Ex marks a spot of strife for Gillard
BRUCE Wilson’s royal commission evidence tended to stretch credulity.
THE much-awaited appearance of Julia Gillard’s former boyfriend at the royal commission into union corruption was a study in testing the limits of plausibility.
Bruce Wilson, a former Australian Workers Union official whose involvement with the future prime minister in the early 1990s would haunt her entire political career, wanted the commission’s top legal brains to believe an anodyne version of events. According to Wilson’s account at the Sydney hearing on Thursday, their allegations of criminality that could land him in jail for conspiracy and fraud were a mere fantasy.
Wilson had a different story to tell, one of his noble intentions as a rising trade union star from Perth who had been contemplating how to reform the AWU and extend its membership reach in the national construction industry.
This was big-picture stuff and Wilson claimed he had the support of the AWU’s Queensland heavyweight Bill Ludwig and others when they discussed the idea over dinner one evening.
The testing ground for Wilson’s idea, he claimed, was to obtain funding for training at the Dawesville Channel project near Perth, managed by Thiess Contractors, where the AWU had coverage of the unionised workforce.
But there was a caveat. Someone at the dinner allegedly suggested that funding for this training should be kept in a “separate legal entity” so that money earmarked for training could not be confused with the AWU’s general accounts. Funds received by the entity could be used to support Wilson’s dream of a national construction branch by supporting candidates in union elections and paying for their associated expenses.
That’s when Gillard entered the picture. In 1991, Slater & Gordon, the Melbourne-based legal firm, sent Gillard as one of its solicitors to Perth to handle an AWU rule change issue when another lawyer was unavailable.
Gillard and Wilson started a relationship soon after — but it would be much more.
Mixing personal affairs with business, Gillard agreed to help Wilson set up his fund by providing legal advice. She helped draft the rules of what would be the AWU Workplace Reform Association. She made handwritten notes on the application form to have the association incorporated, and Wilson recalls it was either he or Gillard who wrote that the association was to promote “changes to achieve safe workplaces”.
All good, so far. Love bloomed between Wilson, a street-smart union official rated by Ludwig as a future Labor prime minister, and Gillard, a left-leaning lawyer who had political ambitions — even if no one could not foresee back then that she would one day meet the expectations Ludwig held for her partner.
The difficulty, as the royal commission heard this week, was the Wilson fund was really fraught from the start. It would become a scandal that cost Wilson his union career, and possibly worse to come. For Gillard, it would mean years of repeated attempts to stamp out suggestions that she had done something wrong and was allegedly a fund beneficiary because some of its proceeds, originating from the Thiess construction company, were used to finance renovations on her home in Melbourne.
Gillard has consistently denied any wrongdoing and gone to great lengths at times to snuff out damaging tales about her involvement with Wilson, including legal threats to restrain publication of the most embarrassing claims.
One early hitch in the scheme was detailed for the first time this week when the commission heard how Gillard took an urgent flight to Perth in May 1992 because Wilson was having a problem getting the fund approved by the Corporate Affairs Commissioner in Western Australia.
The CAC’s concern, according to Wilson, was “whether or not the association could be construed as a trade union”. It is not surprising that the CAC wanted a clarification. After all, the “AWU” name was in the association’s title despite Wilson’s supposed determination not to create confusion. Gillard appears to have provided the necessary assurances as an officer of the court, and the association was given the tick.
Much worse would come. Jeremy Stoljar SC, the counsel assisting the royal commission, crystallised the issue this week when he accused Wilson of having set up the fund “deliberately and knowingly” as a device to obtain funds from Thiess.
Stoljar submitted that Wilson and his then union sidekick Ralph Blewitt, who admits his corruption, should be charged under the WA Criminal Code for offences that carry up to 10 years in jail.
Wilson claimed on Thursday that the fund operated legitimately when Thiess, after receiving invoices from him and Blewitt, made regular payments running to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a three-year period starting in early 1992. The money was held in two fund bank accounts.
While admitting that no actual training was undertaken for many months, Wilson denied a central allegation of the counsel assisting the royal commission that he was responsible for issuing false invoices that committed a fraud. Instead, Wilson likened the early payments to a “retainer” in the legal profession where payments are often made even if no work is done. He claimed training took some time to get running because of Thiess’s failure to acquire the facilities.
Then Wilson made a big mistake. He claimed he hired an AWU organiser who had worked in Karratha, Glen Ivory, to do the training and paid him a rate of $36 an hour as agreed with Thiess. At one point, he said, Ivory received $15,000 in back pay from the fund as a contractor.
What Wilson did not know was that Ivory, who died in 2004, had signed a police statement as long ago as 1997, in the early stages of the scandal investigation, in which he attested that neither he nor the union’s executive had ever known about the fund, and he never worked for it as a training officer.
Nicholas Jukes, a former manager with Thiess, confirmed to the commission this week that he had negotiated with Wilson an agreement for the company to fund the cost of an “AWU representative” to implement a workplace reform agreement at Dawesville.
Jukes left for Queensland soon after and had little to do with Dawesville. But he understood from other executives that the AWU provided someone unknown for training, even if the service provided “waned over the course of the project”. About one thing Jukes was clear: “I believed that Thiess were making payments to legitimate AWU bank accounts.”
Stoljar claims that Wilson perpetrated a fraud because no service was ever provided, and he exploited the AWU name to fool people into thinking it was a union venture.
The association rules that Gillard helped draft included one provision that it have at least five members, but Wilson admitted this week that it had none when submitted to the CAC for incorporation. With all paperwork long gone, he claimed he arranged for six members afterwards. They included him and Blewitt, former AWU official Bill Telikostoglou (aka “Bill the Greek”) who now lives in Athens, Ivory and another man since deceased.
Gillard’s problems started in 1995 when alarm bells rang at Slater & Gordon and she was called to a formal interview with the firm’s head partner, Peter Gordon.
Gillard insists, and Wilson backed her to the hilt on this point this week, that she had no role in the operation of the association after drafting its rules. Wilson claimed she did not even ask how it would raise funds.
But Gillard’s actions clearly troubled Gordon. The AWU was Slater & Gordon’s client, and Gillard did not tell fellow partners about her separate legal advice for Wilson, or make a file note as would be the normal practice. Nor, it seems, did she tell them about her sudden trip to Perth after a kerfuffle over securing the fund’s incorporation. Gillard told Gordon in 1995 that she thought the association was a union “slush fund” for elections, at odds with a role in promoting workplace safety reform — even if such a purpose did not conflict with its broadly drafted rules.
Gillard also had difficulties at Slater & Gordon over what role she might have played in helping Wilson buy a house in 1993 in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, using money from the fund. Gillard had no financial involvement in this deal. She did arrange a power-of-attorney document so Wilson could bid at an auction and buy the property in Blewitt’s name. She also arranged the conveyancing and attended the auction with Wilson. The house was mortgaged to Slater & Gordon.
In a statement tendered to the royal commission this week, a former Slater & Gordon legal secretary who worked with Gillard in 1993, Olivia Palmer, said it was not uncommon to arrange power-of-attorney documents for specific matters such as the Fitzroy auction. But Palmer said she did not know then that Wilson was Gillard’s partner. And it was “inconsistent with usual practice within the firm” when Gillard became involved in obtaining the certificate of currency document for the Fitzroy property shortly before its purchase was finalised.
The most damaging allegation for the former Labor PM at the royal commission this week was evidence from a Melbourne builder, Athol James, that Gillard told him in 1993 while he was doing renovations on her house in Melbourne’s Abbotsford that Wilson was paying for the work. What’s more, James said that on two occasions he saw Wilson hand Gillard “a large amount of cash” to cover the cheques she subsequently wrote as payment for his work. James, hired by Gillard after she spotted his business in a local newspaper ad, could not know whether the alleged Wilson payments came from the “slush fund”.
But another source, the self-confessed Wilson bagman Blewitt, claims he was summoned to Gillard’s house in 1993 to pay another group of tradesmen $7000 on Wilson’s orders. Allegedly Gillard did not see the transaction but was present in the house and told Blewitt to “just go through”. Blewitt claims Wilson had told him to take the money from the slush fund.
Then there is Wayne Hem, a former AWU official hired as an offsider after Wilson moved away from his wife and children in Perth to Melbourne in 1993 to head the AWU’s Victorian branch and live closer to his then girlfriend.
Hem told the royal commission that he attended Gillard’s Abbotsford house in mid-1995 when painters were at work in the company of Wilson’s union associate Telikostoglou. According to Hem, he saw Telikostoglou hand one of the painters an envelope that he assumed contained some money. He admitted he did not see the painter count the alleged money.
On another occasion in 1995, Hem said, he did see money intended for Gillard when Wilson pulled a $5000 “wad of notes out of his pocket” after a late night at the casino in which Wilson had lost money. Hem said Wilson asked him to run an errand by depositing the money in Gillard’s Commonwealth Bank account. Wilson, Hem claimed, wrote a bank account number on a slip of paper, then added Gillard’s name when he “asked him to tell whose account it was”.
In 2012 Gillard denied that the renovations on her home were paid by Wilson or the fund, and insisted that she paid for them herself. She said something similar in her 1995 interview with Gordon, but she did not categorically rule out that money from the slush fund was used to pay for the work.
Gillard, who can be expected to give evidence to the royal commission at some stage, said through a spokesman this week that she was “declining all comment on the royal commission”. So there is no public Gillard response, yet, to the evidence from James and Hem.
At this point, Gillard is relying on firm denials. Her position has been firmly backed by Wilson in the witness box. He went so far as to declare that James, Hem, Ivory, Blewitt and others were all liars. That’s a lot of alleged liars.
What the royal commission does in terms of following the money trail through Gillard’s old bank accounts, if that is possible, could provide some answers to lingering questions about the former PM and her old boyfriend.
In the meantime, Gillard is depending on her credibility as a former PM who, as she has stated, has “done nothing wrong”, compared with the reputation of Blewitt, a man she said in 2012 had admitted his guilt and wanted immunity.
She said Blewitt had been described by others as a complete imbecile, an idiot, a stooge, a sexist pig and a liar. Even Blewitt’s sister regarded him as “a crook and rotten to the core”.
They were heady times in the early 90s for Gillard and her then boyfriend as they frequented restaurants and pubs and went nightclubbing into the wee hours. But the past just won’t go away.
