JOURNALIST:
Prime Minister, just wondering if you'd thought at all, if the inquiry that Labor's proposing to have, whether there could learn anything about weapons of mass destruction and the Government's intelligence, if there's anything more for them to discover?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I think the whole idea of an inquiry at this stage is premature. The survey teams that are really going to be involved in the detailed search, they've only just been formed and I think it is altogether premature and really politically motivated. You've got to remember that Mr Crean himself acknowledged that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Mr Rudd did. Mr Crean said Iraq was in material breach of the United Nations resolutions. I think what the Labor Party is doing is behaving in a very opportunistic fashion and they're not really giving the process proper time to work.
We didn't massage the intelligence, we didn't tell the agencies to tell us what we wanted to hear, they gave us their honest assessment and their assessment was that Iraq had that capability and I believed that, I still believe it. I think it's altogether too early to be running into these things now and I think it is driven by political opportunism, not a genuine search for the truth.
Thank you.
[ends]