The AWU Scandal - Piece by piece the protection of lies is dissolving
We've been told so many times, by so many people, with so much evidence.The message is this - Julia Gillard is lying, today, about the AWU-WRA.
Mark Baker has this story today in The Age and other Fairfax newspapers.
Gillard's account of union slush fund rejected
- October 29, 2012
Mark Baker
A KEY former union accountant has undermined Julia Gillard's depiction of a slush fund she helped set up in 1992 as being a legitimate association needed to help finance union election campaigns.
Ms Gillard - then a salaried partner at law firm Slater & Gordon - gave extensive legal support to the establishment in Perth of the Australian Workers Union Workplace Reform Association from which more than $400,000 was stolen by her then boyfriend.
She told a media conference in August that she understood the association's purpose was to gather money from payroll deductions and other fund-raising events ''where it would be transparent to people that the money was going to support their re-election campaign''.
After it was revealed in 1995 that the association had been corrupted by Ms Gillard's boyfriend and senior AWU official Bruce Wilson, she told senior partners at Slater & Gordon: ''Every union has what it refers to as an election fund, a slush fund … so that they can finance their next election campaign.''
But the man who was the West Australian branch accountant of the AWU at the time says the union already had an election fund and there was no precedent to establish such a formal legal entity as the Workplace Reform Association for such a purpose.
Russell Frearson said the association was operated in complete secrecy by Mr Wilson and his crony, AWU state secretary Ralph Blewitt, with a separate bank account and post box address.
Mr Frearson said neither he, other branch officials nor the AWU's auditors knew anything about the association until its operations were exposed in 1995. ''They kept it very close to their chests. No one knew what was going on,'' he told The Age.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/gillards-account-of-union-slush-fund-rejected-20121029-28dqt.html#ixzz2AcwGdGJXMs Gillard - then a salaried partner at law firm Slater & Gordon - gave extensive legal support to the establishment in Perth of the Australian Workers Union Workplace Reform Association from which more than $400,000 was stolen by her then boyfriend.
She told a media conference in August that she understood the association's purpose was to gather money from payroll deductions and other fund-raising events ''where it would be transparent to people that the money was going to support their re-election campaign''.
After it was revealed in 1995 that the association had been corrupted by Ms Gillard's boyfriend and senior AWU official Bruce Wilson, she told senior partners at Slater & Gordon: ''Every union has what it refers to as an election fund, a slush fund … so that they can finance their next election campaign.''
But the man who was the West Australian branch accountant of the AWU at the time says the union already had an election fund and there was no precedent to establish such a formal legal entity as the Workplace Reform Association for such a purpose.
Russell Frearson said the association was operated in complete secrecy by Mr Wilson and his crony, AWU state secretary Ralph Blewitt, with a separate bank account and post box address.
Mr Frearson said neither he, other branch officials nor the AWU's auditors knew anything about the association until its operations were exposed in 1995. ''They kept it very close to their chests. No one knew what was going on,'' he told The Age.
The Auditors didn't know, the rest of the union didn't know, the authorities didn't know, and only a perhaps one or maybe two people in Thiess really knew.
The union had some good people who started to smell a rat, but they were hosed down by Julia Gillard and Bernard Murphy with the rather formidable defamation action they brought in defence of Ralph Blewitt.
