On Tuesday, Senator Nash made a late-night statement to Parliament revealing that Mr Furnival owned shares in the company, after earlier stating that he had “no connection whatsoever” with the junk food industry. Both he and Senator Nash last week intervened to have a new healthy food star rating website pulled down shortly after it was launched. A question of timing: Fiona Nash during question time in the senate on Thursday. Credit:Andrew Meares Labor Senator Penny Wong accused Senator Nash of “hiding from providing any proper information from this chamber about things she should have known, and things in relation to which she has previously misled the chamber”. She said Senator Nash's claim that Tony Abbott's office was informed about Mr Furnival's shareholding in an “appropriate” time frame was “dropping the Prime Minister's office in it”. "A government that promised to be accountable and transparent … has been found this week to mislead the Australian people through the senate,” she said.

But Senator Nash said she had corrected the record at the “earliest opportunity”. “My chief of staff and his wife have shares in a family business, many couples do,” she said. “My chief of staff is not involved in the operation of the business and the business itself does not make representations to the health department." Bureaucrat removed from project On Wednesday night, rumours were swirling at the highest levels of government that Alastair Furnival was expected to resign his position in Senator Nash's office. However, so far the only person who appears to have lost their position is the senior government bureaucrat in charge of the healthy food star ratings at the centre of the political controversy.

In the senate on Thursday afternoon it was revealed that Kathy Dennis, the assistant secretary in the Healthy Living and Food Policy branch of the Department of Health, was the senior bureaucrat who first refused the demand from Mr Furnival to take down the health star rating website. In an email obtained by Fairfax Media, Ms Dennis said she would no longer be in charge of the healthy star ratings – a system that food manufacturers can voluntarily use to label their product packaging with easy-to-understand nutritional information. "I am writing to provide you with updated information about arrangements for the Front-of-Pack Labelling Secretariat, following a restructure within the Department of Health,” Ms Dennis writes. She states that she will continue to be in charge of all other food matters beside the healthy food ratings, which she has worked on for the past two years. Fairfax Media understands that the move is unusual, as it will result in the director of the healthy star program now reporting to someone less senior than Ms Dennis, even though Ms Dennis still retains control of other food issues.

'Proper and appropriate steps' Public health and consumer groups are furious that the site has been taken offline after two years in development, and have accused the government of bowing to the interests of the junk food industry. Senator Nash has said she was “fully aware” of the rules around disclosure of conflict of interest, and that none existed despite Mr Furnival's shareholding in APA. “My chief of staff took proper and appropriate steps to prevent any conflict of interest with the private business of APA and by withdrawing from any work from APA, and on that basis there was no conflict of interest,” she said. She said Mr Furnival had not earned any money from his shareholding, and that his wife, Tracey Cain, who is the sole director and secretary of the company, had undertaken not to conduct any lobbying in the health area.

In a statement, Ms Cain said she had not made any representations on behalf of food industry clients since September. “It would be disappointing if we had reached a point where people were disqualified from public service as a result of expertise that they, or for that matter, their wives, had gained in the private sector,” Ms Cain said. A spokeswoman for the federal Department of Health said there were "all sorts of reporting arrangements" within the department. Loading "In this instance it was decided that, as the ministerial food standards forum is a joint Commonwealth and State and Territory committee, that the secretariat should report to a separate officer, other than the Commonwealth officer responsible for food issues," she said.