The Prime Minister's stance on pre-Iraq war intelligence advice is untenable.

"If, at the end of the day, it's conclusively and absolutely the case that there were no weapons (of mass destruction), then questions might be asked."
- Australian Prime Minister John Howard yesterday.

Welcome to the end of the day, Prime Minister. Just as almost everyone believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction before the war, there is now overwhelming international consensus that this was not the case.

Questions are being asked about how the coalition of the willing got it so wrong - questions that can only be answered by independent inquiries.

George Bush knows it. Tony Blair knows it. But our Prime Minister's response so far has been to say that almost all the intelligence that came Australia's way about whether Iraq had WMD came from the US and Britain. The implication is that the extent of intelligence failures is a question for Bush and Blair, not Australia, to sort out.

This is not a tenable position. What needs to be established is what Australian agencies did with the intelligence they received before passing it on to Mr Howard and his colleagues on cabinet's national security committee.

Did they ask any questions? Were they at all sceptical? Or did they maximise it because it suited the Government's aim of justifying Australia's part in the war?

Then there is the question of the adequacy of Australia's own intelligence gathering, particularly the material Mr Howard authorised for use in the justification for war delivered by US Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Security Council.

In February last year, Mr Howard said Australian-sourced material used in the Powell presentation came from several countries. He refused to be specific to protect sources.

In his address to Parliament, a year ago today, he said: "The intelligence material collected over recent times, to which Australia has contributed, points overwhelmingly to Saddam Hussein having acted in systematic defiance of the resolutions of the Security Council, maintained his stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and sought to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program."

The key questions are unlikely to be answered adequately by a parliamentary committee.

They do require answers to satisfy Australians that the threat posed by Iraq was not exaggerated to justify an unnecessary war. They need to be answered to give some level of confidence that mistakes will not be made the next time