Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Minister for Transport and Regional Services) Share this | Hansard source

There is absolutely no difference between the comments that have been made by me and the comments made by the new minister for agriculture. What the minister for agriculture has clearly pointed out is that the Wheat Export Authority exercised its legislative responsibility to investigate allegations that were in the public domain. It reported on these matters in the confidential report to the minister, which I received in October 2004. Whilst the report is confidential, Mr Besley, the chairman of the authority, has said a couple of things about what was in that report. The first the minister for agriculture commented about a couple of minutes ago in his letter to Senator Heffernan in which he made the comment and referred to his statements in front of the Senate estimates committee that nothing untoward emerged from that check. To quote from Mr Besley, in the newspaper today, he said:

The information given to the minister—

and in this instance it was me—

contained no evidence of wrongdoing. Instead, the minister was told the WEA had given AWB a “clean bill of health”.

So the advice given by the WEA to the minister was that the AWB had a clean bill of health on these issues. I believe the response that was made at that time was entirely appropriate. It dealt with the complaints, it dealt with the allegations and advised the minister that the AWB had a clean bill of health.

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