Union assistant reveals secret duty

WENDY Pymont recalls her most secretive work and still shakes her head at the skulduggery that she was hearing.

Wendy Pymont

WENDY Pymont recalls her most secretive work and still shakes her head at the skulduggery that she was hearing on the audio tapes she was handed in the union's Sydney office.

Her job in 1995 was personal assistant to Ian Cambridge, then the joint national secretary of the Australian Workers Union at a time of fraud and corruption that was tearing the union apart.

Now 67 and retired, Mrs Pymont, who joined the union a few days shy of her 16th birthday, told The Australian she still believed that police should properly pursue the fraudsters.

In 1995, she received dozens of tapes from Mr Cambridge after he had recorded events and conversations during his dogged investigations of AWU corruption in Victoria and Western Australia.

At the heart of the fraud was a slush fund Julia Gillard, as a solicitor at Slater & Gordon, helped set up for her then boyfriend, AWU branch secretary Bruce Wilson. The woman who would become Prime Minister unwittingly became part of the narrative in Mr Cambridge's diary. Ms Gillard denies any wrongdoing, saying she had no knowledge of the operations of the fund.

"Whatever happened that day, Ian would put it down on tape and I would type it up the next morning, print the page and give it back to him -- it was pretty well straight away," Mrs Pymont said.

"I have kept the work a secret all this time -- until now, I have not told anyone except my husband.

"My computer had to be password-protected and nobody else in the office had access."

Mrs Pymont said she was stunned at the time by the revelations she was hearing, which The Australian is publishing after obtaining, and authenticating, 150-plus A4-size pages of diary notes kept by Mr Cambridge, now a Fair Work commissioner.

"I would swear to the authenticity of the diary entries -- Ian always did it when it was fresh in his mind," Mrs Pymont said. "Ian is a totally reliable and above-board person who would never lie. He was a goody two-shoes and he was under a lot of pressure."

Asked if police should get to the bottom of a fraud scandal that her boss at the time wanted a royal commission to investigate, Mrs Pymont, who recently resigned after a 34-year Labor Party membership, said: "I think some people should get what they deserve -- and sometimes I think it is best to let sleeping dogs lie."