Peter Dutton has thrown his support behind the release of documents relating to Australia’s decision to join the Iraq war following the failure of the Morrison government to hand over all the 2003 cabinet documents for release.
The opposition leader said on Thursday the “papers should be released” while accusing the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, of focusing too much on the “beltway issue” rather than cost of living.
Sealed cabinet documents, including those prepared for the national security committee, are released to the public every 20 years on the first day of the year.
The documents released by the National Archives on 1 January 2024 were expected to contain significant insights into why the then Howard government joined the US-led invasion of Iraq, however, the tranche did not contain any formal submissions and only referenced “oral reports” to the cabinet.
In an 11th-hour statement before the documents were publicly released on New Year’s Day, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet confirmed it had since found additional documents and had transferred them to the archives for inspection.
The department said the documents had been missed in “apparent administrative oversights” by itself, the archives and security agencies, saying it was likely the result of Covid-19 disruptions.
The archives said it intended to make a decision about the release of the additional documents “as a matter of priority”. An investigation into the blunder is under way by former defence secretary, Dennis Richardson, and is due to be handed to the government later this month.
Anthony Albanese on Wednesday said Australians had a right to know why the Howard government committed Australians to the war in Iraq.
“Australians do have a right to know what the decision-making process was, and my government believes that this mistake must be corrected, that the National Archives of Australia should release all the documentation that has been provided to them, having accounted for any national security issues, of course, upon the advice of the national security agencies,” the prime minister said.
“But there is no reason why these documents should [not] be – with the exception of putting people in danger – should [not be] released in a transparent way.”
Dutton, who appeared on 2GB on Thursday, agreed the papers should be released but took aim at Albanese for focusing on the transparency issue while Australians struggled with rising costs, describing it as “a little bizarre”.
“He’s obsessing about trying to get square with John Howard over the release of these cabinet papers – which is a beltway issue: the papers should be released, but that’s an issue for the bureaucrats to work out,” he said.
Greens senator Nick McKim earlier this week demanded a full release of the documents detailing the Howard government’s “disastrous decision to go to war in Iraq”, adding it was another reason why there should be a parliamentary vote before committing Australia to future wars.
McKim said the papers that had been released “still don’t reveal the entirety of the flawed intelligence and failures of political leadership” and were “a missed opportunity to learn the lesson that war should never be entered into on the basis of a lie”.
“It’s critical that additional intelligence documents, including national security committee documents used to justify the war on false grounds, are released,” he said.
“Massive questions remain unanswered about exactly when John Howard promised George Bush he would take Australia to war in Iraq, how that stacks up with the timeline of flawed intelligence, and how this informed national security committee and cabinet decisions to proceed with one of the worst foreign policy disasters in Australian history.”
The 2003 Labor opposition, which was led by Simon Crean, did not support the decision to commit Australia to war. At the time, Crean called it a “black day for Australia” and “illegal, unnecessarily and unjust”.
An investigation by US and UN inspectors found any weapons of mass destruction Iraq had held had been destroyed a decade before the invasion. At least 200,000 Iraqi citizens were killed in the war which followed the 2003 invasion.
