'I put $5000 in Julia's account'

FORMER AWU employee Wayne Hem stands by his claim Bruce Wilson told him to deposit $5000 into Julia Gillard's account.

Wayne Hem

FORMER Australian Workers Union employee Wayne Hem stands by his claim that Bruce Wilson told him to deposit $5000 into Julia Gillard's account after the Prime Minister on Monday declared she could not remember such a transaction.

Mr Hem told The Australian yesterday he remembered "as clear as day" Mr Wilson, the Victorian state secretary of the AWU, giving him $5000 cash at the union's Melbourne office in 1995 and asking him to deposit it into Ms Gillard's bank account.

"He handed me a wad of cash, he gave me the bank account number with Julia's name on it and said, 'Go put this in the bank'," he said. "If I had to relive it in a courtroom I could probably relive it in a courtroom. It's as clear as day." Mr Wilson was Ms Gillard's boyfriend and client in her role as a lawyer at Slater & Gordon.

Mr Hem's account was first recorded in the diary of then AWU joint national secretary Ian Cambridge after a conversation between the two men in June 1996.

Ms Gillard and her office have sought to cast doubt on the credibility of the diary, which The Australian has verified as a contemporaneous account. But Mr Hem swore a statutory declaration earlier this month confirming his recollection of the events.

Ms Gillard said yesterday she could not remember if $5000 was put in her account in 1995, despite attempts to check her records with the Commonwealth Bank.

"I am not in a position to produce my bank records simply because the Commonwealth Bank does not retain bank records from 17 years ago," she told parliament. "I said yesterday I do not -- to the best of my knowledge -- I do not remember $5000 being put in my bank account." Mr Wilson told the ABC's 7.30 program last night he could not recall the payment but "perhaps" it happened.

At her press conference on Monday, Ms Gillard questioned the veracity of the diary entry on the basis another AWU official, Helmut Gries, told The Australian he doubted an account in the Cambridge diary that concerned him. "So we are told on one day, well, this is a diary, all very serious, contemporaneous," she said. "We're told on the next day, actually, this bloke reckons the diary's not right and this information, that the diary's not right, was available to The Australian newspaper when they published this edition. Hence my degree of dissatisfaction with that reporting."

Ms Gillard's media advisers have been seeking to use Mr Gries's recollections to cast doubt on the accuracy of the diary kept by Mr Cambridge, who is now a commissioner with Fair Work Australia. But The Australian secured the statutory declaration from Mr Hem before publishing his claims. Mr Hem said Mr Cambridge's diary from this period should be trusted, even if people who gave their accounts to Mr Cambridge had now forgotten the specific conversations. "For someone to keep a diary as Ian did, he would have been expecting to present it at a formal inquiry," Mr Hem said. "He was probably the only one at the time who was pushing for a royal commission or a full inquiry into the matter."

Internal Commonwealth Bank documents from 1995 show Mr Hem was entrusted to deposit more than $100,000 into an account, a slush fund controlled by Mr Wilson, with his signature appearing on a number of deposit slips.