The Story
This week it has emerged that everyone’s favourite Horcrux owner and narrative antagonist of ‘the boy who lived’ Peter Dutton has been fortunate indeed with his share purchases. In what can only be described as Olympic-level, Buffett-ian levels of deep market intuition, Peter Dutton went on a “share-buying blitz” across the banking sector between the 11th of November 2008 and the 23rd of January 2009, in the depths of the GFC.
The remarkable thing is that on the 24th of January, 2009, the Rudd government’s proposed $4bn bank bailout package was announced, sending prices of those exact shares skyrocketing. Of course, we don’t know how many shares he bought or at what exact price – but given the dates, we can assume he made a tidy profit.
Prior to the bailout, for example, shares in NAB were trading around $16, down from a high of $41 before the crisis. After the bailout announcement, shares in NAB recovered quickly to a high of $22 by April 2009 and then a high of $30 by October 2009.
Peter Dutton, of course, denies any claims that he traded on any insider information and expects us to believe that this just happened to be the luckiest coincidence ever. Gee whiz, couldn’t have happened to a gooder boy!
It is worth noting, however, that when a party in government is crafting a broad package of legislation, especially something as consequential as a multi-billion dollar bailout, it would be sensible (and very normal) for them to confer with the opposition party. It’s reported that:
“While Mr Dutton was in opposition at the time, the Labor Government was regularly briefing the opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull on major stimulus packages, prompting Labor questions about what he knew when he bought the shares.”1
Samantha Maiden, news.com.au
Governments often share this kind of information with their opposition, as it has several benefits:
- Bipartisan Support: If you can strengthen your legislation by obtaining the support of both major parties, this would virtually guarantee passage of the bill through both the upper and lower houses, without dealing with those pesky independents or speaking with Pauline Hanson. Ugh.
- The Appearance of being Bipartisan: Voters are oddly horny for bipartisanship. There’s nothing they love more than their pollies getting along in Canberra. Unless, of course, they’re getting on too well, in which case it’s a secret cabal, and they’re all just as bad as each other – bloody pollies! In any case, it looks good for the party in power if they’re seen as consultative and moderate by conferring with the opposition. And of course the most important…
- Not Being Held Responsible if Things go Tits Up: Fairly straight forward, if both major parties vote for the thing it’s very difficult to get hung out to dry for it later. It’s the grown-up equivalent of getting your sibling to steal the cookies from the cookie jar with you to diffuse the blame when you get caught: “Yes, we’re all in the wrong. Equally. Together.”
So it’s not unreasonable to assume that Dutton could have known that the bailout was coming, or at the very least should have known that a bailout was in the offing, given that the foundations of capitalism were being rocked in a once-in-a-generation cataclysm that can only be explained by the awesome powers of Margot Robbie in a bath.
In any case, Dutton’s denied all insider knowledge, and there’s no way of crawling into a man’s brain to know his true intentions – and even if there were, there are brains that I would have higher on my list than Peter Dutton’s. Gross.
If P Duds Did Make Share Trades with Insider information, Would that be Legal?
Well, in a word, no.
Australia’s insider trading laws are comparatively strict, especially when compared to the wild-west-free-for-all-fuck-and-suckfest that is the United States Congress. Insider trading in the USA’s congressional system is not only not illegal, it’s downright celebrated. Go to CapitolTrades.com if you want to mirror congressional share trades; they tend to outperform the market for some mysterious, unknowable reason.
Australian law, however:
“…encompasses a broader prohibition because it operates on an “information connection” rather than a “person connection” – meaning that individuals who possess information that they know, or ought reasonably to know, is both material and nonpublic are prohibited from trading or from passing the information to others who might trade.”2
Donna M. Nagy and Juliette Overland –
The Cambridge Handbook of Investor Protection
Why It’s Cooked
To my mind, it should be less relevant to voters whether he knew directly about the bailout; the key question is whether he should have reasonably expected that a bailout was going to occur based on his privileged position in Parliament.
Even if we give the most charitable possible interpretation of events and assume that he was sitting quietly in a room, alone, twiddling his thumbs during the maelstrom of the global financial crisis and not involved in any way in discussing the potential response with his colleagues across the ailse, it still tells you something grotesque about Peter Dutton’s character:
When he should’ve been focused on helping the Australian people, he was focused on making a bag for himself. An admirable quality in independent rappers, less so for a member of parliament.
Even if it’s not insider trading (which for legal reasons, I again repeat that he denies engaging in) it’s still really fucking gross. Do we want a guy to lead our country who sees impending financial collapse and thinks, “How can I make some money out of this? Daddy’s gotta get his beak wet, num num num.”
That’s the real problem with these share trades, not that it’s necessarily illegal, it’s that it bespeaks a complete lack of character from a man who seeks the highest office in the land. It’s fucking grubby and gross.
Also, to have the audacity to get caught out and then complain that it’s “ancient history” and this is the result of Labor’s grubby “dirt unit” is just astounding. That’s called playing politics, mate and this round, you lost. The LNP owned a whole news cycle last year because Anthony Albanese (checks notes) legally bought a house with his own money – the idea that LNP wouldn’t act on this information if the roles were reversed is laughable. Expect much dirtier politics from the LNP than this come election time; just watch.
Also, neither here nor there, but populist “Hero of the People” Peter Dutton wasn’t exactly doing much with his votes at the time to help out Aussie-battler-working-family-battlers either. Just something to keep in mind in May.
Links
https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/people/representatives/dickson/peter_dutton/divisions/2009
https://openpolitics.au/analysis/is-political-insider-trading-going-on
https://fortune.com/2025/01/08/congress-stock-trading-pelosi-2024
- Peter Dutton’s ‘highly unusual’ GFC share-trading in Labor’s sights | news.com.au — Australia’s leading news site ↩︎
- Nagy, Donna M., and Juliette Overland. “Insider Trading Law in the United States and Australia: Fiduciary Breaches, Market Abuses, and the Harshness of Penalties.” The Cambridge Handbook of Investor Protection. ↩︎
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