Introduction

The scandal surrounding the Australian Wheat Board's (AWB's) breaches of the UN Oil-for-Food Programme (OFFP) was played out globally across international and domestic fora. This chapter examines the affair from an accountability perspective, using it as a case study of the similarities and differences between domestic and international accountability regimes. While the understanding of accountability differs significantly between the domestic and international spheres, largely because of the comparative weakness of international political and legal institutions, underlying continuities in both the theory and the practice of accountability provide a basis for fruitful comparison. The AWB affair also illustrates the complex and multifarious nature of accountability structures, whereby being able to hold a particular agent to account for a particular action is often the product of a series of accountability processes by a variety of different individuals and institutions with different powers and incentives.

Finally, the AWB affair underscores the ambivalent nature of all such accountability crises. On the one hand, it demonstrates a failure of accountability. The domestic Australian Cole Inquiry and its international predecessor, the Volcker Inquiry, undoubtedly revealed serious accountability deficiencies in the administration and monitoring of the Iraq sanctions regime in general and the OFFP in particular. On the other hand, these inquiries themselves and the political pressures that gave rise to them provide an accountability success story. They helped to bring the facts to light and so provided impetus for establishing a more effective accountability structure.

Effective citizenship, even among people of diverse interests and values, requires a shared sense of political community, including allegiance to common legal and political institutions and general acceptance of each other's legitimate membership of the community and right to citizenship. In most democratic countries, issues of legitimacy are relatively insignificant, provided the borders are well established and the basic constitutional rules uncontested. In some democracies, however, particularly former settler societies such as Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada, the legitimacy of the regime and therefore the legitimacy of its citizens have been called into question. The assumptions that underlay colonial settlement, including the supposed civilising mission and ethnic superiority of Europeans, have been discredited. With this discrediting has come the realisation that the regimes of the settlers were imposed on the indigenous peoples by force and with callous disregard for their cultures and rights. For the indigenous minorities themselves, there is little reason to owe allegiance to a legal and political system to which they have never consented and by which they continue to be dispossessed. While the legitimacy of their residence in the country is beyond doubt, they must question the legitimacy of the imposed regime and the citizenship it confers. Like other colonised peoples, they are seeking restoration of the rights lost through colonisation, particularly the right to their lands and the right to political self-determination.

For the settler and migrant majorities, at the same time, the shift in values can be disturbing.