Torn apart: from left, Nick Styant-Browne, Julia Gillard and Peter Gordon. Photo: Andrew Meares, Darren JamesParting company: 'brothers' no more
IN 1996, a little-known lawyer not long out of a suburban law practice in Melbourne's outer eastern suburbs scalped a goliath. After a long and tenacious campaign on behalf of traditional communities in the remote west of Papua New Guinea, BHP was forced to pay $150 million compensation for years of environmental devastation brought by the Ok Tedi gold and copper mine. As well, the company was required to spend another $350 million to $450 million on containing the toxic waste it had already flushed down the Fly River.
The case made the name of the lawyer who ran it, Nick Styant-Browne, and dramatically raised the profile of his firm, Slater & Gordon, which claimed a then Australian record $7.6 million in costs from BHP.
Ok Tedi propelled Styant-Browne on a formidable career picking fights with the rich and powerful on behalf of mostly poor or disenfranchised clients and helped pave Slater & Gordon's way to becoming Australia's leading class action and no-win-no-fee law practice and, in 2007, the world's first publicly listed law firm.
Now Nick Styant-Browne is embroiled in the fight of his life. But this time he has taken on no less than the prime minister. In the process he has gone to battle with the firm he helped make famous, wrecked a 20-year friendship and provoked the wrath of many Labor supporters who view him as a traitor to the cause.
The revelations were based on a previously private transcript of a meeting in September 1995 between Gillard, Slater & Gordon's senior partner, Peter Gordon, and the firm's general manager, Geoff Shaw — a meeting that triggered Gillard's exit from the firm and traversed a scandal that would shadow her political career over the next 17 years.
The transcript revealed Slater & Gordon had mounted a secret internal inquiry after discovering Gillard had assisted her then boyfriend, AWU official Bruce Wilson, in two substantial transactions, without briefing senior partners and without keeping regular records.
The first transaction was to help form the AWU Workplace Reform Association, which Gillard told Gordon and Shaw was a union election "slush fund" but which registration documents prepared in her office said was purely to promote workplace safety and training and prohibited union officials from obtaining a pecuniary benefit.
The second was the purchase of a Fitzroy unit in the name of an AWU crony of Wilson, Ralph Blewitt — a unit Blewitt had never seen that was bought at auction by Wilson in the company of Gillard, using a power of attorney drafted by Gillard, with free conveyancing provided by Gillard and supported by a Slater & Gordon mortgage loan arranged by Gillard.
What Gillard insists she was unaware of at the time, and which the Slater & Gordon principals did not know clearly until months later, was that more than $100,000 of the money used to buy the unit was taken from the AWU Workplace Reform Association — part of at least $400,000 police believe Wilson stole from corporate donations to the association before he was dumped by the union and his girlfriend.
The transcript of the September meeting — carefully and heavily redacted to exclude privileged information — was made public by Nick Styant-Browne. His dramatic decision followed the collapse of weeks of intense private negotiations over an issue that, despite deep personal reservations, he had, until then, been happy to leave buried in the past.
"Julia Gillard has been prime minister for more than two years," he says. "She was a senior member of the cabinet before that and the opposition before then and I felt no need at all to raise any of these issues. I was happy just to let them lie. So Iam not a crusader. I am not a crusader for purity in politics or anything like that. But I draw the line at — I would not be seen by my silence to go along with — a whitewash of what happened."
Styant-Browne is sitting in the plush offices of a Seattle law firm lit by the sparkling panorama of Puget Sound. It's the most glorious autumn since he seized the chance to achieve a long-held ambition to practise class-action law in the United States, departing Melbourne just weeks after the September11 attacks of 2001.
Controversy around Gillard's time at Slater & Gordon is nothing new. Allegations about her relationship with Wilson and the intersection of his activities and her work at the firm have flared intermittently since she embarked on a political career in the mid-1990s. A lack of evidence, and her forceful denials, had seen off the story every time.
But the saga took a fateful turn in July when The Australian reported that retired Melbourne lawyer Harry Nowicki had uncovered fresh information while researching a history of the AWU — and was photographed with Ralph Blewitt, who declared that he was ready to give evidence about what he knew if granted immunity from prosecution.
Alarm bells rang in the executive suite at Slater & Gordon, which since the days of Julia Gillard has gone from a firm of about 100 staff to a listed corporation of more than 1700 employees with about 70 offices across the country and overseas and annual revenue in excess of $200 million. They rang, too, for Peter Gordon, who had launched his own practice in 2010 after making a fortune from the Slater float.
The firm's former class action poster boys were soon in touch with each other about how they might protect their collective and individual reputations if what they knew about events of the early 1990s became public. It was a move that would ignite, not defuse, the time bomb.
"I was happy to remain under the radar for ever and had previously disavowed making any statements when the issue had been raised because I just thought it would go away," says Styant-Browne. "But when Blewitt emerged I formed the view, and Peter agreed with me, that the story had some traction and that it could rebound to us in a very unhappy way.
"There was a lot of stuff on the internet saying that Slater & Gordon had worked with Gillard to cover up the improprieties of her boyfriend in relation to the AWU — that was the line — and so that concerned both of us, and that's why we started discussing extensively making a joint statement."
Gordon had been a good friend and professional soulmate of Styant-Browne since he was recruited by Slaters in 1992 to run the Ok Tedi case. Since then, their careers had shone through some of the biggest damages cases in Australian legal history.
Gordon made his name with big settlements for victims of asbestos, medically acquired HIV, Dow Corning breast implants and Thalidomide. Styant-Browne led the fight for thousands of Australians poisoned by contaminated Kraft peanut butter. He then successfully represented Rose Porteous, widow of mining magnate Lang Hancock, in the bitter feud with daughter Gina Rinehart over his estate — a fight that went all the way to the High Court.
"It was a long-standing friendship, a good friendship," says Styant-Browne. "After I moved over here I would catch up with him two or three times a year, mainly when he would come over here but also when I would go to Australia. We continued to work together on some projects."
The friendship was tested, then ruptured, as the almost daily communications about the drafting of the statement dragged on. The discussion broke down when Styant-Browne refused to endorse a draft that he believed exonerated Gillard. When he concluded that it would be released anyway he took pre-emptive action.
On Saturday, August 18, a front page story in The Australian reported for the first time that Julia Gillard had left Slater & Gordon after a secret internal probe into ''controversial work she had done for her then boyfriend'' during which she had been unable to rule out personally benefiting from union funds in the renovation of her house.
The paper quoted Styant-Browne saying that the partners took ''a very serious view'' of these and other matters ''and accepted her resignation''. His remarks clearly reflected the content of the 1995 transcript but, for the moment at least, the transcript remained private.
The next day Slater & Gordon managing director Andrew Grech released a media statement Styant-Browne had anticipated. Referring to the 1995 internal review, it said: ''Ms Gillard co-operated fully with the internal review and denied any wrongdoing. The review found nothing which contradicted the information provided by Ms Gillard at the time in relation to the AWU/Bruce Wilson allegations and which she has stated consistently since the allegations were first raised.''
The statement went on to say that Gillard had taken leave in September 1995 to campaign for the Senate and that her resignation had become effective on May 3, 1996, when she started work with then Victorian opposition leader John Brumby.
It concluded: ''Slater & Gordon has regularly invited the Prime Minister back to the firm for events and functions. Like a number of other notable lawyers, a meeting room in the Melbourne office is named in recognition of her achievements.''
While publicly airbrushing the events of 1995, Slater & Gordon privately turned its guns on Styant-Browne. In a curt letter, partner Leon Zwier of Arnold Bloch Leibler, on behalf of Slaters, demanded the return of ''confidential documents that are and always have been the property of Slater & Gordon'', including the 1995 transcript, and warned him about breaching the confidentiality of former clients and staff of the firm.
The supreme irony of the moment was not lost on Styant-Browne, who insists that he has been meticulous at every turn to respect material that is subject to client privilege. It was the high-profile Zwier - for whom Styant-Browne's former wife once worked as a personal assistant - who had recommended him to the headhunter who recruited him to Slaters. Here was the firm that made its name backing corporate whistleblowers turning on its own whistleblower.
Styant-Browne fired back that the transcript, which he says was transcribed by his former wife at their kitchen table and which he holds the only complete copy of, was not the firm's property but a document he had agreed with Peter Gordon in 1995 should be held ''for our individual benefit'' in the event that it was needed to protect their position in any subsequent external investigation of the AWU matters.
When Gordon then made public his support for the Slater & Gordon statement supporting Gillard, Styant-Browne released a copy of the Gordon ''working draft'' that he had refused to support - a document that made a mockery of Grech's media statement.
The draft confirmed that Gillard had left the firm after her relationship with the other partners ''had become fractured and trust and confidence had evaporated''. It said the partnership was ''extremely unhappy'' with her over the AWU matters and had considered terminating her employment. But it then expressed Gordon's view that there was ''no sufficient basis to dismiss Ms Gillard for misconduct'' and that ''she should be accorded the benefit of the doubt and her explanation accepted''.
The next day, an angry Gordon gave media interviews attacking Styant-Browne for releasing what he described as a confidential communication, but added: ''I believed at the time that there was no explicit or indirect evidence that she was involved in any wrongdoing and that remains my view today.''
When Grech again publicly supported Gillard and accused Styant-Browne of ''a serious breach of a legal practitioners obligations'' in releasing the Gordon draft, Styant-Browne decided that a 17-year secret should no longer be kept. The redacted transcript of the September 1995 interrogation of the future prime minister appeared in full in the next day's Australian. Styant-Browne says he could no longer hide what he knew of the AWU scandal and Gillard's actions.
''Slater & Gordon want to control the agenda. They, in my view, have this sort of untrammelled objective of protecting and hiding adverse material at all costs. I think there's a tribal element to it. I think they see their interests and her interests as closely aligned,'' he says.
''They think there is some cachet and prestige associated with the PM having been a salaried partner with the firm. That was really her only substantial job outside of government and I think that the PM's office has been assiduous in cultivating the strategy that the interests of the firm and the prime minister are coincident, and they need to work together to deal with this issue.''
He is not surprised that his actions have ended a long and valued friendship with Peter Gordon.
''I knew Peter would be enraged. We discussed this many times. I knew and repeatedly told him there was a strong possibility this issue would blow up to affect our friendship. I was relentless in making it clear to him that I thought I may have to make my own statement. He said if that happened it would not affect our friendship. We were brothers; we would always be brothers. But I never believed it because I know the man.''
The hate mail has flown thick and fast from strangers and acquaintances, who see the stance of a life-long Labor supporter - a man who in his days at Slater & Gordon had a portrait of Gough Whitlam on his office wall - as a political betrayal.
''I expected that and that doesn't really affect me at all. I remain a loyal and strong - well, some would say not so loyal - a strong supporter of the Labor Party, but I'm just not prepared to be party to a public record about what happened that is false.''
The campaigning lawyer who has never bowed to convention, who has long sported an earring and who still prefers to ride the Harley to work, is uncomfortable to now be seen by some as being in the same camp as the Gillard-baiting ''misogynists and nut jobs'' of the far right and the cybersphere.
''In the public eye, the promoters of this issue against the PM have included some very unsavoury characters from the right and I think she has successfully conflated them with what I regard as good journalism. That doesn't surprise me. If I was advising her as her media strategist, that is exactly what I would suggest.''
He insists he has not been motivated by any personal dislike of Gillard, although he remains concerned that at the time of the AWU scandal he headed the commercial division of Slaters and he might be seen to have had some responsibility for events he says he was kept ignorant of.
''I have never had any personal animus against her. I was never involved in any conflict with her during my time at the firm until these matters emerged, and then there was no, I still don't believe there was any sort of open conflict between us,'' he says.
Having been drawn reluctantly back into the heart of the controversy, he is unsure where it will lead. ''For what my view is worth - and I have tried to avoid expressing my view and just stuck to the facts - but I think at the very minimum she was wilfully blind.''
