THE start of a new year often permits previously secret documents to be released to the public after the 20-year embargo is lifted.

Having spent 26 years in and around politics has allowed me to see and hear many releases from governments which bear little resemblance to what I thought was probably the truth.

Sometimes it is really hard to draw the line between fact and fiction.

Fact always seems to lose out in favour of expediency.

My thoughts this week come from Cabinet Documents being released from records held in 2004, twenty years ago.

The juicy bits relate to the Iraq War.

We were told our nation needed to be involved in war in a location that had little to no interest for Australians due to “weapons of mass destruction”, either hidden underground or even worse, being manufactured by Iraq.

We now know that these weapons never existed and that the people involved did not possess the ability to manufacture them, let alone source the critical materials for this purpose.

But could we as a nation afford to turn our backs on it and, even more importantly, say no to our powerful friends’ requests?

Then there were the Timor-Leste “negotiations”.

It is an interesting way to describe what went on there, which was all about drilling for oil in someone else’s back yard.

I could go on and wonder what the real reason was behind sending a ship, planes and soldiers to the Solomon Islands to put down an islanders’ insurrection causing issues for an Aussie-run gold mine in the mountains.

Then my excitement turned to fear when the government was considering a taxation regime involving capital gains tax, marginal income tax rates, no doubt looking at retirement taxation plus issues of housing affordability. Somehow, we all got through it but would have preferred the facts and real reasons to be clearly stated so they could be appreciated by all.

By John BLACKBOURN