HSU trio ‘stole $2.4m from union members’

Kathy Jackson and other senior HSU figures are “personally responsible” for misappropriating members’ funds.

Former HSU national secretary Kathy Jackson.

Kathy Jackson and fellow former senior Health Service Union figures are “personally responsible” for misappropriating more than $2.4 million of members’ funds, say the senior barristers assisting the trade union royal commission.

They accuse its former star whistleblower of corruption and say a Federal Court ruling that Ms Jackson stole more than $1.4m from the HSU should be used as the basis of Com­missioner Dyson Heydon’s final report.

The submission to the commission does not recommend criminal charges be laid while a Victorian police taskforce investigation into the scandal is under way.

“This sorry history of mis­appropriation and deceit was facilitated by a culture then pervasive at the HSU, in which senior management operated with a sense of complete entitlement in respect of the use of members’ money and at the same time without being subject to proper control or super­vision,” it states.

It remains open to Commissioner Heydon to find that Ms Jackson, national secretary of the union until ­February, should be referred to the authorities to face further criminal and civil sanctions.

Former general secretary of the NSW branch Michael ­Williamson defrauded the HSU by providing fake invoices totalling $938,000, and Ms Jackson’s predecessor Craig Thomson, who was convicted of theft for misusing a union credit card, misappropriated $5600, the submission concludes.

Together, the officials “at the apex of the union” formed a “triumvirate of persons who were prepared to further their own personal interests and political ambitions at the expense of the members’’, the submission states, adding that a “failure of governance and transparency was at the heart of the scandal”.

“The picture … is deeply disturbing. It is of a union in disarray. It is of a union in which the predominant culture among senior management was of entitlement, not service.”

Counsel assisting the commission has come under fire for going “softly” on Ms Jackson, who took allegations of Mr Williamson’s wrongdoing to police.

“Katherine Jackson was instrumental in revealing Michael Williamson’s conduct to the public and to the prosecution,” the submission states. “However, her own activities as a union official have now also come to light.

“In substance … Jackson misused her position as a union official to further her own interests and political ambitions in a variety of ways and over a period of years, resulting in misapprop­riation from the HSU of in excess of $1.4m.”