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

The member for Wills further claims that there is something untoward about the fact that I have not listed any new investments in my statement of pecuniary interests. In fact, my wife has over recent days begun to purchase some new shares, as I have advised the Clerk today. Further on the matter of Julia’s shareholdings, I accept that during one interview on the Insiders program I must have temporarily overlooked two small parcels of shares that Julia held while I was Deputy Prime Minister. These were recorded in my pecuniary interest statements, which is of course how the member for Wills knows about them. In my early years as a cabinet minister, following a fuss in the Senate, Julia determined selflessly to sell off her portfolio at considerable disadvantage, even though she had owned them since before we were married. I do not believe that my mistake in this instance has any material bearing whatsoever on the substance of this matter.

It should be noted again that although, as I have acknowledged, I was late in recording the sale of AWB shares—and I am embarrassed about that—it was in fact I who told the Australian newspaper that I had done so. I was not asked, nor was I in any way forced to confess as a result of some discovery by others. I volunteered the information. The two brief meetings with the Prime Minister and other colleagues that I have referred to in the past and that the member for Wills seeks to misinterpret in no way alter the simple reality that I had no inside information on the report. My wife and I sold the shares for the reasons that I have consistently outlined.

The member for Wills also refers to a claimed meeting with the Chairman of the AWB to discuss Volcker that was widely reported in the media some weeks ago. As he would be well aware, I made it plain that my diary did not refer to any such meeting, that I did not believe it had happened and the Chairman of the AWB confirmed my recollection in evidence to the Cole commission of inquiry the day after that news hit the headlines. As I have said outside this place, if I had been warned that there was serious trouble coming, some impropriety in the wings, I would have felt obligated to retain the shareholding.

I make the point, and I make it quite emphatically, that should the member for Wills entertain any serious belief that I am guilty of insider trading he must exercise his responsibility to refer the matter immediately to the appropriate regulator, which happens to be ASIC. That is what he should do. Needless to say, ASIC would enjoy my full cooperation. A failure by him to do so will confirm that he does not believe his own imputations and has been using them for purely political purposes, in which case he, frankly, clearly owes me and my family an apology.

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