Julia Gillard was being examined about this advertisement in the West Australian newspaper, 6 March, 1992.
Ms Gillard was trying to say she knew nothing about the ad, what was in it, or how it got in the paper - but she was getting tied up
While she was struggling up to his feet jumped her Counsel.
Gillard did more than give advice on incorporation of the association.
After the initial application was refused Gillard made a written appeal to the Minister.
The association was incorporated on the Minister's direction.
Gillard is covering up for her true role by using a forged letter to stitch up Ralph Blewitt.
A confidential source sent me this in the very early days - not long after 2UE.
Union re-election funds are common but only challengers worry about secrecy.
Wilson had been secretary for over a year and Bill Ludwig was in it with him.
They were worried because the Association should never have been incorporated. If it was it should have been under Industrial Laws.
Jeremy Stoljar used the words from the Associations Incorporation Act "a trade union is ineligible for incorporation".
The 7 second pause that follows is telling.
The AWU WRA Inc was refused incorporation.
Gillard appealed and argued the case - including submissions in writing from Thiess and the national head office of the AWU.
What Gillard did should be in this file.
That's why the forgery was produced.
But she's not the only one in it.
Mr Neal can give evidence about his own signature - but what about his signature stamp?
He says he did not write the letter, would not be a party to it and could not legally have made the offer in it.
Ralph Mineif is the only other staffer who could have used Ray Neal's signature stamp.
Mr Mineif is even more emphatic than Mr Neal - he could not, would not and did not have anything to do with the letter.
But just in case - here are the signature on the letter and the signature stamp from the certificate:
It's a simple task to extract and compare them - and it's clear the stamp was not used on the forgery.
Ray Neal didn't write the letter.
Ralph Mineif didn't write the letter.
Ralph Blewitt didn't get the memo that Gillard used to load him up.
What more do authorities need?
NT child detention royal commission formally requests six-month extension https://t.co/XnfHsU0cmq #auspol
— The Australian (@australian) December 14, 2016
Dyson Heydon, Jeremy Stoljar and the crew got an extra year on the gravy train.
Now a joint police/bureaucrat task force is coming to the end of the 3rd continuing year of the TURC's investigations.
And they still haven't dealt with a simple backyard photocopied forgery.
That's because they are scared.
If you knocked up a forgery from the doctor to cover a sickie, you'd lose your job.
Gillard used a forgery of a corporate affairs commissioner's letter and she's not scared at all.
That's because Brandis et al are scared of her.
On 12 May 2014 Jeremy Stoljar SC made his opening statement about the AWU Scandal.
He misled the Commission on the $60M contract Thiess was gifted by Carmen Lawrence's Government.
The Commission learned nothing about Thiess during its two years of operation.
Stoljar recommended that the Commission make these final findings.
I recorded this editorial at the time of Stoljar's submission.
I made a submission to the Royal Commission about Stoljar's errors of fact.
The Commission told me "no concluded view can be reached" on my evidence.
In relation to Thiess securing the $60M contract central to the frauds, the Royal Commission's finds:
That is stunningly incomplete. A jury should be told the whole story.
In March 2014, two months before Stoljar's opening statement and while he was being paid to research the matter, The Australian newspaper published this story I wrote with Hedley Thomas.
I contacted the Commission and offered my services free of charge. The Commission declined.
Now, as former High Court judge Dyson Heydon’s team of investigators and lawyers prepares to follow the Abbott government’s terms of reference to examine the slush fund, as well as more recent wrongdoing by trade unions, Blewitt likens the unfolding spectacle to a car crash in slow motion.
He sees bent union practices, corrupt sponsors in business and in the Labor Party, old friends - even himself - as inevitable road kill.
But Blewitt, whose credibility as a witness was helped by a ruling from Victoria’s Chief Magistrate Peter Lauritsen three months ago, is adamant that the corruption he engaged in was not limited to alleged fraud perpetrated in the now infamous slush fund that Julia Gillard, as a solicitor at Slater & Gordon, had helped to set up.
This slush fund, the AWU Workplace Reform Association, was established for, and controlled by, the former prime minister’s then boyfriend, Bruce Wilson, the union’s powerful Perth-based leader at that time.
He and Gillard have always strenuously denied wrongdoing, while accusing Blewitt of being a liar and an imbecile.
With its registration documents, the slush fund was given a veneer of legitimacy as an incorporated association under West Australian law. It misleadingly purported to be an AWU entity for workplace safety. But from its inception in April 1992 it was secretly receiving pay-offs amounting to hundreds of thousands dollars from major building company Thiess. The cash flow occurred during the two years in which Thiess built a major West Australian project, the Dawesville Channel.
The slush fund into which Thiess paid the money and the Dawesville Channel project that Thiess developed - on time and on budget thanks to the toil and the industrial peace of Wilson and fellow official Blewitt’s AWU members - were always inextricably linked. Blewitt oversaw the invoices, which he says were bogus, that were sent to Thiess, which would then pay for a “fictitious” official at the project. Blewitt admits he created some of the paperwork on Wilson’s orders to dress up the sham arrangement in a cloak of legitimacy.
The two men would use cash from the accounts to buy a house in Blewitt’s name in Fitzroy, at an auction attended by Gillard with Wilson as bidder, while the law firm handled the conveyancing and the finance. Blewitt also claims the cash paid for renovations of Gillard’s house.
But as Blewitt awaits a call from Heydon’s royal commission to give this evidence under oath, he insists the slush fund was merely the corrupt product of a project much bigger, bolder and, he says, arguably more concerning for how it benefited Thiess.
The project was a $60 million engineering triumph, almost wholly funded by taxpayers. It was handed to Thiess in late 1991 by WA’s then fragile Labor government led by Carmen Lawrence.
Blewitt will tell the royal commission that the project, the Dawesville Channel south of Perth - which reversed an environmental disaster, opened a swampy estuarine bog to the Indian Ocean, constructed a magnificent bridge and redeveloped land for housing, a marina and retail - was the ingenious opening gambit in Wilson’s scam.
The men were friends and close union allies then. Wilson, a gung-ho firebrand with a gift for winning over a workers’ crowd, always led. Blewitt, who obeyed without question, was one of a select few who knew of the then secret slush fund. Gillard, who would abruptly leave her job at Slater & Gordon after her colleagues discovered her role with Wilson in helping to set up the slush fund with her legal work, has since said she was profoundly misled on its actual workings.
Few former union insiders roll over to talk about union criminality. Fewer still admit to their own offences, for which they will possibly be convicted and imprisoned. Blewitt, who has done both, readily characterises himself and Wilson as like-minded partners in union fraud during Lawrence’s Labor government of the early 1990s, even as corporate collapses, the “WA Inc” revelations and a subsequent public inquiry into her predecessor Brian Burke’s reign would lead to damning corruption findings.
But it is Blewitt’s claims about how Wilson wielded his undoubted power as a union boss to achieve allegedly corrupt ends with about $60m of public funds that makes the resulting slush fund’s cash flow appear minuscule by comparison.
Blewitt paints a disturbing picture of a bent nexus between big business, unions and the public funds entrusted to governments to manage.
“As state secretary of the largest trade union in Australia, Wilson had a lot of influence over the executive of the ALP and the Trades & Labor Council,” Blewitt tells Inquirer.
“It is a very powerful position to be in. It gives you the opportunity to determine the outcome of preselections (of Labor members seeking to run for parliament). Wilson used his power to his advantage. He did a deal.
“He lobbied the Labor government to give the contract to Thiess. He had a double-edged sword - he would say to Thiess, ‘I will get you the contract, but I want the (slush fund)’, and he would say to the Labor Party, ‘We will support you in preselections and in the upcoming state election, but you have to award this contract to Thiess.’
“The Dawesville Channel was the major government project on the radar at the time. Wilson dreamed up the scam to get money from it.
“Because of the AWU’s size we could determine who got the seat of Kalgoorlie that was held by the deputy premier, Ian Taylor. When you’re in that position you carry a fair bit of clout - and Wilson told me he was lobbying Ian Taylor for Thiess to get the job.
“By inference and by actions and by the happenings I saw at the time, I became aware of it. I went to some of the meetings. He told me he was lobbying the state government for Thiess to get the project. I know he was lobbying Ian Taylor.
“If they did not support us, they would not have been preselected - it’s as simple as that. That’s the line Wilson ran: ‘If you want to get preselected, this is what I want.’ That’s just the way the system worked with the ALP and the trade unions. It’s not an ‘if’ or ‘maybe’ situation, it’s just how it worked.”
Victoria’s Chief Magistrate, Lauritsen, summarised part of this proposition in a 12-page judgment in December when he ruled on documents seized under search warrant by police from Slater & Gordon’s offices months earlier:
“On 2 May 1991, Wilson was elected the secretary of the Western Australian branch of the AWU while, in October 1991, Blewitt was elected as its assistant secretary. Wilson had lobbied the Western Australian government to have Thiess appointed to construct the (Dawesville Channel) project. He met with the deputy premier on a number of occasions. At the time, Wilson was the brother-in-law to the WA general manager of Thiess, Joseph Trio.”
The seriousness of some of these matters was spelled out by Lauritsen’s summary of what Victoria Police are now investigating:
“commission of four types of offence in relation to Wilson and others - obtaining property by deception; receiving secret commissions; making and using false documents; and conspiracy to cheat and defraud. (The lead detective) now believes Wilson, Blewitt and others were involved in committing these offences.”
Trio, asked by Inquirer about the Thiess contract with which he was closely involved, says: “I have provided a detailed statement to Victoria Police and I have no further comment. I absolutely deny (the allegations) but I do not want to make any further comment.”
Lauritsen, whose judgment is being appealed by Wilson, found “there is a good deal of corroboration of Blewitt’s evidence”. Lauritsen found that documents seized by Victoria Police last year in an ongoing fraud investigation into the AWU slush fund scandal were “prepared in the furtherance of the commission of a fraud or an offence”.
The Dawesville Channel project was strikingly different from other significant taxpayer-funded projects - despite it being one of the biggest and costliest ventures commissioned by the Labor government in that era, there was no public tender. There were no competing bids. This was unusual. Thiess had it sewn up.
Julian Grill, a minister in the WA Labor government of Burke and Peter Dowding, tells Inquirer that he regards it now as “extraordinary” that Thiess got the contract from Lawrence’s government with no public tender.
“I’m not aware of any other job of that size not going to tender - it is quite extraordinary and it requires some explanation,” says Grill, who resigned to be a backbencher when Lawrence became premier.
“As a minister, I handled hundreds of contracts for infrastructure and I never saw or knew of that sort of expenditure without a public tender,” he says. “I’m genuinely shocked to hear it. What is the explanation?”
Grill also had a lot to do with Wilson at the time, having run his successful campaign to become AWU secretary.
“We decided to back him and we got other people to help. But we were very disappointed and disillusioned with what ultimately transpired. What happened with the slush fund was absolutely disgraceful,” Grill says.
Blewitt’s claims that the $60m project was delivered to Thiess - largely because an allegedly corrupt union boss, who wanted his own slush fund for elections and personal use, threatened senior Labor figures to make a decision contrary to normal public policy - are emphatically rejected by Taylor, who was also the minister for state development. He says Blewitt’s assertions are wrong.
“I have no recollection at all of Bruce Wilson ever talking about the Dawesville Channel,” Taylor, the former member for Kalgoorlie, who had a good working relationship with Wilson, tells Inquirer.
“He was just another union leader - I thought he was pretty firm and tough. Nobody was going to take my preselection off me. I can’t remember anyone being particularly challenging in those days regarding preselection. If anyone is suggesting Wilson had something like that over my head, it is ridiculous. If the suggestion from Ralph is that Wilson had this big dagger over politicians and told them ‘if you don’t support this, I will knock you off’, it’s ridiculous.”
However, one of Australia’s leading mining executives from the era, Hugh Morgan, the former chief executive of the Western Mining Corporation, tells Inquirer a strikingly different story about Wilson’s influence on the then government and on Lawrence.
Morgan, a strong Liberal Party backer and union critic, says he will repeat his account of a remarkable meeting with Lawrence to the royal commission if it seeks his evidence.
“In the early 90s at WMC we had very poor productivity and very poor industrial relations on site,” Morgan says.
“The union leader of this workforce was Bruce Wilson. He was a pied piper, and he was very good on the stump at making people feel unhappy.
“As a consequence of our unsatisfactory industrial situation, I went to see Carmen Lawrence about the matter. Bruce had done everything he could to avoid signing an agreement. But finally, we got him to sign.
“I went to Carmen Lawrence and she said to me very directly, ‘Hugh, I cannot fulfil that because Bruce has informed me that if I go ahead with that agreement, he will ensure that I do not get my preselection for the next election.’
“I was in her office. I did not think that what she told me was false. I took it as her being very truthful with me. She was clearly embarrassed and upset.
“Carmen Lawrence was always very approachable and polite to me. She understood our problems. And she said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it - Wilson has threatened to take away my preselection, and you have to understand that’s why I can’t do this.’
“I was staggered. She was concerned about it. And I thought, ‘This is a lost cause here with this government.’
“I thought from her demeanour that this (threat by Wilson) had shocked her. In other words, it was not a case of ‘he does this to me every day’.
“I took it as an unusually aggressive but powerful statement from the union head that had concerned the premier in an unusual manner. Wilson was a very forceful and influential individual, remarkably so. There was no question in my mind, she was concerned. This was not something of her making or of her imagination. It seems remarkable that you can threaten the preselection of a premier. I think it was an illustration of the worst circumstances in which the trade union movement and the Labor Party were locked together.
“My observation is that the trade union movement believes that it is not only their right but their mission to exert whatever power it has over Labor members of parliament because the Labor Party is the child of the trade union movement. Those members of parliament are the union’s representatives - the union movement put them there.”
The political influence that Blewitt (and Morgan) claim that Wilson exerted is not disclosed in internal documents and briefing notes written by senior public servants and ministers at the time during a rushed assessment of Thiess and its project proposal.
Numerous government files about the Dawesville Channel project and dating back to the early 90s have been inspected by Inquirer in the State Records Office in Perth.
Some of these documents do disclose, however, concerns of senior public servants about the haste with which a decision was being made by cabinet to give the green light to Thiess, as well as the unorthodox way it was to proceed without a public tender.
There were other extenuating circumstances. Much of the land that the government would need for the Dawesville Channel was privately owned by Wannunup, a company that had joined with Thiess to promote to the government a last-ditch bid to obtain approval and funding for the project. Wannunup, frustrated by years of inaction on land it needed to develop, and Thiess had locked in together and were pledging that a three-way public-private partnership would deliver the channel fast, de-risk it, and save more than $20m.
Documents show that Treasury officials who were briefed on the confidential cabinet submissions wanted to know in September 1991 whether other options had been investigated. “Has a tendering process or request for expressions of interest from other potential developers been considered? On what basis could the state be satisfied that the arrangements between Wannunup and Thiess Contractors produce the lowest cost possible?” Treasury official Ross Holt asked at the time.
A senior public servant, Nello Siragusa, replied that “no consideration has been given to calling for expressions of interest from other potential developers since Wannunup are the major landholders”.
The documents also disclose that cabinet had made a significant shift. In a June 1991 cabinet submission, the project was to have been run out across five years and split into “appropriate contract packages and tenders called for each package”. But within weeks the project had fundamentally changed to one that would be built solely by Thiess in three years or less, with no tenders called.
Blewitt says it was not a coincidence that Wilson, who needed Thiess to get the nod, became AWU head in May 1991. Wannunup and Thiess took a new total construction package to the government just six weeks later, and it was informally endorsed almost immediately.
John Jenkin, who was head of the marine and harbours department overseeing the project, told Crown Law in a memo: “On the surface, it is the least cost option. On the other hand, it has a disadvantage in that the government could be seen to be favouring the parties involved.” In a separate briefing note, Jenkin cautioned it “could lead to some criticism of the government for not calling tenders and for favouring one particular developer. However, if the savings are sufficiently high, this criticism could be countered.”
The two public servants who were most closely involved, Siragusa and Jenkin, both of whom no longer work for the government, tell Inquirer that they would not have known of any lobbying of their political masters by Wilson. They cannot recall anything untoward. Siragusa says he has been helping police with the ongoing probe. “Look, I can only say so much if your line of inquiry is heading down the track of union business, because I have given a statement to police in Victoria who are looking at this,” Siragusa, who was government project manager of the Dawesville Channel, tells Inquirer.
“It did not go to tender, but it was thoroughly scrutinised. What the government did at the time was thoroughly investigate the (Thiess) price, and I put together a financial analysis that was vetted by Treasury and found to be a very competitive offer. The contract was awarded to Thiess - and whatever Thiess had to do with the unions had nothing to do with the government. Whether there was any political lobbying by the union or by anybody, I wouldn’t have known. Any union involvement was outside my knowledge.
“I’m proud of what we built. We did it with a fixed-price contract and Thiess finished it ahead of schedule.
“We would not have got the job done any cheaper, or any earlier, if we had done it any other way.”
Jenkin says: “It was unusual. The financial advantages of proceeding that way with those partners made the project possible. Thiess was one company prepared to take the financial risk. We made recommendations to the government that were accepted. Thiess carried the risk that it would not be financially successful. For a number of years I have been aware of the slush fund allegations, but I had no idea of a connection with the Dawesville Channel.”
Merv Warren, who led the landowner-syndicate of Wannunup, tells Inquirer: “We certainly had nothing to do with the unions ourselves. Our consultants proposed Thiess. It seemed that Thiess was the only company with the background and funds to carry the project. Thiess came along and agreed to work with us on a project that would benefit everyone. At that time, unions were holding some companies to ransom. If they did the same to Thiess, it would not surprise.
“I think that if it had gone through a public tender process, it would have extended the waiting period before any contract was let. They needed to act quickly because of the environmental problems in the estuary.
“The government’s decision meant it could be fixed with speed and efficiency for less money, and we finished ahead of schedule. It was done with a lot of goodwill from everyone.”
Asked for comment about the claims of Blewitt and Morgan, Lawrence said yesterday: “This does not ring true.” She added that she had not had time to refresh her memory on the events. She said she did not wish to make further comment until she had recollected the circumstances surrounding the matters that The Australian emailed her about on Thursday.
ENDS
Every touch leaves its trace.
This scandal continues.
