It’s a bad day when you snap at a snapper

BRUCE Wilson’s bad day at the national royal commission into union corruption started in Sydney shortly after 10am.

Wilson lashes out at The Australian’s photographer in Phillip Street, Sydney, yesterday.

BRUCE Wilson’s bad day at the national royal commission into union corruption started in Sydney shortly after 10am. That was when former High Court judge Dyson Heydon triggered the beginning of formal proceedings. Something that might once have seemed very unlikely was now, officially, open for business and deadly serious.

The day only got worse as Wilson’s former bagman in the Australian Workers Union, Ralph Blewitt, gave long-awaited and incriminating evidence under oath of an allegedly ­corrupt conspiracy involving a slush fund, allegedly set up for the two men with the help of Julia Gillard in the 1990s.

Blewitt sang like a canary about dodgy accounts and cash pay-offs that had nothing to do with the welfare of members of the AWU or the supposed objectives of the slush fund.

By lunchtime, Wilson snapped — and his bad day became plain diabolical. He went the knuckle on The Australian’s photographer Sam Mooy in an altercation filmed near the aptly named Bent Street in Sydney’s CBD. The images of flailing fists and shoulder charges he directed at Mooy shortly after 1.30pm were circulating within minutes.

For Wilson, who was once groomed by the AWU’s “godfather” Bill Ludwig to be a future prime minister, the photographs of him instigating a violent confrontation reinforced his reputation as a militant union thug, albeit with a charismatic edge that won over the members.

Wilson had elected to come to Sydney yesterday to talk to his lawyer, Kristine Hanscombe QC, but he wanted to keep his head down on the first day of public hearings. He had stayed away from the building at 1 Farrer Place, not wanting to be seen, but at lunchtime he was briefed by Hanscombe at a nearby cafe on Bent Street.

Ben Fordham, radio 2GB’s afternoon presenter who had come to the hearing for a sticky-beak, rubbed his eyes as he saw a casually dressed man bearing an uncanny resemblance to Wilson walking to the cafe. “Isn’t that Bruce Wilson?” Fordham asked quietly. Mooy and his photographic colleagues were soon on the spot.

Fordham had left the public hearing about 30 minutes earlier, mildly bemused that Mark Latham, the former Labor opposition leader who sat in the public gallery taking notes, declined to shake his hand or talk to him in the lobby. Fordham tried to understand the snub.

Perhaps it had something to do with his regular radio interviews of people who regard the AWU slush fund as a matter of significant public interest.

Unlike Latham, who hoped to write a book claiming it was all part of a vast right-wing conspiracy propelled by “Brucers’’ to unfairly damage Gillard.

Before Wilson’s attempt to show that David Gyngell and James Packer were not the only celebrity brawlers prepared to punch on in public view in Sydney, he may have been in high spirits.

Blewitt had been on a roll in the witness box, giving Heydon a dour lesson in the workings of a dodgy slush fund and how the ­illicit cash could fund all sorts of things.

Along the way, the former prime minister and her boss at Slater & Gordon lawyers, Bernard Murphy, now a Federal Court judge, were named for their own alleged roles in helping establish the slush fund.

Blewitt told of a $50,000 cash payment that Wilson allegedly told him was for Ludwig.

The inquiry heard claims of a $7000 cash payment by Blewitt to a builder who was renovating Gillard’s house, as well as bogus invoices sent by the AWU to the building company Thiess, which funded so much of the largesse.

No evidence has been heard from anyone else so far but it is a matter of public record that Gillard (and Murphy) have denied any wrongdoing.

If her former boyfriend and their one-time client can manage his temper when he gets in the witness box, there will no doubt be some spirited denials from him, too.