Brian Toohey – An audience of two. That's all the Western Australian Liberal Senator, Sue Knowles, wanted when she rose to speak in Parliament on Wednesday about what she saw as an important development surrounding Paul Keating's business dealings with Indonesia while prime minister.
The two people who matter to Knowles are the Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, and the current Prime Minister, John Howard. Without their support, she can't get the inquiry she wants into Keating's behaviour.
Other senators have also mounted a case for an inquiry. Only Knowles has been cheeky enough to prod Howard along by noting that, while Opposition leader in 1995, he had demanded an inquiry into claims that Keating had done favours for his friend Warren Anderson over the building of the Northern Territory's new Parliament House.
Knowles's speech on Wednesday focused on a contract obtained from the Soeharto Government by the Soeryadjaya group which had bought Keating's half share in a piggery. Knowles told Parliament: "The unmistakable implication is that the Soeryadjayas bought out Keating's piggery share in return for influence peddling by the former prime minister with President Soeharto on their behalf."
Knowles reminded Parliament that Keating had said on the ABC's 7.30 Report in July 1998, "Mr Soeryadjaya was definitely not part of any crony structure with President Soeharto. He'd been on the outer, as anyone who knows about Indonesia knows". But Knowles said "he was not on the outer after he bought Keating's piggery interests".
Knowles said a new book, Asian Eclipse – Exposing the Dark Side of Business in Asia, traced how the Soeryadjaya family fortunes had improved markedly following their purchase of Keating's share in the piggery. She quoted the author, Michael Backman, as saying: "The Soeryadjayas possibly hoped that their taking Keating's troublesome piggery investment off his hands would help im-prove their standing with Soeharto . . . There was no doubt a link with the Australian prime minister wouldn't do the family any harm."
Knowles said Backman told how a consortium headed by a Soeryadjaya company was subsequently awarded a fixed telephone line concession on part of Java. Backman noted that, "for the Soeryadjayas, it marked a return to big business".
Backman is a former member of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade who has worked in Indonesia. In his book, he says Keating used his influence with Soeharto in 1995 to pressure the Indonesian Government to accept Telstra as a partner in a 15-year concession to roll out and operate phone lines in central Java, and that another consortium headed by the Soeryadjayas' company, Artimas Kencana Murni, was awarded a similar concession.
He makes no claim that Keating also lobbied on behalf of the Soeryadjayas. (Although a central theme of Backman's book is that Asian leaders such as Soeharto should have stayed at arms length from the corporate sector, Keating can hardly be faulted for lobbying on Telstra's behalf.)
After Keating bought a half share of the Brown and Hatton piggery group for $430,000 in 1991, Coalition MPs subjected him to questions. Partly as a result of the distraction this caused, Keating disposed of his share after meeting the Soeryadjayas in Sydney in March 1994. According to a story in The Sydney Morning Herald last year, the Soeryadjayas agreed to pay $US6 million for Keating's share. Earlier this year, Keating told the paper he had received a little under $4 million. This figure has only whetted the appetite of Coalition politicians who obviously regard it as representing an intriguingly handsome capital gain on an asset whose debts had risen heavily.
Keating has said the Soeryadjayas were introduced to him by John Benson who has since retained him as a consultant on an aluminium project. Although Benson was a partner of Warren Anderson, Keating says he had not met him before the piggery sale. Knowles told Parliament the sale was not the first time Benson and Anderson had been involved in business moves involving Keating and Indonesian interests. In 1992 they had sought $130 million in Australian aid to supply cattle from Anderson stations to small farmers in Indonesia. The request was made to Keating's prime ministerial office from an Indonesian foundation, Yayasan Serangan Umum, to which Benson was a consultant.
According to Knowles, the Yayasan was "recently exposed as one of those tax-exempt foundations with hidden wealth, run by Soeharto's military cronies, with Soeharto himself as a patron". She said: "The documentary evidence shows that for three years Keating and [Laurie] Brereton [his then parliamentary secretary] tried to secure Australian aid funding for an uneconomic project which would have benefited Anderson." The proposal was eventually rejected by AusAID but "by this stage Anderson had sold his interest in the cattle stations".
The previous Wednesday, Senator Bill O'Chee told Parliament he had a new document showing that the Commonwealth Bank had written off $4.9 million in piggery group debt in May 1994 while the bank was still majority owned by the Federal Government. O'Chee said the CBA, "as much as the Indonesians who purchased his piggery, made Keating into a multimillionaire".
O'Chee told Parliament that, apart from writing off debt without any recourse to its security, the CBA had done Keating an extraordinary favour by giving the Indonesians a six-year no-interest loan worth about $4 million. He also said Keating benefited from the CBA's decision to write off $11 million in personal debts owed by his former piggery partner, Al Constantinidis, "conditional on his silence on matters to do with the piggery and Paul Keating".
On the same day, in a detailed speech on the piggery sale, Senator Paul Calvert said "documents now on the record raise a clear prima facie case of capital tax gains fraud by Paul Keating".
Keating has not commented on these speeches. But he previously issued a blanket denial of any impropriety or illegality while he was prime minister. He has specifically denied approaching anyone other than normal CBA line officers about the piggery and stated that he has paid all taxes due.
Fortunately for Keating, Howard seems to have changed his mind since 1995. Now that he is prime minister, he apparently believes that any official inquiry into behaviour allegedly damaging the office of prime minister could only further damage the office of prime minister.