John Anderson (Gwydir, National Party) Share this | Link to 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—

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The member will refer to other members by their seat.

John Anderson (Gwydir, National Party) Share this | Link to 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.