“Τετέλεσται”

Some (but still too few) within the mainstream media are finally deigning to cover with appropriate seriousness the scandal of how the Prime Minister, the Hon. Julia Gillard, apparently conspired to cover-up her participation in criminal activities.

At last.

See various links in “Yet More on Gillard”, and see “The story the media nearly let Gillard bury” by Andrew Bolt:

The case against Julia Gillard in the AWU scandal is growing.  But the case against the media is already damning.

Much remains unclear about what Gillard did, and why, as a solicitor for her boyfriend, Australian Workers Union secretary Bruce Wilson, and his bagman, Ralph Blewett, in the mid-1990s.

At the very least, she faces troubling questions about her judgment and integrity, particularly over her involvement in registering the AWU Workplace Reform Association.

The application Gillard prepared to register the association in 1992 falsely claimed its main purpose was “to achieve safe workplaces”.

On March 6, 1992, a public notice to incorporate the association ran in the West Australian under Blewett’s name, claiming it was “formed for the purpose of promoting and encouraging workplace reform for workers performing construction and maintenance work”.

This, too, was false, Gillard later conceded in a recorded interview with angry Slater & Gordon partners in 1995 the association was actually a “slush fund” for Wilson “into which the leadership team puts money so that they can finance their next election campaign”.

It seems she’d known this from the start, explaining “the thinking behind the forming of incorporated associations” was to avoid “a very difficult dispute about who was the owner of the monies” if “the leadership team fractured”.  […]

Many questions need answering about this affair, not least why she failed to open a file on her work to tell her partners what she was up to.

But what shames the media is that so many political journalists for years never wanted to ask any questions at all.

UPDATE I:  see also Andrew Bolt’s “AWU scandal: Did Gillard break the law?” and “AWU scandal: The coverup, and questions for Shorten”.

UPDATE II:  Laura Tingle of the AFR, in “It’s a question of judgment for Gillard”, finally concedes that the PM has to answer questions:

It started as a dark suggestion of involvement in a scheme for union officials to corruptly receive hundreds of thousands of dollars from large companies.  It has now morphed into questions about why Julia Gillard left the prominent law firm where she worked until 1995 and about her paperwork management.

But whichever allegations have swirled around the Prime Minister about her involvement with now disgraced union official Bruce Wilson long before she entered Parliament, they ultimately involve her judgment:  judgment then and judgment now.

Based on the transcript of an interview between the senior partner of Melbourne law firm Slater & Gordon, Peter Gordon, and Gillard in September 1995, published in yesterday’s The Australian,  the bigger problem for the Prime Minister is her judgment now in not dealing with this matter properly earlier.

Her problem with voters is that they think she is a liar.  By appearing to obfuscate on these events, she may have only reinforced that view and found the “clear air” the government was hoping for after the carbon tax took effect chewed up on this issue.

She has repeatedly said she has answered questions about this matter.  But she hasn’t.

Tingle, unfortunately, try as she might, cannot be impartial; she just has to try her utmost to exculpate the PM:

[Gillard] is persuasive in saying she did not know that money from the fund which, as a lawyer, she had set up for Wilson was subsequently used to buy a house in which the former Australian Workers Union official would live.

Tingle’s poorly chosen adjective “persuasive’, therein, is used in its rather rare sense of “not at all credible but blusteringly self-serving and evidently fallacious”.

UPDATE III:   Consistency

The very same folk
who shout that “global warming”
dooms us, based on lies

and faulty logic,
must doubt the PM did wrong—
wait, that’s no surprise. 

UPDATE IV:  see Andrew Bolt’s “The AWU scandal: How forgiving was Smith really?”.

UPDATE V:  Pickering:

UPDATE V:  see Andrew Bolt’s “The AWU scandal: Brilliant, except for the bit about the real issue”:

As [he wrote earlier] Julia Gillard’s fiery defence of her rôle in the AWU scandal was brilliant politically and theatrically.

It was masterly how she made the most insignificant error in a minor colour story in The Australian seem a massive error which discredited weeks and many pages of meticulously accurate coverage.

It was terrific how she made out the controversy started with the utterly scurrilous blog of Larry Pickering, with a base media just recycling his smelly wares, when serious journalists, politicians, lawyers and unionists have raised serious questions about this for a long time.

It was effective, albeit a little desperate, to play the sexism card, portraying the criticism of her as misogynist and sexist—and then to play the woman betrayed.  Sensational, and you can see how that will dovetail into an attack on Tony Abbott.

Again, it was clever tactically to make The Australian a villain, to fit in with the wicked Murdoch media narrative to rally the Left.  Never mind that 2UE, 3AW, the Financial Review and, belatedly, Sydney Morning Herald were also demanding answers from her.

And it was a masterstroke to spring the press conference on journalists who thought they were there for an announcement on the new refugee intake, and then stand there until the questions from the largely unprepared petered out in the only opportunity Gillard says she”ll ever give them.

On the other hand, some of us might think those tactics of the PM were just sneaky, and typical of her devious, duplicitous nature.  Nonetheless, though not the most intelligent of women, the mendacious PM is a whole lot smarter than the meretricious reporters whom she so easily bamboozled.

UPDATE VI (24 August):  in “Looking for answers, start with the ‘slush fund’”, Hedley Thomas of The Australian, as they say, nails it: 

Twenty years ago, Julia Gillard used her expertise as a lawyer to help create a “slush fund” for her boyfriend and his mate in the Australian Workers Union to draw on to fund their own elections.

“Slush fund” is not newspaper hyperbole.  It is how the Prime Minister described it when she gave a long explanation of her own conduct during a tape-recorded 1995 interview, part of an internal probe by Peter Gordon, her then boss at the Slater & Gordon law firm.
As Gillard was a relative nobody at the time, she must have expected that the transcript would never become a matter of intense public interest.
Her use of the phrase “slush fund” was correct then, and it is correct now.  At the time of the sensitive, serious and professionally humiliating probe into her undisclosed work revolving around the slush fund, Gordon considered “terminating” Gillard’s job as a salaried partner at the Melbourne firm.
As his recent draft statement leaked to The Australian this week stated, Gordon was weighing whether Gillard [were] knowingly involved in fraud and deliberate deception of her highly concerned partners.
He decided this could not be the case.  He decided to give her “the benefit of the doubt”, adding:  “Nevertheless, the partnership was extremely unhappy with Ms Gillard considering that proper vigilance had not been observed and that [her] duties of good faith to [her] partners especially as to timely disclosure had not been met.”
She resigned.
The “slush fund” that Gillard had created three years earlier was a legal entity, an incorporated body, for the purpose of raising and holding funds for the re-election of union officials.  It was designed to assist the personal advancement in the union of Gillard’s then boyfriend, Bruce Wilson, who was then the leader of the West Australian branch of the Australian Workers Union.  Wilson needed “slush”, or money, to fund a forthcoming election that he expected to contest.
Gillard’s boyfriend, and his friend, union sidekick and bagman Ralph Blewitt, needed a name for this legal entity.  They could have called it the AWU re-election fund.  Or the AWU vote-for-a-new-leader fund.
Instead, it was called the AWU Workplace Reform Association, a title completely at odds with its actual purpose.  The written objects, or rules, for the association do not disclose the true purpose is to fund elections for union officials.
On the contrary, the rules stress purposes including the promotion of safer workplaces and skills training.  In the formal application for the association, Gillard advised that it was formed for the purpose of “development of changes to work to achieve safe workplaces”.
In this way, its purported purpose had nothing to do with its actual purpose—as a “slush fund” for the re-election of Gillard’s then boyfriend.  This is Gillard’s Achilles heel.
Yesterday, Gillard said she had not signed the document to set up the association and had only provided legal advice.  Further, she said if the fund supported “trade union officials who would stand on a platform about reform and improvements in workplaces”, then it had fulfilled its stated role.  But this later explanation, at her hour-long media conference, remains difficult to reconcile with the facts.
The question that might have elicited the devil in this detail was not asked by the press gallery yesterday, but it revolves around a simple point.  The reality is that if any of the documents lodged with the West Australian government agency had disclosed that the association’s true purpose was as a “slush fund” to help in the election of union officials, it would not have been registered.
It would not have been eligible under the legislation that governed such associations.  It would not have been permitted to come into existence.
In her answers yesterday, the Prime Minister deftly moved the goalposts.  It was a legalistic answer, a duck-and-weave that takes a minute or two to see as such.
Gillard said:   “My understanding of the purpose of this association was to support the re-election of union officials who would run a campaign saying that they wanted re-election because they were committed to reforming workplaces in a certain way, to increasing occupational health and safety, to improving the conditions of the members of the union.  That was my understanding of the purpose of the association, and so I provided legal advice for the association.”
There it is.  If Gillard had given the WA government agency the same answer as she gave yesterday, the bureaucrats in Perth would likely have rejected the application outright.  They would have seen it for what it was:  a “slush fund” for the purpose of raising funds for the election of [some incumbent] union officials.
Gillard’s explanations on this will raise more questions about trust, integrity and professionalism.
Almost all of the facts surrounding these tawdry circumstances have been revealed and confirmed in the past week as a result of one former equity partner, Nick Styant-Browne, breaking a 17-year silence to The Australian.
By providing this newspaper with a leaked statement that Gordon had transmitted to him as a draft for possible release, Styant-Browne initiated a discovery of truths that have been concealed for too long.
Until recent days, Australians had been told a starkly different narrative of Gillard’s time at the law firm.  Until Styant-Browne acted, an incurious media failed to do its job properly.

UPDATE VII (24 August):  meanwhile, one of those incurious, sycophantic nincompoops, Dennis Shanahan, also of The Australian, ridiculously claims:

In the end, [Julia Gillard] acquitted herself well—as she always does when she assumes the authority of Prime Minister after deciding on a course of action.

For Dennis, if you hector the ill-prepared and largely unimaginative arse-lickers of the Canberra press gallery in sufficiently strident tones, whilst dishing out deliberately duplicitous answers to feeble questions, that’s behaving as an impressive leader.

UPDATE VIII (24 August):  Tim Blair, in “It’s a Matter of Slush”, explains:

Julia Gillard has become the first leader in political history whose defence is:  “It was a dodgy slush fund, not a trust fund.”  The Australian yesterday apologised for describing the fund in question as one of trust rather than slush—which, as Hedley Thomas points out today, is the Prime Minister’s preferred term  […]
Use “trust” in place of “slush” and the PM becomes outraged [because, apparently, “trust” is] gravely defamatory.  The Australian should have used the good, honest term “slush fund”.

UPDATE IX (24 August):  see Larry Pickering’s “What a Cunning Stunt”:

That was so brilliantly cunning to pounce on a typo in The Australian in order to pull on a Press conference claiming defamation of all things.  What was the typo, “trust” instead of “slush”, was it?

It was really good the way you gave absolutely no notice to the Press who were so obviously caught on the hop.  No time for Editors to tell correspondents what they wanted asked!  Wow, only two questions of any substance and you dodged them so beautifully.

I was impressed the way you praised the Press as being the cream of the country’s journalists.  Golly, only two tired old Lefties, Grattan and Bongiorno, plus a few snotty nosed cadets were present.

Not one of the Press actually knew what to ask.  They don’t know the background to this.  Brilliant Jules!

So, as a tired ol’ newspaperman, could I humbly ask you to answer, just specially for me, the following, (I promise I won’t tell anyone):

01. You said yesterday that you paid for your renovations.  Why then did you previously say you couldn't be certain that you did?
02. You said you believed it was “slush fund”.  As an industrial Lawyer did you seriously not know a “slush fund” could in no way be an Association?
03. If you believed it was a “slush fund” why did you print on the Application Form that its intended role was to facilitate “worker safety and training”?
04. Is it true that the four people present in the room when you drew up this document were yourself, Ralph Blewitt, Bruce Wilson and Senior Equity Partner, Bernard Murphy?
05. An Association requires, by law, to have at least five members.  Whom did you nominate?
06. When you drew up a power of attorney for your friend Bruce Wilson to act for Ralph Blewitt, why did you not inform Mr Blewitt of the mortgage, now in his name, subsequent to going to buy the house with Mr Wilson?
07. When conducting the firm’s conveyancing (again pro bono) for the purchase and sale of the Kerr Street house, did you take note of where the money was coming from and going to?
08. Why were the Association, the bank account, the purchase and sale of the house and the mortgage kept secret from the AWU.
09. How could the purchase of a house be consistent with either a “slush fund” or “worker safety and training”?
10. Why did you attempt to deliberately mislead the WA Commissioner for Corporate Affairs when setting up this Association?
11. Why did you not inform your firm’s boss or your firm’s client, the AWU, of any of your actions?
12. Do you agree it is your handwriting on the fraudulent form?
13. When the AWU discovered the fraud, why did that union’s boss, Ian Cambridge, immediately sack Slater & Gordon and call for a Royal Commission?
14. Why were you asked, by your employer, for a taped interview?
15. After you were dismissed why did you not renew your Practising Certificate?  Did you believe you would be unable to practise again?
16. Why is the six months subsequent to your dismissal missing from your CV?
17. Why did your boss, Styant-Browne say, and I quote: “the company took a very serious view of these and other matters and accepted her resignation”?
18. What did Mr Styant-Browne mean by “a serious view of these and other matters”?
19. Is Mr Styant-Browne, or Mr Gordon correct?
20. Why was Senior Equity Partner Bernard Murphy asked to make a settlement and leave at the same time as yourself?
21. When your ex-Attorney General Rob McClelland stated in Parliament, “a third party may have benefitted”, was this “third party” referring to you?
22. What did you mean by, “I was treated shabbily”, when you were asked to leave the firm?
23. You refuse to make a statement in the House.  Is it true you realise it would be illegal to lie when so doing?
24. And finally Ms Gillard, how can you profess to be a champion of the working class when you have clearly been complicit, with your boyfriend, in stealing their money?

Now, I don’t expect you to answer all of these, just a few would be good …with the rest you can perform your normal stunt of evasion.

UPDATE X (24 August):  see also “Gillard calls lack basic judgement”, by Geoff Travers:

Laura Tingle [see above, at Update II], a first-year solicitor would know that the transactions Julia Gillard was instructed to carry out by a union official responsible for managing the money of his union members were unusual and had the potential to be suspicious.  The fact that the client was her boyfriend would also have made a junior solicitor refer the matter to another partner to avoid the obvious conflict of interest.

That a solicitor with eight years’ experience, who was a partner of the firm, could not see the potential dangers arising from these instructions beggars belief.  Failing to open a file on the matters to properly record the instructions is also a breach of prudent legal practice.  At the very least it illustrates an appalling lack of judgement.
Slater & Gordon made a perfunctory investigation and appear to have accepted Gillard’s explanations at face value.  Of course, Slater & Gordon had a commercial interest in accepting Gillard’s explanation because, if they did not, they would have had to report her actions to the Law Society and probably to the police.  The resulting scandal would have cost them dearly.  Much better to accept her explanations and have her quietly leave the firm.
These matters are entirely relevant to the electorate’s assessment of Gillard’s judgment and integrity.  Had they been known before she was elected to Parliament, I doubt she would ever have become Prime Minister.
It is an embarrassment having this woman as our Prime Minister.

UPDATE XI (24 August):  you might think that Julia Gillard would have a hard time suggesting that Philippa Martyr must be a misogynist for being less than totally supportive of the PM but, nonetheless, her office is surely giving it a red hot go; see “Hiding Behind Her Own Skirts”, by Philippa Martyr, at Quadrant Online:

I would have more respect for Julia Gillard’s attempt at self-defence yesterday if she hadn’t let herself go with the whole string of name-calling at the end, mixing up Tea Partiers and right-wing nutjobs and all sorts of other bogey-men.  […]
But what really got my goat was that she played the gender card again.  Jules clearly has a problem with being disliked, and she can’t seem to figure out that it’s not because she’s female.  It’s because she’s currently heading the most incompetent and wasteful government in Australia’s history, which has just admitted that the mining boom is over and that they’ve spent all the money.  […]
But let’s humour her for a bit and think about misogyny.  Why does she feel so victimised?
Back when Gillard was a young and naïve industrial relations lawyer with promising Labor Party connections (spot the contradiction in terms), she met a card-carrying, tagged-and-monitored misogynist called Bruce Wilson.
Wilson apparently used her quite badly.  But Gillard seems to have turned a blind eye to the red flags that popped up early on in that relationship—like, for example, Wilson having a wife and children, as well as an alleged series of other lady friends at the same time.  Or his asking her to set up a workplace safety and reform fund which she later described as a re-election slush fund; and then using the money to re-elect himself into a nice house, where there was doubtless plenty of workplace safety and reform while the renovations got done.
Gillard is not the first Labor woman to be screwed both literally and metaphorically by a sexist-pig male unionist.  This is something for which the Left is justifiably famous:  a quick tour round the Sydney ‘Push’ shows the devastation it wreaked in the lives of its female fellow-travellers.  Sexual liberation was strictly one-sided:  it was the women who ended up with the black eyes, the STIs and the repeat abortions.
An even quicker tour round the Craig Thomson Wing of exhibits also affords an insight into the male union boss at play.  Not a pretty sight, is it?  Prostitutes, lavish dinners, binge-drinking, and of course, packing the little woman onto a plane to get her out of the way.
You can say what you like about conservatism being all being tea and scones for the ladies.  Hell, I’d rather have tea and scones than get hung out to dry some twenty-five years later because of my 100% willing and consensual four-year relationship with a corrupt leftie misogynist tool, who is now hiding in rural NSW and refusing to answer any questions that might put me in the clear.

UPDATE XII (25 August):  see Andrew Bolt’s “Fairfax tip: the AWU scandal won’t go away”; and, linked therein, see Peter Harcher’s “PM and a fistful of questions”:

One of the many intriguing aspects of the slush fund scandal that was revived against Julia Gillard this week is that the opposition had almost nothing to do with it.  […]

The opposition was not hawking to the press a dirt file on Gillard. It did not promote the story or brief reporters on the key questions to pursue. It did not use question time, not even once, to pressure her on the matter.  […]

So how did the Prime Minister arrive at the point on Thursday of icily declaring that "I have determined that I will deal with these issues'', ''given we have got to a stage where false and defamatory material is now being recycled in The Australian newspaper," and taking questions from the [ill-prepared and mostly proctoleichous] press gallery until the questions were exhausted.  […]

The watershed moment was when a member of Gillard's own caucus, Robert McClelland, stood in the House on June 21.  McClelland was a widely respected member of the Gillard cabinet and served as her attorney-general before she dumped him.  […]

One of the promoters of the Wilson story is a retired union official called Harry Nowicki.  […]  A former industrial lawyer with the old Builders Labourers Federation, he had decided to write a history of the AWU.  By the time of the McClelland declaration, he had already spent half a year researching the Wilson scandal and Gillard’s relationship to Wilson as lawyer and lover.  He was in close contact with Wilson’s former bagman, Ralph Blewitt.

Nowicki says the McClelland speech was the moment that energised everybody interested in the affair:  “It was when Robert McClelland made a speech—he’s an ex-attorney-general, he’s not some underground figure.  I spoke to him, he vaguely remembered me as an industrial officer.  Rob was disturbed—any lawyer looking at that union and what happened is uncomfortable.’

Nowicki and Blewitt spoke to [The Australian’s Hedley] Thomas “and we convinced him there was more to it”.  So the reason the Wilson affair returned to haunt Gillard this week, according to Nowicki, is “the McClelland trigger, followed by Hedley”.

Nowicki and Blewitt are hunting for documents.  Nowicki takes this matter so seriously that he has retained a Melbourne criminal barrister, Peter Faris, to compile a brief of evidence on the Wilson scandal.  Nowicki has asked him to “look at two things—professional misconduct of Julia Gillard and Slater & Gordon, and who might be liable to criminal charges” over the matter.  He says he can afford this level of investigative legal diligence because he is “comfortably well off”.  […]

Indeed, Gillard has now turbocharged this affair.  She has elevated it to a legitimate subject of prime ministerial scrutiny.  She said she would not lower herself to answer any future questions.  But no matter how resolutely she tries to tough this out, new material and new questions will not stop coming.

UPDATE XIII (25 August):  see “Media’s shameful silence” by Hedley Thomas, in The Australian:

One week ago, the grand sum of information on which most Australians could reasonably rely to make informed judgments about the conduct of Julia Gillard—before she embarked on a career in the political arena—was divided into four vastly different blocs.

The first of these is Australia’s mainstream news and documentary media, the journalists responsible for the first draft of history.  In particular, Fairfax Media’s The Age (because of Gillard’s residency in Melbourne), News Limited’s Herald Sun, the ABC, and The Australian.

It is important to include in this bloc the Canberra parliamentary press gallery because of the understandable public interest in exploring the past deeds, and misdeeds, of political leaders.

This mainstream-media bloc is the most influential.  Its market penetration and capacity to inform millions of people, from the tip of Cape York in Queensland to the southernmost town of Tasmania, means it needs to be the most accurate and diligent.

The next bloc produced the important narratives that sit on bookshelves and in libraries as a ready reference.  It includes the official biographies and curriculum vitae, and author Jacqueline Kent’s book The Making of Julia Gillard.  Its penetration is limited to the number of people who have bought or borrowed the book, perhaps measured in the tens of thousands.  It is supposed to stand the test of time as a reliable document of truth.

The third bloc is the blogosphere with its a mish-mash of websites.  Some can be fair and informative, others are vile and malicious in their recycling of unattributed innuendo without regard for defamation, public interest and balance.  It is difficult to know how many read them, or how widely the email links are distributed, but when viral, the hits will be enormous.

The fourth bloc with a stake in the sum of knowledge about the conduct of Gillard when she was a salaried partner in a prominent Melbourne law firm is made up of those directly in the know.  These are the true insiders who were there at Slater & Gordon at the time, in 1995, and involved in significant events that have long been concealed.  They would number little more than a handful, not including those whom they have told in confidence.

One of those insiders, Nick Styant-Browne, lanced a boil last week.  He made a decision to impart long-concealed information about the conduct of the Prime Minister.  He determined that it was in the public interest for Australians who have a direct stake in the country's leadership to know truths that have been tightly held by a handful of people since 1995.  He asked The Weekend Australian and this journalist to help him impart this information.  He did it in the midst of a raging, nasty internet campaign against Ms Gillard.

In his own careful, reserved statement, Styant-Browne, a former equity partner of Slater & Gordon who has been practising law in Seattle for the past decade, revealed astonishing facts from primary-source documents about Gillard.  They were facts about which my mainstream media colleagues—the hundreds of journalists informing 20 million Australians—should have been inquisitive, and intensely interested in developing.

Styant-Browne's disclosures in this newspaper last Saturday, were these.  After an internal probe at the firm in 1995, Gillard left her job as a direct result of the controversial work she had done for her then boyfriend, a union boss accused of corruption.  A tape-recorded interview was conducted; a transcript existed.

In it, Gillard could not categorically rule out that she had personally benefited from union funds in the renovation of her Melbourne home.  Her partners “took a very serious view” of her conduct, particularly her failure to open a file on her legal work in establishing an incorporated association, which she admitted in the 1995 interview was a “slush fund” to raise money for union officials to contest elections.  The association had a misleading name, the Australian Workers Union Workplace Reform Association, which meant nobody could have understood it was a “slush fund”.  Because of her failure to open a file, the Slater & Gordon partnership did not know of its existence for three years, despite Gillard’s having set it up for her then boyfriend, Bruce Wilson, and his mate, bagman Ralph Blewitt, both of whom were AWU branch secretaries.

The AWU did not know about it either, despite the AWU’s being Slater & Gordon’s client.  The AWU’s national leadership was in the dark for a further seven months after Gillard's abrupt departure in September 1995, amid police investigations trying to account for hundreds of thousands of dollars that went through the slush fund that Gillard had created.  She believed she had been treated shabbily by the firm, and strenuously and repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Importantly, at no time in the past 17 years has the Australian public been informed of these remarkable circumstances surrounding Gillard’s conduct.  Not by the mainstream media nor the authors nor the political insiders in Canberra and Melbourne.

The country knew next to nothing of how she parted ways with Slater & Gordon; of how, in documents, there existed a detailed account of a scandal that caused two journalists to lose their jobs last year for their attempts to investigate.

It is not possible to look back on how Styant-Browne, his revelations, and the messenger, The Australian, were managed over this past week without reflecting on the work of journalists who claim to represent their readership, their listeners, or their viewers.  On the ABC and in Fairfax newspapers, senior and influential commentators spent days trying to reposition the revelations by conflating them with the ugly campaign in the blogosphere or pretending there was little or nothing new.

Influential media leaders such as Michelle Grattan from The Age, and Fran Kelly of the ABC, appeared reluctant to engage on a story about the most powerful politician in the country, even though they had missed the story, or just not reported it, despite privileged positions in Canberra.

Less experienced journalists took their cue, and instead of leaping on obvious news angles that could be developed to add to the sum total of knowledge, stalled.  Widely read website Crikey.com’s reporter Andrew Crook wrote a story suggesting a grand Liberal Party conspiracy because Styant-Browne’s nephew’s de facto sister-in-law (whose name he could not immediately recall) works in social policy in a Liberal Party office.

A number of journalists betrayed their political colours and connections with enthusiasm to ignore or deflect Styant-Browne's disclosures, so as to give the Prime Minister a glowing endorsement.  In this way, they distorted what was an already carefully worded media release from Slater & Gordon, and prepared a counter-narrative: the evil Murdoch empire was at it again.

Readers, viewers and listeners were told falsely that these were old allegations about the Prime Minister, and that she had dealt with them so many times in the past, or that they were old stories being reheated from blogs, or they were not worthy of the national daily, or they were not legitimate, anyway.

There were exceptions outside the News Limited stable, of course.  Clear thinkers [ha!] such as Tony Jones, of the ABC’s Lateline, his 7.30 colleague Chris Uhlmann, and Fairfax’s political reporter, Lenore Taylor.  But by then the ground was shifting, Slater & Gordon was spinning, and the Prime Minister’s Office was in crisis.

The material released by Styant-Browne grew exponentially on Tuesday because of his concern that his old firm, Slater & Gordon, was trying to protect the position of the Prime Minister.  So a tightly held draft statement that he had been preparing with Peter Gordon suddenly became public.  More detail, more truths.  Gordon, although furious it had been leaked, conceded it contained only “minor inaccuracies”.

In this new, unvarnished draft of the earlier history of Australia’s Prime Minister, Gordon wrote that the firm had considered termination because her relationship with the firm's partners had “fractured, and trust and confidence evaporated”.  He added that he gave her the benefit of the doubt, but “the partnership was extremely unhappy with Gillard considering that proper vigilance had not been observed and that [her] duties of utmost good faith to [her] partners especially as to timely disclosure had not been met.  Ms Gillard elected to resign and we accepted her resignation without discussion.”
Affronted by an attempt to gag him, Styant-Browne released a legal letter he had received that morning from Arnold Bloch Leibler, acting for both Slater & Gordon and Peter Gordon, stating:  “These issues are serious and my clients and I genuinely hope that they can be resolved amicably, discreetly and quickly.”
On Wednesday, the 25-page transcript popped out.  It was a mine of information.  It was Gillard, in her own words, explaining her conduct as a partner shortly before she had to go.  But something else was growing in momentum.  Significant sections of Australia’s media, in my view, showed they lacked the will and the wit to deal with the truth [and that’s putting it mildly].
They did not pursue it doggedly without fear or favour; they increasingly questioned whether it was even legitimate and worked overtime to downplay it.
They saved their worst for Thursday when the Prime Minister seized on a trivial error by my colleague at The Australian who had incorrectly reported in an inconsequential page 6 colour story that Gillard had established a “trust fund”, not a “slush fund”.   Gillard beat this nothing typo into something that a child would see as inflated nonsense.
She then reached out to journalists too naïve or intellectually dishonest to call it for what it was—a desperate, craven deflection.
The Prime Minister used journalists to shoot the messenger, and at a time of threatened media regulation, they obliged and pulled the trigger.

UPDATE XIV (25 August):  see also the Editorial, “Gillard opens a file on spin”, an editorial in The Australian:

Gullibility and incuriosity are not ideal traits if your job [be] to hold politicians to account on behalf of the public.

The journalists of the Canberra Press Gallery have a special privilege and responsibility in our democratic processes and this week many of them showed how they sometimes failed.  After stonewalling detailed and serious questions from The Australian, Julia Gillard decided finally to confront the issues surrounding the end of her legal career at Slater & Gordon in 1995.  Her tactics were as clever as they were transparent.  The Prime Minister had spotted a clear but relatively minor error in a page six corollary story to our investigations into the affair.  Our reporter referred to a “trust” fund when he should have written “slush” fund—you be the judge.  Having demanded and received an apology, Ms Gillard decided to go on the attack, accuse this newspaper of recycling “false and defamatory” information, conflate our coverage with a vicious online blogger’s efforts and try to put the issue to bed.
While she performed strongly in taking questions for about an hour, she still had not responded to careful and fair questions submitted in writing by our investigative reporter, Hedley Thomas.  Ms Gillard threw herself at the mercy of journalists whose insights were limited to what they had read in the paper.  Some of the key questions were asked, some not.  Indisputably, she confirmed the key elements of Thomas’s revelations:  at the behest of her lover, Bruce Wilson, she had established a union slush fund; it had not been officially described as such; she had not opened a file at the firm on the matter or notified other lawyers; her firm was concerned about this and conducted a formal interview over the affair; she resigned soon afterwards.  This is all particularly controversial because (without Ms Gillard’s knowledge [she claims]) the fund was then used by Mr Wilson and Ralph Blewitt to syphon union funds.  When Ms Gillard became aware [she claims] of the alleged corruption, she ended her relationship with Mr Wilson.  We do not know what other action she took, if any, to alert authorities.
The Prime Minister has not attacked The Sydney Morning Herald for reporting on Thursday that she might have broken the law—something this newspaper has never alleged.  Yet, astoundingly, their political editor Peter Hartcher accuses The Australian of being “dedicated to the destruction” of the Government.  The Age also has been spared Ms Gillard’s wrath, despite following our reports with accounts of its own.  But then, commentary by its political editor, Michelle Grattan, has seemingly sought to build a bridge with the Prime Minister ever since suggesting in April that she should resign.  Many journalist have accepted the invitation to move on.  At the ABC, political host Barrie Cassidy has demanded journalists place Tony Abbott under more scrutiny.  Yet he argues Ms Gillard should face less.  Perhaps instead of writing about journalism, he ought to practise some.

UPDATE XV (25 August):  elsewhere in The Australian, the fawning, soi-disant academic, Peter van Onselen, who bends over backwards to cater to any demand of the PM, promises to hold his breath, or to scream really loudly, until he turns blue, unless all of us agree that the PM is very, very good, and has nothing to defend, and everyone should just shut up already and, and, and, anyway, other like-minded apologists for this corrupt Government agree with him, so there!

Graham Richardson (a Gillard critic, to be sure) says that he won’t be revisiting the issue.  This paper's political editor, Dennis Shanahan, said the PM performed well, as did The Sydney Morning Herald’s political editor, Peter Hartcher.
The political editor for The Age, Michelle Grattan, described the PM’s defence as “credible”, adding that “this affair has been raked over sufficiently”. Sky’s political editor David Speers said the PM had finally drawn a line under this issue.

 This dopy Peter van Onselen is actually a professor at a real university.

UPDATE XVI (25 August):  see “Did Gillard see this cheque?” and “Cassidy and the perils of trusting Gillard”, both by Andrew Bolt.

UPDATE XVII (25 August):  one of the most partisan and incompetent hacks on television, Paul Bongiorno, who would obsequiously lick the PM’s arse at every opportunity (and named by most colleagues, behind his back, as Bumjourno), likes Peter van Onselen’s groveling drivel (see the fifteenth update) and endorses “every word”:

Every word?  What, even “we’ve all been there!” dealing with home renovations?  (I, for one, have never had any dealings with home renovations and paying therefor.)  Even this: “There would hardly be a law partner anywhere in the country who had not done similarly [i.e., act incompetently and unlawfully] at some point in time, for a friend or a family member”?

UPDATE XVIII (26 August):  Andrew Bolt, in “Will Atkins go as Milne did?”, notes that Glenn Milne was sacked from the ABC’s “Insiders” after (and, perhaps, because) he claimed that Julia Gillard had actually lived with Bruce Wilson (though she probably did) whereas Dennis Atkins (another apologist for ALP members who conspire to defraud unions), who has made the same claim, has not been sacked from “Insiders”.

UPDATE XIX (26 August):  see Natalie O’Brien’s “The men behind the PM’s hellish week” in The Age:

It was two retired lawyers from Melbourne who sparked a fresh examination of the 17-year-old Australian Workers Union funds scandal that has long stalked Julia Gillard.

Harry Nowicki, a former personal injuries lawyer who worked for the now defunct Builders Labourers Federation, and Richard Thomas, formerly a prominent lawyer with Arnold Thomas & Becker who did some work for the AWU in Victoria, say they joined forces in an effort to finally get to the truth about the scandal.

The pair reject Ms Gillard’s assertions on Thursday that the present allegations are nothing more than a smear campaign being driven by “misogynists” and “nutjobs'”.

'“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Mr Thomas said.  “In fact, it all started again publicly when one of her own ministers [Robert McClelland] raised it in Parliament.”

The lawyers, who have been investigating the union for months, said the questions were coming from within the labour movement.  “People want to get rid of the past,” Mr Thomas said.  “They want the Labor Party to be squeaky clean and not controlled by faceless men and unions.”

The men say that, like Watergate, it is not the scandal itself but the subsequent cover-up over AWU funds that is the problem.  […]

Mr Nowicki began researching the AWU for a book.  When he discovered a lot more information about Mr Wilson’s time as an AWU organiser and the alleged scam of taking money from construction companies, he asked Mr Thomas to help him dig a bit deeper.  “I couldn’t believe it when I saw what Harry had unearthed,” Mr Thomas said.

Also in The Age, the overpaid Annabel Crabb sees the opportunity for humour in the scandal, but fails to write any:

For years, theorists on the Case of the Dodgy Boyfriend have hinted darkly at untold riches accruing to Ms Gillard.  And now we know exactly what she got out of it; a low brick wall that she hated.  This tells us that even if Ms Gillard was an orchestrated fraudster, which she is not, she was kind of a hopeless one.  Does that make it better or worse?  I don’t know.

Notice that Crabb is happy to accept the unsupported word of our duplicitous PM.

Some other impressions spring to mind from a reading of the transcript [edited, by The Australian, of her interview with Slater & Gordon partners, Peter Gordon and Geoff Shaw]; the scope and ambition of Ms Gillard’s terrible taste in blokes, for one thing.

The suspicion that the Prime Minister’s electoral fortunes in her seat of Lalor, where nearly 10 per cent of constituents speak Greek, are in for a slight downturn, for another.

And a quiet sense of amazement that more didn’t go wrong with Building the Education Revolution, given the future education minister’s cack-handed project management of her own renovation.

This is not to suggest that the above conclusions themselves are not bothersome.

Given the option of calumny [!] or foolishness in a prime minister, clearly the only prudent choice is “none of the above”.

UPDATE XX (26 August):  well worth reading in full is “Our PM, a congenital lawyer”, by Alan R.M. Jones, at Quadrant Online:

Julia Gillard’s hasty presser on Thursday (Aug. 23) revealed much more about the unprepared press gallery than it did of her “young and naïve” role in the AWU’s fraud and racketeering scandal.  […]
Divorced from her pitch-perfect self-righteous indignation as a woman scorned—with a “very robust sense of her own integrity” no less—her media conference’s transcript represents an exercise in dissembling, with its carefully parsed and practiced answers.  Not one of her responses conveyed the comfortable candour expected of one at ease with the truth.  […]
Gillard is not even consistent within the same media conference [though the reporters there failed to perceive this].  Near the end of the conference, Gillard states, “it’s 17 years ago.  I don’t have a clear recollection about those matters,” when asked if at the time she believed “her future was on the line at Slater & Gordon?”  So which is it:  is her memory clear as a bell and Styant-Browne’s recollections need to be questioned, or is it that she cannot remember?  Clearly she hasn’t got her story straight and only one version of her departure from Slater & Gordon is true.

See “Factional rats in Labor’s ranks behind smear campaign, writes Samantha Maiden”, by, unsurprisingly, Samantha Maiden, in The Sunday Telegraph.  See also “Union bagman: I didn’t know I had home loan”, by Natalie O’Brien:

The self-confessed union bagman, Ralph Blewitt—the legal owner of a terrace house in Fitzroy allegedly purchased using misappropriated Australian Workers Union funds—has claimed that he never knew he had a housing loan for the property.

UPDATE XXI (26 August):  Shane Dowling, of Kangaroo Court of Australia, writes:

There is enough evidence to charge Julia Gillard [with] concealing a serious indictable offence, which carries a jail term of two years.  Julia Gillard has dared anyone to make allegations against her, I have before and will again.  In this post I make out the prima facie case against Julia Gillard.

UPDATE XXII (27 August):  in the eighth part of his “Is the Prime Minister a Crook?” series, “Peeling back the putrid layers”, Larry Pickering has more questions to put to the PM, and more serious allegations to make:

WA newspaper archives show Bruce Wilson travelled to Boulder/Kalgoorlie in 1992 to attempt to allay union members' concerns about his decision to transfer the management of large sums of union members’ money to a new AWU account in Northbridge, Perth.  […]
Wilson knew he would never convince members of the legitimacy of the proposed move himself.  So he introduced to the stage a person of high legal authority to assure union members there was no need for concern.
The person he introduced was Julia Gillard.  Members were unaware Gillard was his lover.  She was presented as an important Industrial Lawyer from Victoria and an official representative of the Labor stalwart law firm, Slater & Gordon.
Gillard addressed union members at length explaining why the money should be moved and that there was nothing to worry about.  She insisted the members were in the good hands of Slater & Gordon and their best interests would at all times be protected.
Gillard must have done an excellent job because the account containing approximately $1 million was shifted to a private Northbridge, Perth account.  […]
Three years later, police were asked by incoming AWU State Secretary, Tim Daly, to investigate one amount of $145,000 withdrawn from “The Goldfields Fatal Accident and Death Fund” to buy two holiday units in Kalbarri.  […]  Despite the WA Major Fraud Squad's Detective David McAlpine’s keenness to lay charges, it didn't happen.  The Kalbarri holiday units, were subsequently sold.  Again the laundered money vanished.  It was only the tip of a very large iceberg.
Wilson was also negotiating a “Workplace Reform Agreement” with Thiess at their Dawesville (Mandurah) site.  He had invoiced Thiess himself for 220 hours worked per month, every month, at a rate of $36.00 per hour. But did not on any occasion even visit the site.
Thiess raised cheques on each of Wilson’s invoices.  Each cheque was deposited in, and promptly withdrawn from, the sham Northbridge account.  This is commonly known as a “secret commission”. It is highly illegal.  […]  Although the WA Police wanted Blewitt and Wilson charged they could not convince Thiess to co-operate.  […]
The question that must be asked, and will soon be answered, is how could Gillard have been Wilson's lover for over four years and not know what was going on?  He carried a wad of notes that would choke a horse and was purchasing multiple properties for cash with extorted funds.  […]  Convincing workers in Boulder to part with their hard-earned funeral savings to buy holiday units and she didn’t know?  […]  To say she didn't know beggars belief.  Either she is a simpleton (which she is not) or she is treating us as simpletons.  The latest photo depicts her as definitely not blonde and she was an industrial lawyer and partner in the most notorious law firm in the land.  She didn’t know what she, or he, was doing?
When Gillard acrimoniously broke-up with Wilson, she was more familiar with his scams than poor Blewitt.  So, why didn't she go to the police?  […]  So, why are police never successful in prosecuting union fraud cases?  Simply because union bosses and developers refuse to cooperate.  […]
The glacial HSU East branch investigation by the union-dominated FWA is testimony to the futility of expecting delinquent crooks to investigate delinquent crooks.  […]
We “nut-job, sexist misogynists” are really not supposed to ask these questions?  Not one has been answered.  […]
Criminal elements, like small fish Craig Thomson (who had Gillard’s “full confidence” until the bitter end), are deeply embedded in the ALP.  They are protected by the ALP and their court costs are covered by the ALP via the unions.  HSU’s Williamson has ripped $20 million from lowly paid workers.  […]
The main protector from union prosecution is Bill Shorten, another product of a Left wing law firm.  He has successfully shut down the HSU investigation by sequestrating the union and is currently busy trying to bury the AWU/Gillard/Wilson investigation.

UPDATE XXIII (27 August):  see “How Gillard tricked the ABC and Age – and was forgiven”, by Andrew Bolt. 

UPDATE XXIV (27 August):  as he promised last week, Michael Smith has begun releasing documents relating to the Gillard/AWU scandal at his website, Michael Smith News.

UPDATE XXV (27 August):  Michael Smith has added more documentation:  “The AWU Scandal – where did the money come from?”, “The AWU Scandal – who in the union knew about it”, and “The AWU Scandal – Whose Handwriting is Where”.

UPDATE XXVI (28 August):  see Andrew Bolt’s “Why didn’t Gillard tell authorities it really was a slush fund?”. 

UPDATE XXVII (28 August):  see “Shooting the Messengers”, by Paul Zanetti, at The Pickering Post. 

UPDATE XXVIII (28 August):  Jonathan Holmes, of “Media Watch”, neglects to ask the alleged journalists of the Canberra press gallery why they weren’t able to ask Julia Gillard sufficiently searching questions about the AWU scandal last week, and neglects also to question them why they so quickly and gullibly accept any specious assertion the PM offers in her own defence, but he does ask Hedley Thomas why that exemplary reporter thought investigating the questionable integrity of a deceptive prime minister was at all appropriate; for good, detailed responses from Thomas to questions from Holmes, in a PDF, see “Hedley Thomas’s response to Media Watch’s questions”.

UPDATE XXIX (28 August):  Michael Smith continues to add more documents on the AWU scandal:  “my questions to the PM of last year”, “the role of the $67,722.30 cheque”, “paying for the house”, and “the Slater and Gordon Trust Account General Ledger”.  UPDATE XXX (29 August):  added thereto is “Slush me”, and (XXXI) “The Mortgage to Blewitt”, and (XXXII) “Fun with Other People’s Money [part 1]”, and “Fun with Other People’s Money, part 2’, and (XXXIII) “the boys get sprung”, and “Wilson Charged”.

UPDATE XXXIV (29 August):  Larry Pickering has added another post, “Rudd leaks on Gillard” to his Facebook page.

UPDATE XXXV (29 August):  Michael Smith has added another post to his site: “The AWU Scandal – the other Slater and Gordon Partner”.

UPDATE XXXVI (30 August):  Andrew Bolt asks, “Which journalists blame themselves for Gillard’s, er, ‘wrong things’?”.

UPDATE XXXVII (30 August):  Michael Smith has added more posts to his “AWU Scandal” series:  “Bill Ludwig and Bruce Wilson”, “Bruce Goes with the Money”, and “Bill Gets the Money Back – But What About Bruce?”.

UPDATE XXXVIII (1 September):  posted on Larry Pickering’s Facebook site, is “Why Gillard picked on Pickering”, by Angus Whittaker:

Only a few months back, when it became obvious media were being gagged by Gillard, an enraged Pickering started blogging.  He was computer-illiterate but somehow figured it out.
In the space of a few months he was off and running with a following greater than he ever had in newspapers.
The Press stayed well clear of Gillard’s dubious past.  There were a few bloggers around but they were unsophisticated and without traction.  Then Pickering gave the story some legs the media could no longer ignore.
His cartoons are rude and uncensored but he knows how to grab attention.  He portrays Gillard with a sex aid.  His whimsical stories on the Wilson/Gillard scandal immediately caught the attention of those who were previously unaware of it.

UPDATE XXXIX (4 September):  Michael Smith posts more important material, such as “Fun With Other People's Money”, with more documents and details which expose Hon. Julia Gillard as someone who must surely be prosecuted.

UPDATE XL (5 September):  we close with a link to Michael Smith’s latest document in his “AWU Scandal” series: “Gillard and her Partners Massive Fail”.

UPDATE XLI (22 March, 2013):  site statistics inform me that some readers wish to know the meaning of  Τετέλεσται, the ancient Greek for “it is fulfilled”, being the perfect middle/passive third singular of τελέω, “I fulfil”.  (See also John, xix: 30.)