover its incompetence and corruption, and that there is a coterie of former Defence officials now ensconced in think tanks and academia ever-ready to leap to its aid in the media and call for still more money to be wasted on weapons systems.
The contrast with the United States, where a super-sized audit office, the Government Accountability Office, relentlessly investigate all departments including the Pentagon and issues a constant stream of reports, sometimes with multiple reports about the Department of Defense per week, and congressional committees publicly grill Pentagon chiefs and contractors about procurement and weapons systems, is stark.
In Australia, scandal and corruption in defence spending pass with minimal accountability and no consequences — including the generous rewarding of firms that help murder Australians.
