PM and a fistful of questions
DateAugust 25, 2012
Peter Hartcher
No matter how resolutely Julia Gillard tries to tough this one out, she will remain under intense scrutiny.
inShare. Pin ItEmail articlePrint .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.
In the annals of scandal-based attempts to embarrass or pressure prime ministers, this makes it as rare as a blue diamond, but nowhere near as attractive.
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. These are the time-honoured hallmarks of an opposition-led assault; they were missing this week.
Tony Abbott did egg the media on by repeatedly telling reporters, when asked, that the Prime Minister had questions to answer. But he did not specify any, even when invited to. He was a bystander enjoying the spectacle and cheering it on, but not a participant.
Joe Hockey was being quite truthful yesterday when he told Channel Seven "it's not something we have been involved with, I must say. This has been coming from a range of different sources."
It wasn't for lack of access to the material. The scandal itself is an old one. Seventeen years old. A number of tireless promoters have been supplying briefings and dirt files to Coalition frontbenchers on it for years. Among those supplied were Eric Abetz, Nick Minchin, Barnaby Joyce and George Brandis.
So why didn't the Coalition make use of it? It looks like a perfect opportunity. The Prime Minster's previous life was as a lawyer at Slater & Gordon, traditionally the law firm of choice for trade unions.
And one of her clients, the Australian Workers Union, was and is one of the biggest. She made the mistake of taking the Victorian secretary of the union, Bruce Wilson, as her lover. So he was both her client and her boyfriend.
Wilson and his bagman, Ralph Blewitt, were forced out of the union amid accusations that they stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from a fund-raising vehicle, the AWU Workplace Reform Association.
He told Gillard it was a slush fund for his own re-election in the union, on her account. Instead, he allegedly used the money to buy himself a house.
How was Gillard involved? As his lawyer, she gave him legal advice in setting up this vehicle, the Workplace Reform Association, as an incorporated entity. As his lover, she went along to the auction with him to buy the house. She happened to be making renovations to her own house around the same time. She left Slater & Gordon soon after Wilson was forced out of the AWU.
There are some obvious questions for Gillard here. Did she know about his alleged fraud? Did she knowingly abet theft in any way?
When Wilson was allegedly stealing the money and Gillard was renovating her house, did any of the money find its way into her renovations? That is, did she benefit personally from any of the allegedly stolen funds?
Gillard's firm and consistent answer across the years is ''no'' to all questions. She has often been accused through the years, but no evidence against her has been produced.
But these questions were reopened this week when The Australian ran a series of articles by Hedley Thomas revisiting the matter, and adding some new information.
It looked like a perfect opportunity for the opposition to embarrass Gillard because it reminds the public of the intimate relations between Labor and the union movement, because it reminds the public of union corruption, and because it allows the opposition a new way to accentuate the old theme of Gillard's trustworthiness.
Why pass up the chance? There are three reasons that the opposition chose to sit this one out.
First, it was wary of running hard against a prime minister in an effort to embarrass her over a matter of personal conduct. The Liberal Party remembers only too clearly what happened to Malcolm Turnbull when Utegate blew up in his face.
Second, no political party has a monopoly on the politics of personal destruction. If Abbott had decided to pursue Gillard over her past private life, it would have invited retaliation from Labor.
But third is the fact that, after examining all the material, the opposition decided that there was no damning new evidence against Gillard. It looked bad, it was murky, but there was no hard evidence of a crime or misconduct.
Indeed, it was not only the opposition that drew this conclusion. The Australian's Hedley Thomas, author of this week's series on Gillard and Wilson, wrote an article on September 17 last year saying: "The Weekend Australian has examined thousands of pages of documentation and conducted numerous interviews to test long-standing allegations … that Ms Gillard - as a junior partner at the Melbourne law firm Slater & Gordon - was involved in wrongdoing by her then boyfriend, Mr Wilson.
"None of the material examined is capable of supporting the claims that Ms Gillard was a beneficiary of ill-gotten funds or that she knew at the time that Mr Wilson was involved in alleged fraud."
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 press gallery until the questions were exhausted.
Something had changed. And it wasn't the opposition. It was in what Hockey had called "a range of different sources". What was it?
It was not the people whom Gillard described as "the misogynists and the nut jobs on the internet" who run a fevered, full-time hate campaign against her. That is a constant.
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.
Now speaking in his capacity as a backbencher, he rose to address the subject of a bill to crack down on fraud by union officials. In full knowledge of what he was doing, he committed an act of political bastardry against his leader:
"I never want to see a dollar that a worker gives a union used for any purpose other than the proper purposes of representing that union member's best interests," he said. "Indeed, I know the Prime Minister is quite familiar with this area of the law; as lawyers in the mid-1990s, we were involved in a matter representing opposing clients."
He had just revived the unmentionable matter of the Wilson scandal, the subject Gillard had spent 17 years trying to live down. Now McClelland talked it up:
"Indeed, my involvement in that matter has coloured much of my thinking in this area and resulted in me moving amendments on September 17, 2002, to actually strengthen the powers of the Federal Court of Australia."
The shadow attorney-general, George Brandis, called this "most significant," and he was right. Privately, McClelland told colleagues that he fully intended to give Gillard a punch in the nose.
It was a clear signal that he was joining the destabilisation of Gillard. It was a declaration that the Wilson affair was now fair game. And it was an invitation to others to reopen the matter, to use it against Gillard, and to receive the blessing and support of at least a part of the Labor Party.
One of the promoters of the Wilson story is a retired union official called Harry Nowicki. We'll be hearing more of Nowicki in the months to come.
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 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".
The opposition didn't need to bestir itself. With an entire ecosystem of anti-Gillard activists, dedicated promoters of the Wilson scandal like Nowicki and Blewitt, a split and bitter Labor caucus, and the anti-Gillard agenda of The Australian, this affair is not going to fade away.
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.
Peter Hartcher is the political editor
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