The news in Australia over the last few days has been headlined with the scandal of the findings handed down by the Cole Inquiry into the behaviour of the Australian Government and the Australian Wheat Board and their ethically despicable trading deals with the Iraqi Government just before the 2003 invasion.

At that time there were (in theory) severe sanctions placed by the world community upon trade with Iraq, an accord to which Australia was a signatory. However, for reasons that are still unclear, the AWB considered that these sanctions didn’t apply to them and they carried on business as usual, a situation that encompassed significant bribes to officials in the Iraqi Government in order to lubricate the machinery of commerce. This was, we are to understand from the AWB, normal business practice.

The Howard government in its typically weaselly manner has managed to slip like a greased pig from the grasp of the Cole Inquisitors, avoiding the allegations of Corruption directed toward it for its part in the debacle, and settling for the questionably safer judgement of Incompetence (with which it evidently feels quite comfortable). This is not a surprise for thinking Australians. We’ve become used to this over the last decade or so. This Government is not ‘responsible’ for anything except winning the cricket.

But the full force of the law has landed on the AWB, which has been found in Australian law to be about as rotten as any capitalist venture can be. The punitive effects of this are yet to be decided, but they are likely to be severe.

The extraordinary comment of the day, however, came from the former Managing Director of the AWB Andrew Lindberg, who made a philosophically booby-trapped statement to the effect that he did not believe that AWB acted with evil intent.

Aha. No, Mr Lindberg. Of course you didn’t. Very few people, except for psychopaths and Satanists actually set about acting with evil intent. That’s the really tricky thing about Evil, isn’t it? It kinda sneaks up on you when you thought that all you were doing was just fudging the truth. Just telling a little white lie. Just looking after the interests of your shareholders. Just giving a few mill to Saddam because, y’know, if we don’t, someone else will.

Evil isn’t a big cackling sulphur-smelling demon, Mr Lindberg. Evil is an obsequious little bespectacled man with a ledger, who keeps pointing at the bottom line and telling you your market index has dropped by half a percent. Evil is a little voice that whispers “Go on, just one little signature won’t hurt – they’re a backwards country run by towel-heads: no-one will care…” Evil is a lot of little moral compromises that really don’t matter all that much…

A deficit of evil intent does not mean a deficit of evil.

And you always know when you’re doing the wrong thing.

(It’s not like you were trying to cover your tracks or anything. Right?)