Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Banking and Financial Services) Share this | Hansard source

My question is to Senator Abetz, the Minister representing the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. Isn’t it now clear that the Wheat Export Authority had been alerted to serious anomalies about the AWB’s arrangements for selling wheat to Iraq in early 2004? Didn’t those arrangements include a dramatic escalation in bogus transport costs and a grossly inflated price of wheat? Given the Wheat Export Authority investigated these serious breaches in 2004, is the minister able to explain why the authority simply accepted AWB’s advice that everything was above board and did not take a closer look at what was going on? Can the minister also explain why the Wheat Export Authority took no further action, even after the Volcker inquiry in the United States started to express concern about the AWB’s deal to sell wheat to Iraq?