Who knows PM Julia Gillard is under investigation?

Victoria Police detectives are still working on the 18-year-old AWU slush fund scandal.

ALP State Conference

IN the days after a heated 2GB radio interview in March, during which Julia Gillard was questioned closely about the AWU slush fund scandal, a detective in Victoria's Fraud Squad, Ross Mitchell, made a strategic decision.

One answer the Prime Minister gave during a dogged tussle in her interview with Ben Fordham stood out. Mitchell knew it when he heard it. The other detectives knew it too.

Although seemingly innocuous to those not involved in the probe, Gillard's answer was new and pivotal. It meant police in Melbourne would need a sworn statement from Fordham in Sydney, even though as a journalist he would be expected to subsequently disclose some key facts.

The actions that Mitchell and other police took in seeking further information from Fordham led to him stating in unequivocal terms on his radio show this week something that had been previously cryptically and very carefully inferred - the Prime Minister is under formal Victoria Police investigation as a result of the 18-year-old Australian Workers Union fraud. Fordham has kept a pledge to police to not publicly reveal more than this.

He told his audience: "So, let me make this perfectly clear. The Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, is under investigation by police. This is fact. I hadn't planned to add to what I said yesterday out of respect for the detectives on the case. But if the Prime Minister's office wants to deny she's being investigated, as has been reported last night and today, then I will once again correct that record. Now it needs to be pointed out that the Prime Minister and her office mightn't know she's being investigated. But I know it. And others do too. The detectives are investigating three individuals and one of them is Julia Gillard. Prime Minister, you may not know this, but you are currently being investigated by the Fraud and Extortion Squad of the Victoria Police Force."

Neither the Police Commissioner of Victoria, Ken Lay, nor the Prime Minister's office has sought to dispute any of Fordham's assertions. Nor is the PM's office now suggesting, as it did in March, that the Victoria Police investigation has nothing to do with Gillard. The reality is that Gillard's office cannot know the details of the probe.

Lay, who has had the opportunity to correct the record if he decided that Fordham had jumped to a wrong conclusion in naming Gillard, let it stand. Lay added: "The AWU matter is under investigation. That's still current."

The Prime Minister has always repeatedly, strenuously and sometimes angrily denied any wrongdoing, accusing The Australian and others of engaging in a smear campaign.

For an alleged fraud being taken seriously since late last year by seasoned detectives, Australians should ask hard questions about why large sections of their media, and particularly the public broadcaster, still baulk at reporting the AWU scandal; downplay the story or, worse, self-censor; ask few or no questions; and even mock journalists who have lost their jobs for pursuing it - Michael Smith and Glenn Milne.

Australia's best-resourced media outlet, the ABC, has scarcely, if at all, reported the ongoing police investigation this year. Only after Media Watch questioned the ABC's obvious reticence to look at the AWU story in any meaningful way last year, the 7.30 program belatedly weighed in. The flagship investigative program, Four Corners, has since abandoned a proposed in-depth story.

Indeed, almost everything that Fordham told his listeners on 2GB this week would surprise Australians who receive their news only from the ABC. Fordham tells Inquirer that nobody from the public broadcaster has contacted him since his revelations.

"I would have thought that the most powerful person in the country being the subject of an ongoing police investigation is a very significant story," Fordham says. "If others choose not to see it that way, I'm more than happy to keep covering it.

"I've had reactions from some people saying: 'How do you know that it's true?' and 'Are you just making it up?' All I can keep saying is that it is 100 per cent fact. I would not say something so serious about the Prime Minister unless I could be 100 per cent sure. If I were wrong on this, there would be a good argument for my dismissal and possibly worse (a defamation action for damages). It would be career suicide and totally unfair to Julia Gillard. But I'm as certain of the facts as I am of my own name.

"I'm not beating my drum and saying 'Look at me'. But if a story about the PM being under investigation is not very interesting and vitally important, I should be in another profession. The listeners are intrigued by it because they are not hearing about it elsewhere. They are not reading about it in every publication and seeing it on the TV news."

With questioning so far of witnesses in Queensland, Victoria, NSW and Western Australia, up to a dozen detectives are particularly interested in the creation and operation of a union election slush fund, misleadingly called the AWU Workplace Reform Association.

The entity was set up and formally registered in Perth with the help of Gillard's legal advice (as a solicitor at Slater & Gordon) to her then boyfriend and client, AWU official Bruce Wilson, and his union sidekick, Ralph Blewitt. The two men allegedly used it as a slush fund to siphon hundreds of thousands of dollars from Thiess during the construction company's development of a major project that required both labour and industrial peace from AWU members.

Some of the money, which was kept secret from everyone else in the union, would go into a $230,000 terrace house at 85 Kerr Street, Fitzroy, bought by Wilson (in Blewitt's name) at an auction he attended with Gillard, whose firm would manage the conveyancing. The terrace house was Wilson's home in Melbourne during his relationship with Gillard and his time as secretary of the Victorian branch of the AWU. The money from the property's sale a few years later went directly to Blewitt and Wilson, not the union, whose national leadership discovered too late that the union had been used in a scam.

In his only recent public statements Wilson has backed Gillard, saying she knew nothing about any wrongdoing. They have each attacked and ridiculed Blewitt, who has said he decided to blow the whistle because two journalists lost their jobs for trying to report the issues.

For Mitchell's taskforce, one of the most interesting features of Blewitt's story is that he has told it in the knowledge that he faces going to prison. Having admitted to police an incriminating role in what he calls a fraud, Blewitt can be prosecuted and convicted. There has been no deal.

One of the planks of Blewitt's story, which 2GB's Fordham latched on to in his interview with the Prime Minister in March, concerns a "power of attorney" document bearing Gillard's signature as the official witness. According to Blewitt, it was a false document.

Blewitt has repeatedly said the "power of attorney" was not worth the paper on which it was written. The document permitted Wilson to buy the Fitzroy terrace house (in Blewitt's name) at auction. Blewitt, who was living in Perth at the time, claims it is bogus - that Gillard could not have "witnessed" it as they were thousands of kilometres apart at the time.

In previous rejections of Blewitt's claims about this document, the Prime Minister insisted she always witnessed such documents properly as a solicitor. But Fordham tells Inquirer that all of Gillard's previous answers seemed to avoid declaring outright that she and Blewitt were in the same room when the power of attorney was witnessed.

"I wanted a straight answer from the PM on that simple question when I interviewed her in March and I wasn't going to let it go," he said.

Gillard finally confirmed to Fordham that she and Blewitt were in the room when the document was signed. It is an assertion that could only be wrong if Victoria Police have evidence placing them on opposite sides of Australia.