As parliament resumes, the gummint
is having to deal with more unwelcome fallout from Julian McGauran trading in
his RM Williams kit for the sensible navy suit. Bill Heffernan apparently went
the biff yesterday at Canberra airport at the Nats’ Fiona Nash who
Henry’s readers will remember made a recent charge for the Barnaby Joyce award
for coalition intransigence by declaring that the gummint could no longer count
on her vote in the Senate. The Coalition meetings will be interesting in the
coming weeks, that is for sure.

Those rascals at the AWB will also
have caused a spike in antacid sales at the Parliament House cafeteria with
the gummint no doubt primed for sustained attacks from the opposition. A second
whistleblower has come forward and there is a palpable stink coming from the
crippled AWB.

Let’s not forget – it is basically
impossible to do business in some of these regions without greasing palms and
carting bags of cash around. We know it, US
Senator Coleman knows it and anyone with half a brain would know it.
Henry predicts that the end result of this will be that a few DFAT
officials will cop censure of some sort (Downer not one of them), the
top level or two of AWB executives will be swept out and the AWB itself
– if it survives and keeps its monopoly position – will have to
initiate a new corporate governance regime that will effectively
cripple it and cause our wheat growers to lose opportunity in the
Middle East for a generation. Australian market share will then go to
US growers, who have covered their tracks better and are able to
construct creative credit provisions that are unavailable to the
AWB.

Read the full article at Henry
Thornton