Note to PM: Meet the Real Ralph
"I was just basically his mouthpiece" ... Ralph Blewitt.
What Julia Gillard said she didn't know about the AWU's Ralph Blewitt, it seems everyone else did.
AT FIRST blush, Ralph Blewitt's CV sings: Vietnam veteran, union state secretary, man of means with a home in Perth and an investment property in the heart of fashionable Fitzroy.
Julia Gillard certainly had no reason to doubt his credentials back in the early 1990s when she was a partner at Slater & Gordon and the Australian Workers Union was her client - or at least not that she has ever admitted.
When the West Australian branch of the union needed what was officially described as an association to further the noble interests of workplace reform, safety and training - but what she knew all along was to be a slush fund - it was Blewitt's name on the paperwork and Gillard's deft legal touch that got it through the registration hoops.
She was more than happy, when word came that Blewitt wanted to buy an investment property in Melbourne, to help find the right place, to do a freebie on the conveyancing, to sort out finance through her law firm's loan facility and, for good measure, to turn up at the auction with her boyfriend to make sure everything went to plan for the absentee landlord.
When a few disgruntled union rivals started agitating against Blewitt and published some unflattering pamphlets, it was Gillard's legal colleagues who pounced with a defamation writ that stopped them in their tracks.
Asked at a media conference in August whether, in her many dealings with him over several years, she had ever had reason to find Ralph Blewitt to be a ''shonky'' character, the Prime Minister replied:
''That's a question that no one could answer. Did I have any reason to believe that Mr Blewitt was involved in the kind of conduct that has subsequently come to light? No, I did not.''
The ''kind of conduct'' alluded to by Ms Gillard was, in fact, one of the biggest union rorts in Australian history, a scam in which her then boyfriend and senior AWU official Bruce Wilson, in collusion with Blewitt, set up a bogus union reform association from which more than $400,000 in corporate contributions was stolen, including more than $100,000 that went towards the purchase of a residential property in Fitzroy.
Gillard, whose legal advice was central in establishing the association and buying the unit, insists she knew nothing about the corruption of the AWU Workplace Reform Association until it was exposed in August 1995, after which she ditched her boyfriend and left her job at Slater & Gordon under a cloud of acrimony.
Gillard says she was ''deceived'' by Wilson during their four-year relationship. By extension, she was also deceived by Blewitt, and that deception lasted almost as long and was maintained through the many and complex dealings on legal matters in which he ostensibly was her key client.
It survived the future prime minister's many visits to Western Australia, with and without Wilson, during any of which there were plenty of other AWU branch officials who might have told her about the ''real'' Ralph.
Russell Frearson was one. The then AWU branch accountant and erstwhile ally of Wilson says he knew nothing at the time about the dodgy slush fund but he knew all about Blewitt.
''He was Bruce's dog. You stick the dog on the tuckerbox and no one would touch it,'' he says. ''Ralph was there to make sure no one organised against Bruce.''
Frearson says that after Wilson went to take over the AWU Victorian branch in 1992, he installed Blewitt in his place as branch secretary in WA. From the outset, Blewitt proved to be an incompetent manager who antagonised most of his colleagues: ''He was crazy. You knew you were dealing with an idiot.''
The former Timber Workers Union organiser, who was said to have once settled an argument with a manager by dismembering his desk with a chainsaw, also had difficulties with some female members of the union. ''Ralph used to upset the women. His view of women was not very progressive,'' says Frearson.
Blewitt has lived in various parts of south-east Asia for most of the past 15 years. A regular in the nightclubs of Bangkok, some of his postings and comments on social media would not pass muster in the current national political focus on the evils of misogyny. Presumably he was on his best behaviour when Julia Gillard was around.
Says another prominent branch official from that time: ''Ralph would have made a great janitor. There was no way he could run a big organisation. He didn't have the skill set at all. He floundered from day one.''
Blewitt himself concedes he was not quite foreman material.
''I was never cut out to be a branch secretary. I was only ever an organiser,'' he said in a recent online interview with former Sydney broadcaster and Gillard antagonist Michael Smith.
''But I was the only person who was 100 per cent loyal to Wilson that he could control. So he anointed me as secretary as a figurehead only, in name only. He was still running the branch from Victoria. The political side of the union, the running of the union, was done by Wilson and I was just basically his mouthpiece.''
Blewitt also admitted he was involved in fraud and said he was ready to co-operate with any police investigation. ''It is time to get the whole thing off my chest rather than take it to the grave,'' he said.
The Prime Minister's dogged defence of her actions, which has seen a series of heated exchanges in Federal Parliament this week, has largely concentrated on her dealings with Ralph Blewitt while the role of Bruce Wilson has been in softer focus.
Blewitt's justifications are the classic soldier's defence - I was just following orders: ''Basically, it was like this: Wilson said do as I say or you haven't got a job. So I really had no option. In order to maintain my job I would go along with whatever it was he said to do.''
His account might be self-serving but it is broadly corroborated by several former union officials who knew and worked with the pair.
''He was Wilson's puppet,'' said a former senior AWU official from Western Australia. ''Wilson installed him in that job when he went to Victoria and then he basically forgot about the rest of us.''
When the Workplace Reform Association was established in 1992 it was Blewitt who signed the papers, prepared with Gillard's advice, that declared it to be ''dedicated to change to work to achieve safe workplaces''.
As The Age revealed two weeks ago, that incorporation was approved only after Gillard vouched for the bona fides of the association in response to a challenge from the WA Corporate Affairs Commission.
According to Blewitt, Wilson was the main player in the association's formation and operation, from the outset kept secret by the pair and run from a post office box and bank account separate from the union branch.
''I was instructed by Bruce Wilson to withdraw cash, went down to the Commonwealth Bank in Northbridge and withdrew bundles of money for four, five, $8000 at a time and just passed it over to him,'' he claims.
In early 1993, more than $100,000 taken from the association's account was used towards the purchase in the name of Ralph Blewitt of a unit in Kerr Street, Fitzroy. Blewitt had never seen the property before it was bought at auction by Wilson, who was accompanied on the day by Gillard and used a power of attorney drafted by her.
When the scandal broke in 1995, the WA fraud squad began an investigation that stalled after construction, mining and services contractor Thiess - which contributed most of the stolen money - refused to assist police. Gillard was questioned by the senior partners at Slater & Gordon about the work she had done to acquire the house in which Wilson lived and she was a frequent guest at - work she had not advised them she was doing.
''What was said to me at that stage was that Ralph had an interest in investing in a property, that he had some excess money, and that Bruce had talked to him about making that investment in Victoria rather than WA because it would suit everybody's purposes,'' she said, according to a transcript of the meeting.
But Blewitt now says his role in the purchase was peripheral. ''Wilson did all of that. I had no idea what was going on in Victoria,'' he says. And when the property was later sold: ''I signed the transfer of title document Wilson gave me to sign. I got no money out of any of this.''
Wilson's departure from WA and his choice of successor led to growing unrest in the branch. Several former AWU officials who had admired and supported Wilson concluded that Blewitt had to be removed. But given what the pair knew about the operations of the secret slush fund, and their former allies didn't, that could not be allowed to happen.
When anonymous pamphlets began to circulate within the union attacking Blewitt, Slater & Gordon acted. A writ lodged in Perth demanded exemplary damages against the alleged authors of the pamphlets and their printer.
Blewitt was the plaintiff but he says Wilson instigated the defamation action with legal advice from Gillard and her immediate boss at Slater & Gordon, Bernard Murphy - now a federal Court judge - and he does not know who paid for it.
''He [Wilson] approached Slater & Gordon, and Gillard and Murphy to start the action, all I did was sign the appropriate paperwork,'' Blewitt says. The move silenced the critics.
''They weren't in a position to get embroiled in a sustained fight in the Supreme Court. So you bleed them dry. They can't afford to fight you.''
In the meeting with her partners at Slater & Gordon after the corrupt activities of Wilson and Blewitt were exposed, Gillard was challenged about her role in helping establish the Workplace Reform Association, as well as the purchase of the Fitzroy property. She was also asked why she had not opened proper files or consulted her partners about the matters. All these actions caused them to consider her dismissal before she resigned.
Her response then, and since, has been that she did nothing wrong, that she was deceived by Wilson and that she ended their relationship once she became aware of what he had done.
While she claims to have had no reason to doubt her crooked boyfriend over several intimate years, she is yet to explain why she also had no reason to doubt the bone fides or authority of Ralph Blewitt, his crooked front man.
Mark Baker is editor-at-large.
"I was just basically his mouthpiece" ... Ralph Blewitt.AT FIRST blush, Ralph Blewitt's CV sings: Vietnam veteran, union state secretary, man of means with a home in Perth and an investment property in the heart of fashionable Fitzroy.
Julia Gillard certainly had no reason to doubt his credentials back in the early 1990s when she was a partner at Slater & Gordon and the Australian Workers Union was her client - or at least not that she has ever admitted.
When the West Australian branch of the union needed what was officially described as an association to further the noble interests of workplace reform, safety and training - but what she knew all along was to be a slush fund - it was Blewitt's name on the paperwork and Gillard's deft legal touch that got it through the registration hoops.
When a few disgruntled union rivals started agitating against Blewitt and published some unflattering pamphlets, it was Gillard's legal colleagues who pounced with a defamation writ that stopped them in their tracks.
Asked at a media conference in August whether, in her many dealings with him over several years, she had ever had reason to find Ralph Blewitt to be a ''shonky'' character, the Prime Minister replied:
''That's a question that no one could answer. Did I have any reason to believe that Mr Blewitt was involved in the kind of conduct that has subsequently come to light? No, I did not.''
The ''kind of conduct'' alluded to by Ms Gillard was, in fact, one of the biggest union rorts in Australian history, a scam in which her then boyfriend and senior AWU official Bruce Wilson, in collusion with Blewitt, set up a bogus union reform association from which more than $400,000 in corporate contributions was stolen, including more than $100,000 that went towards the purchase of a residential property in Fitzroy.
Gillard, whose legal advice was central in establishing the association and buying the unit, insists she knew nothing about the corruption of the AWU Workplace Reform Association until it was exposed in August 1995, after which she ditched her boyfriend and left her job at Slater & Gordon under a cloud of acrimony.
Gillard says she was ''deceived'' by Wilson during their four-year relationship. By extension, she was also deceived by Blewitt, and that deception lasted almost as long and was maintained through the many and complex dealings on legal matters in which he ostensibly was her key client.
It survived the future prime minister's many visits to Western Australia, with and without Wilson, during any of which there were plenty of other AWU branch officials who might have told her about the ''real'' Ralph.
Russell Frearson was one. The then AWU branch accountant and erstwhile ally of Wilson says he knew nothing at the time about the dodgy slush fund but he knew all about Blewitt.
''He was Bruce's dog. You stick the dog on the tuckerbox and no one would touch it,'' he says. ''Ralph was there to make sure no one organised against Bruce.''
Frearson says that after Wilson went to take over the AWU Victorian branch in 1992, he installed Blewitt in his place as branch secretary in WA. From the outset, Blewitt proved to be an incompetent manager who antagonised most of his colleagues: ''He was crazy. You knew you were dealing with an idiot.''
The former Timber Workers Union organiser, who was said to have once settled an argument with a manager by dismembering his desk with a chainsaw, also had difficulties with some female members of the union. ''Ralph used to upset the women. His view of women was not very progressive,'' says Frearson.
Blewitt has lived in various parts of south-east Asia for most of the past 15 years. A regular in the nightclubs of Bangkok, some of his postings and comments on social media would not pass muster in the current national political focus on the evils of misogyny. Presumably he was on his best behaviour when Julia Gillard was around.
Says another prominent branch official from that time: ''Ralph would have made a great janitor. There was no way he could run a big organisation. He didn't have the skill set at all. He floundered from day one.''
Blewitt himself concedes he was not quite foreman material.
''I was never cut out to be a branch secretary. I was only ever an organiser,'' he said in a recent online interview with former Sydney broadcaster and Gillard antagonist Michael Smith.
''But I was the only person who was 100 per cent loyal to Wilson that he could control. So he anointed me as secretary as a figurehead only, in name only. He was still running the branch from Victoria. The political side of the union, the running of the union, was done by Wilson and I was just basically his mouthpiece.''
Blewitt also admitted he was involved in fraud and said he was ready to co-operate with any police investigation. ''It is time to get the whole thing off my chest rather than take it to the grave,'' he said.
The Prime Minister's dogged defence of her actions, which has seen a series of heated exchanges in Federal Parliament this week, has largely concentrated on her dealings with Ralph Blewitt while the role of Bruce Wilson has been in softer focus.
Blewitt's justifications are the classic soldier's defence - I was just following orders: ''Basically, it was like this: Wilson said do as I say or you haven't got a job. So I really had no option. In order to maintain my job I would go along with whatever it was he said to do.''
His account might be self-serving but it is broadly corroborated by several former union officials who knew and worked with the pair.
''He was Wilson's puppet,'' said a former senior AWU official from Western Australia. ''Wilson installed him in that job when he went to Victoria and then he basically forgot about the rest of us.''
When the Workplace Reform Association was established in 1992 it was Blewitt who signed the papers, prepared with Gillard's advice, that declared it to be ''dedicated to change to work to achieve safe workplaces''.
As The Age revealed two weeks ago, that incorporation was approved only after Gillard vouched for the bona fides of the association in response to a challenge from the WA Corporate Affairs Commission.
According to Blewitt, Wilson was the main player in the association's formation and operation, from the outset kept secret by the pair and run from a post office box and bank account separate from the union branch.
''I was instructed by Bruce Wilson to withdraw cash, went down to the Commonwealth Bank in Northbridge and withdrew bundles of money for four, five, $8000 at a time and just passed it over to him,'' he claims.
In early 1993, more than $100,000 taken from the association's account was used towards the purchase in the name of Ralph Blewitt of a unit in Kerr Street, Fitzroy. Blewitt had never seen the property before it was bought at auction by Wilson, who was accompanied on the day by Gillard and used a power of attorney drafted by her.
When the scandal broke in 1995, the WA fraud squad began an investigation that stalled after construction, mining and services contractor Thiess - which contributed most of the stolen money - refused to assist police. Gillard was questioned by the senior partners at Slater & Gordon about the work she had done to acquire the house in which Wilson lived and she was a frequent guest at - work she had not advised them she was doing.
''What was said to me at that stage was that Ralph had an interest in investing in a property, that he had some excess money, and that Bruce had talked to him about making that investment in Victoria rather than WA because it would suit everybody's purposes,'' she said, according to a transcript of the meeting.
But Blewitt now says his role in the purchase was peripheral. ''Wilson did all of that. I had no idea what was going on in Victoria,'' he says. And when the property was later sold: ''I signed the transfer of title document Wilson gave me to sign. I got no money out of any of this.''
Wilson's departure from WA and his choice of successor led to growing unrest in the branch. Several former AWU officials who had admired and supported Wilson concluded that Blewitt had to be removed. But given what the pair knew about the operations of the secret slush fund, and their former allies didn't, that could not be allowed to happen.
When anonymous pamphlets began to circulate within the union attacking Blewitt, Slater & Gordon acted. A writ lodged in Perth demanded exemplary damages against the alleged authors of the pamphlets and their printer.
Blewitt was the plaintiff but he says Wilson instigated the defamation action with legal advice from Gillard and her immediate boss at Slater & Gordon, Bernard Murphy - now a federal Court judge - and he does not know who paid for it.
''He [Wilson] approached Slater & Gordon, and Gillard and Murphy to start the action, all I did was sign the appropriate paperwork,'' Blewitt says. The move silenced the critics.
''They weren't in a position to get embroiled in a sustained fight in the Supreme Court. So you bleed them dry. They can't afford to fight you.''
In the meeting with her partners at Slater & Gordon after the corrupt activities of Wilson and Blewitt were exposed, Gillard was challenged about her role in helping establish the Workplace Reform Association, as well as the purchase of the Fitzroy property. She was also asked why she had not opened proper files or consulted her partners about the matters. All these actions caused them to consider her dismissal before she resigned.
Her response then, and since, has been that she did nothing wrong, that she was deceived by Wilson and that she ended their relationship once she became aware of what he had done.
While she claims to have had no reason to doubt her crooked boyfriend over several intimate years, she is yet to explain why she also had no reason to doubt the bone fides or authority of Ralph Blewitt, his crooked front man.
Mark Baker is editor-at-large.
