Prime Minister John Howard's government is implicated in the UN sanctions-busting Iraq corruption scandal over oil-for-food trade. But does anybody care?

You bet. Take the Americans: they're watching the monopoly Australian Wheat Board with keen eyes - and ears. And if influential United States senators like Norm Cole and Tom Daschle have their way, they'll move heaven and earth to ban the AWB from the lucrative world wheat trade market. If it happens - and it's a big if -American wheat farmers, whose exports are heavily subsidised by Washington, DC against foreign competition, will reap an even bigger financial bonanza.

There's talk in Canberra that the single-desk AWB ought to be dismantled for the scandalous bribes - A$300 million - it had paid Iraq's murderous Saddam Hussein regime. AWB had also paid some A$16 million to senior Pakistani government officials of dictator General Pervez Musharraf. Perhaps the Howard government ought to retain the single-desk in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to oversee Australian companies like AWB pay bribes just to win markets. Senior AWB management has argued, spectacularly, that without such kickbacks, Australia's export wheat markets would've been gobbled up by their American free-trade partners.

So much for the free-trade mantra

But true to form, Howard has been ducking and weaving from the AWB fallout amidst the Cole Inquiry. Howard has been trying hard to distance himself and his key ministries of trade and foreign affairs, overseen, respectively, by the dizzy-eyed Mark Vaile and staunch Howard poodle Alexander Downer, from AWB's grubby sleaze.

Since AWB is a private company (it was in the 1980s state-owned), Howard says AWB has nothing to do with his government. Codswallop. Why then did Downer's ministry ask AWB to keep it posted on its wheat-selling operations to Iraq, even if it were working under the UN sanctions regime? Also, why did Downer's office advise AWB that its over-inflated wheat price, by as much as A$50 per tonne, did not breach UN sanctions? Why didn't it prick the hardened so-called specialists in Downer's office that AWB had advised that it were paying the 'facilitation fees' to a Jordanian trucking company, Alia, which the Canadians suspected was controlled by Saddam Hussein and his thugs?

If the Americans smelled the stench coming from the AWB's corridors, the Canadians had worked out AWB's deceit as far back as early 1990s. In fact, Ottawa had let Canberra know during Howard's tenure that it has uncovered AWB's underhandedness, the way it had set up the scheme to make payments to Saddam via front companies. In 2003 a US Defense Department had also uncovered AWB's fraud, but Howard says he knows nothing of the document's existence. Yet Howard has failed to act on these complaints. How could he not have known about this, especially as the Criminal Code, when changed in 1999, makes such transgressions, well, criminal?

Still more questions. Howard has insisted that neither he, his ministers nor senior bureaucrats had at any time known of AWB's sordid corruptness. Yeah, right. So how does Howard explain his former ambassador to Washington, Michael Thawley, who, in the lead-up to the 2004 election, had lobbied Senator Coleman to not haul AWB senior managers before his investigative committee? Any suggestion that Thawley had acted independently is utter nonsense. Given the rigorous protocols and conventions of government and ministries like foreign affairs, Thawley would've been instructed to dissuade Coleman from dragging senior AWB officers before his committee. And such directives can only come from the likes of Downer, who isn't known to twitch a muscle unless his boss lets him.

Claims by what the opposition Labor Party leader Kim Beazley describes as "the three wise monkeys" - Howard, Downer and Vaile - that they know nothing are so incredulous even as inquiry commissioner Terence Cole has sought his terms of reference to be expanded to also investigate one of Australia's largest companies, BHP, and its subsidiary, Tigris Petroleum, both of which have been implicated in the scandal over abuses of the UN's oil-for-food regime in Iraq.

Limit information

In fact, from the Howard government's body-language, it's clear Howard wants to limit information on the AWB's scandalous role. It would be seriously damaging to Howard's own standing. After all, he has the simple volition to deceive and blatantly lie, as he has over SIEV-X, the children overboard affair, and his complicity in manufacturing the mother of all lies over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program on the pretext of legitimising his joining the good mates George W. Bush and Tony Blair in invading then occupying Iraq. What's more, here's even the possibility - no, probability, given Saddam's madness - that the bribe money paid to him by AWB and possibly BHP's Tigris Petroleum could have been offered to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers against Israelis.

If there's a money trail, there's also a blood trail, and nothing about these would be fantastical. Australia rushed to war with Iraq and has been complicit in the killing of innocent men, women and children by Coalition of the Willing's arsenal. Meanwhile, it has been happy to sell wheat to Iraq, after bribing Saddam's to do Australia a favour. At home Howard rewards his business mates with nice policies and legislation, such as the politically draconian, socially irresponsible and mostly economically barren industrial relations laws he has just introduced. Or when he saved his brother's bankrupted company by egging on workers' entitlements while the older Howard enjoys a cushy lifestyle in a leafy part of Sydney. Or the fact that, in his crony-infested government, AWB's directors also occupy plum positions in federal statutory institutions.

It's a familiar story of Howard's devious historical record in office, and he'd do anything to keep himself in power. If Labor thinks that the AWB scandal could bring down the Howard government, it won't happen. Labor has stopped this thought fetish. Not that the pusillanimous opposition has any chance of winning government in the next decade, with its constant policy bungling. But, more to the point, Howard needn't worry because Australian voters could not care less what AWB may have done. Their pockets are full of disposable income; things have never been better for them.Their apathy may be stunning but it's barely surprising. Ignorance, after all, is bliss. And Howard knows this, and plays it up to a gullible electorate.

MANJIT BHATIA, an academician and writer, is also research director of AsiaRisk, a political, economic and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. He specialises in international economics and politics, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific.