Julia Gillard set to retell an old (and twisty) tale at trade union inquiry
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Version 0 of 1. Julia Gillard will give evidence to the royal commission into union corruption on Wednesday about allegations that have followed her for more than two decades. They involve a colourful cast of characters – an ex-lover, his former mate and “bagman”, lawyers and politicians, and a truckload of tradesmen including Bill “the big Greek bullshit artist” and a woodworker called Athol James. The story has drifted in and out of the news and meandered down various dry gullies as it has been pursued by a series of political rivals, opponents and journalists over the years. But the questions to be put to Gillard now focus on two sharp points: what she knew about the operations of a “slush fund” set up by her boyfriend in the early 1990s, Australian Workers’ Union official Bruce Morton Wilson – including its use to buy a house; and whether any money from the fund was used in a series of somewhat bungled renovations on a different Melbourne house that Gillard owned at the time. She has, of course, been repeatedly questioned about both matters – the AWU Workplace Reform Association, the fund set up in 1992 by Wilson and his sidekick and self-described “bagman” Ralph Blewitt with legal advice from Gillard, at the time a lawyer with Melbourne firm Slater and Gordon, and her own sorry home renovation tale. Despite the dodgy-sounding name, “slush funds” are not always unethical, if they involve legal contributions to be used to run union elections. But the royal commission has heard this one was used to bank money paid by companies for sometimes non-existent training programs and that $90,000 of it was used to buy a house in Blewitt’s name at an auction attended by Wilson and Gillard. Gillard first explained her knowledge of the fund at a meeting with the senior partner and general manager of Slater and Gordon in September 1995, after they become concerned about what Wilson and Blewitt had been doing. The transcript emerged when the allegations resurfaced during her prime ministership in 2012. “It’s … common practice, indeed every union has what it refers to as a re-election fund, slush fund, whatever, which is the funds that the leadership team, into which the leadership team, puts money so that they can finance their next election campaign,” she told them. “It is not proper to use union resources for election campaigns so you need to finance them yourself. Some of them, you know, they can cost $10,000, $20,000 – they’re not cheap. So the usual mechanism people use to amass that amount of money is that they require the officials who ran on their ticket to enter payroll deduction schemes where money each week or fortnight goes from their pay into a bank account which is used for re-election purposes from time to time. They also have different fundraisers, dinners and raffles and so on to amass the necessary amount of money to mount their re-election campaign.” She also told the firm she had been to the auction, where Wilson successfully bid on the house, thinking Blewitt was buying an investment property in which the pair had agreed that Wilson would live. A week before the 2007 election, Gillard, by now deputy Labor leader and on the brink of becoming deputy prime minister, was explaining her past again. “These matters happened between 12 and 15 years ago,’’ she told the Sunday Telegraph. “I was young and naive … I was in a relationship, which I ended, and obviously it was all very distressing. I am by no means the first person to find out that someone close turns out to be different to what you had believed them to be. It’s an ordinary human error. “I was obviously hurt when I was later falsely accused publicly of wrong-doing. I didn’t do anything wrong and to have false allegations in the media was distressing.” Now prime minister, and with the allegations still swirling, she responded again at a press conference on 23 August, 2012. “My understanding is that the purpose of the association was to support the re-election of a team of union officials and their pursuit of the policies that they would stand for re-election on,” she said. So far, the royal commission has heard a lot of evidence to raise very big questions about what the slush fund was actually doing – including a statement given by a now-dead “training officer” that he had never done the training work – but no specific evidence to prove that Gillard knew. In Wilson’s evidence, he said she had had no further role in the “slush fund” after providing the legal advice when it was set up. In November 2012, Gillard also stated, “I had no knowledge of the workings of this association from the time of assisting with legal advice when it was being incorporated to the time that allegations about it were being raised in 1995; no knowledge of the operation in the meantime.” The story gets more complicated when it comes to the renovations. Gillard also elaborates on them in her 1997 interview with Slater and Gordon. It started with boyfriend Bruce and some of his mates demolishing her bathroom when she was on holidays in 1994 and the tradesmen who were engaged to help rebuild it and do other home improvements, including “Bill the Greek”, whose attempt at a fence was “hideous” and whose relationship with the truth sufficiently tenuous for Gillard to describe him as a “big Greek bullshit artist”. She also describes “a glassworker/ woodworker person called Athol James, who I found in the local newspaper”. From such an innocuous start, James is now figuring large in the tale. He has given evidence to the royal commission that Gillard told him payments for her renovation were coming from Wilson and that he saw Wilson give Gillard large amounts of cash. “She said that Bruce Wilson was paying for the work onsite, but she would get the money from him and give me her cheque … on two occasions, I saw him hand over a wad of notes,” he said. Wilson told the royal commission this was a lie. Blewitt told the royal commission he paid $7,000 to a worker wearing overalls at Gillard’s house during the renovations, on Wilson’s instructions. Wilson said he never paid for Gillard’s renovations and that Blewitt never paid a tradesman as he claimed. Gillard has always insisted she paid for her own renovations. In another marathon press conference on the issue, when it was again dominating parliamentary question time in late 2012, she was also scathing about the credibility of at least one of those making allegations against her. “Mr Blewitt is a man who has publicly said he was involved in fraud. Mr Blewitt is a man who has sought immunity from prosecution. Mr Blewitt is a man who has fled Indonesia to avoid a police interview in relation to land fraud, although he denies wrongdoing in the case. Mr Blewitt says he owes money on another Asian land deal … Mr Blewitt, according to people who know him, has been described as a complete imbecile, an idiot, a stooge, a sexist pig, a liar, and his sister has said he’s a crook and rotten to his core. His word against mine – make your mind up.” And she was blunt about what those pursuing the case, some of them with years of painstaking work, needed to do to prove their allegations. “If anyone has a piece of evidence that says I knowingly received money to which I was not entitled for my renovations, please feel free to get it out. If anyone’s got it. It’s only been 20 years.” The royal commission set up by the incoming Coalition government has given her detractors a chance to air every piece of evidence they have collected. On Wednesday, once again, she will have the chance to reply. |