John Anderson (Gwydir, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Wills last week in this place again effectively claimed that I had engaged in insider trading when my wife and I sold AWB shares last year. I again categorically deny any such impropriety. His clear intent is to imply that I must have had inside information about the contents of the Volcker report. He is wrong; I did not. Mr Thomson makes several claims in an attempt to justify his position. For example, he says I have given contradictory reasons for my wife and I determining to sell our shares. This is patent nonsense. I have consistently indicated that I formed the view a couple of years ago following a conversation with my accountant that my wife and I should diversify, and we further formed the view that we would let the shares go if they reached or exceeded $5. The fact that I did not immediately sell them the first time they hit $5 reflects a couple of simple realities. The first is that I did not feel comfortable about diversifying through the purchase of new shares while I was a cabinet minister. The second is that I neither employed a share broker, who might have alerted me to the movements in the value of the shares on a regular basis, nor spent time as a minister poring over share registers on the internet or anywhere else.

It was in fact only after I left the ministry that I began to turn my mind to the issue of succession planning—there are a couple of people from farm families in this place and they will know how important that is for farm families—and resolved to act. On checking the price in early October last year, my wife and I decided that the time had come to enact the in-principle decision that we had made long before, and so I placed an order with e-trade to sell my B-class shares. Indeed, the market—it is very important to note this; it is an interesting point—was not at all concerned by the contents of the Volcker report. The AWB shares rose consistently through the months building up to the first Cole hearings. So if I had had an inside tip it certainly was not a very good one. Mr Thomson further claims—

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