Perhaps the most enduring memory of the Australian Wheat Board’s Iraq misadventures is the picture of its paunchy former chairman, Trevor Flugge, stripped to the waist and pointing a gun at the camera. Flugge was in Iraq, to all intents and purposes representing Australia. Selected by the Australian government with a tax-free salary package of just under a million dollars, he was there because, in the prime minister’s words ‘our principal concern at the time was to stop American wheat from getting our markets’.

Iraq was, of course, one of ‘our markets’ and a focal point for what Caroline Overington calls, in Kickback: Inside the Australian Wheat Board Scandal, ‘the greatest trade scandal in Australian history’. Mostly, Australian trade scandals are policy driven, emerging surreptitiously from under the radar, and too diverse and complex to be easily understood. Iraq was different.