Lenore Taylor, political editor
theguardian.com, Wednesday 10 September 2014
The former prime minister spent a day under oath over her involvement in the ‘slush fund scandal’. And nothing new emerged
Julia Gillard departs after giving evidence at the royal commission into trade union governance and corruption in Sydney. Photograph: Paul Miller/AAP Image
Surely this has to be it, the end of this saga at least as it relates to Julia Gillard.
After a whole day under oath we learned precious little more about the former prime minister’s involvement in the “slush fund scandal” other than some detail of her displeasure upon coming home from holidays in Queensland to find that her boyfriend had demolished her ugly red and yellow bathroom and the astonishing fact that she received invoices from tradesmen before she paid them, and then afterwards, receipts.
Her long-awaited evidence did not reveal any proof, or any new evidence, that she knew what her former lover Bruce Wilson had done, or intended to do, with the Australian Workers Union Workplace Reform Association, which as a lawyer for Slater and Gordon she provided legal advice to help him and his sidekick Ralph Blewitt create.
They did, of course, go on to do allegedly very questionable things with it, some of which are under investigation by Victorian police, but of these Julia Gillard has always denied all knowledge.
Her long day in the witness box also revealed no proof, or new evidence, that any money from the fund had paid for any part of her somewhat chaotic 1995 home renovations, something she once again categorically denied.
The renovations happened in a hurry after Wilson’s surprise demolition, with a union colleague of Wilson’s recommending the tradesmen. The tradesman who says she told him that Wilson was paying for the renovation, and who says he saw Wilson hand her “wads of cash”, was mistaken on both counts. “I never saw Mr Wilson with significant amounts of cash.” And another man, who said he had seen Wilson pay tradesmen for her, didn’t even describe the right house, she said.
She still couldn’t really explain some less-than-precise aspects of her legal work, for example when counsel assisting the commission Jeremy Stoljar asked which of the objects of the association, drawn up by her, fitted what she knew its intent to be – a fund to collect money to help pay for union election campaigns.
She hesitated as the whole room read down the list of objectives, helpfully displayed on a big screen. “To contribute to … a democratic safe workplace”. Not really. To “contribute to … the implementation of appropriate skills training” – that wasn’t really it either.
“In truth the objective of the association to raise funds for union elections … none of that is set out here,” Stoljar prompted.
“F”, Gillard finally said, nominating the objective “to support and assist union officials and union members who are contributing to the adoption of the aims of the association and its policies”.
“These objectives are obviously very broadly drawn … and what we have discussed fits beneath them,” she explained.
And again we heard that she did not open a file in Slater and Gordon’s system for the work she did for Wilson and Blewitt. It was “a judgment call” she said, whether to open a file when doing free work for union clients, and she had certainly “done more substantial work than this for free for trade unions and trade union officials”.
She was, once again, questioned as to why she allowed the name “Australian Workers Union” to be used in the title of the association, when the union did not know about it, and the whole point of creating it was to keep it separate from the union.
“There was nothing in any of this back at the time which caused me to conclude in any way that the name of the association or anything else about the association would be used to mislead people,” she said, followed by the closest statement to any kind of admission. “None of us get to go in a time machine and go backwards. Obviously, if one got to do the whole thing differently given what I know that I did not know at the time.”
The day began with evidence that could have been difficult for Gillard, a statement from former Health Services Union official Robert Elliott that Gillard had offered to help him and another official, now his wife, set up what sounded like another “slush fund” – a fundraising entity for union elections, which would be labelled as an “occupational health and safety fund”.
“The offer was not taken up by me or others on the basis that it seemed an exotic and suspect arrangement,” Elliott said in a background brief prepared two years ago for a different legal purpose.
But on Wednesday he said he had been mistaken, that he had conflated different conversations and that he was “deeply distressed” to be giving evidence about statements he now believed to be false. Gillard denied she had any such conversation with Elliott.
With her usual cool demeanour Gillard then spent most of the day wading through a thick folder of two-decade old documents, and being asked about things she either denied or could not recall.
There were brief moments of light relief, like when Stoljar asked: “Were you annoyed that Mr Wilson had smashed up your bathroom”, and Gillard shot back: “It wasn’t my preference, no.”
The journalists and bloggers and shock jocks and authors and amateur ex-union sleuths who have pursued Gillard for so long over these allegations will be bitterly disappointed.
Alan Jones – who once famously suggested the former prime minister be put into a chafe bag and dropped into the sea – urged his listeners in ominous tones Wednesday morning to tune in to hear what Gillard would say “under oath”. Michael Smith, the former Sydney radio host who lost his job over his pursuit of the story and has doggedly pursued it on his own website ever since, said he was gobsmacked Elliott had recanted on his statement, but pointed his readers to the ongoing investigation by Victorian police.
But Gillard has now answered questions at two very lengthy press conferences and, under oath, at a full day’s royal commission hearing.
The first two times she was prime minister and in command of the situation. On Wednesday, after one short tea break, she returned to the room before royal commissioner Dyson Heydon, and for about five minutes stood at the witness stand, looking into the middle distance, alone and almost unnoticed, while the lawyers chatted and onlookers checked their phones.
But even without the authority of office, even under oath, even under a whole day’s questioning by some of the best lawyers in the land, these allegations have progressed no further.
Surely, after 20 years, it is time to finally give up on the story about the young lawyer, who was to become prime minister, and her “dodgy boyfriend”, and whether he might have paid for the renovations necessitated by his demolition of her bathroom covered in ugly red and yellow tiles.
