Julie Bishop - Member for Curtin

2GB Breakfast with Alan Jones

30 November 2012

Subjects: AWU slush fund

E&OE…

ALAN JONES      Well the lady who’s done all the heavy lifting this week and done it with great dignity is the West Australian MP and deputy leader of the opposition Julie Bishop.
 
She gained her law degree from Adelaide University. She became a partner in an Adelaide law firm at 26. She then went to Perth and worked as a lawyer at Clayton Utz specialising in commercial litigation. She was elected in 1994 managing partner of the Perth office of Clayton Utz which then had 27 partners and about 200 staff. She won the seat of Curtin at the general election in 1998. So she’s highly credentialed for the forensic job she undertook this week. 

There were two groups of people in the Parliament this week and we can focus both of them on leadership. Because Julie Bishop is a trained lawyer and has exceptional forensic skills she handled all but a couple of the questions for four days. It’s a mammoth task, but it almost has to be done by one person because you’ve got to marshal all the material, you’ve got to have continuity in the questioning and you have to organise your strategy in such a way that one question leads into another. 

The key though, was the dignity shown by Julie Bishop and her leader Tony Abbott in the face of appalling language by the Prime Minister and some others on the other side. They were unruffled and unrattled and I can’t remember hearing them raise their voice, Julie Bishop or Tony Abbott. Julie Bishop, simply and courteously asked the questions, she invariably was met with the rankest discourtesy that has ever been heard in the National Parliament. I have never heard in my life anything worse.
 
We saw a Prime Minister this week, who as I have already said, debased herself by her behaviour,  demeaned the office of speaker, demeaned the processes of Parliament, demeaned the function of question time which is to illicit answers and she answered nothing, demeaned democracy, with the Prime Minister carrying on as if the electorate weren’t entitled to answers to the questions that Julie Bishop asked and of course over all of this with people in the public gallery, she demeaned the office of Prime Minister.
 
No one witnessing this could possibly believe how this woman got to where she is, how Australia could possibly tolerate this behaviour. The Speaker, admittedly a Labor Party woman, but a good natured woman, Anna Burke, constantly tried to bring the Prime Minister back to answering questions. She was ignored. In the history of Australian Parliaments I can’t conceive of a week in which the Parliament has witnessed anything worse.
 
I’ve asked Julie Bishop to join me this morning. She’s in the studio.
 
Good morning, thank you for your time.
 
JULIE BISHOP    Good morning Alan.
 
ALAN JONES      Have you ever had a meal with Julia Gillard?
 
JULIE BISHOP    No.
 
ALAN JONES      Do you feel affronted by her language and her behaviour?
 
JULIE BISHOP    I was deeply frustrated by the events of this week. I have come to accept that the Prime Minister refuses to answer questions in question time. But I would have thought questions that went to her very integrity, her professional standards, her ethics, her fitness to be Prime Minister would have been an opportunity for her to respond in an appropriate way to questions that only she knows the answer. And yet on each occasion she stonewalled in a most frustrating episode, not only for the Coalition, but for the Australian people.
 
And might I say Alan, at the heart of this is a massive fraud that was committed against the Australia’s Workers Union, almost a million dollars, and none of that money has been recovered and it seems no one is accountable.
 
ALAN JONES      No one’s accountable, no one knows what’s gone on. On one occasion, she virtually told the opposition to answer their own question. ‘Well answer it yourself’, then sat down. I’ve never seen anything like this in the Parliament.
 
JULIE BISHOP    Likewise, I’ve also rarely seen a Speaker have to intervene to sit the Prime Minister down. That happened on a couple of occasions during the week. And it wouldn’t be easy for Anna Burke to publicly humiliate the Prime Minister in that way, but she did.
 
ALAN JONES      If you criticise Julia Gillard it’s sleaze and smear. This is the woman who seems to have a PHD in sleaze and smear, whether it’s Mr Blewitt she’s attacking or you or Tony Abbott it’s misogyny, Tony Abbott douchebag, being Jack the Ripper. She’s smeared you for having a meeting with Mr Blewitt when Mr Blewitt was a friend of hers and an accomplice of her boyfriend for four years.
 
JULIE BISHOP    Well in fact he’s the whistleblower and when there was an opportunity to meet him, which I did for about 10 minutes - he’d just been to the police, he’d just made a confession to the police about his role in this fraud, incriminating himself - I had the opportunity to ask this whistleblower if he had the documents that have mysteriously gone missing from Perth offices, from Slater and Gordon, from the New South Wales registry, he didn’t, so I left it at that. But for some reason my 10 minutes with Mr Blewitt is far worse than four years of Julia Gillard’s close personal friendship with him.
 
ALAN JONES      If Julia Gillard has never done anything wrong as she argues. You’ve been a managing partner, you know the processes, you know the gravity when a managing partner calls in a junior partner and decides to record that interview. Why was she summoned to a partners meeting, which was recorded by Slater and Gordon and subsequently left their employment?
 
JULIE BISHOP    Slater and Gordon uncovered the beginnings of the massive fraud and realised that Julia Gillard as the partner had not only set up the bogus organisation, but had taken part in the conveyance which meant money from this slush fund went into a house occupied by her boyfriend and when the firm realised that they were a party to it they called her in to essentially sack her.
 
Alan, had I been the managing partner of Slater and Gordon at that time, I would have sacked her on the spot, I would have reported her to the professional standards board in Victoria, I would have told the AWU that a massive fraud had been perpetrated against it, after all the AWU was the client, and I would have ensured that the police had been alerted. As it was, none of that happened and it wasn’t for another five or six months before the AWU found out and reported it to the police. By that time, the house had been sold and the moneys had disappeared.
 
ALAN JONES      Why has the Law Society of Victoria, even to this point, done nothing?
 
JULIE BISHOP    She’s never practised law again. Presumably as part of the deal to leave Slater and Gordon was to hand over her practising certificate and never practice law again.
 
ALAN JONES      So would she be allowed to practice law again in Victoria?
 
JULIE BISHOP    If these matters were brought to the attention of the appropriate authorities in Victoria I would imagine she could never practice law again.
 
ALAN JONES      So she could never practice law in Victoria, but she can be the Prime Minister of Australia? That seems a mammoth contradiction to many.
 
JULIE BISHOP    Well that’s because this was not investigated at the time by the appropriate authorities. If the law council, or the legal practice board, were obviously not told of this then even though the AWU officials were calling for a Royal Commission at the time, nothing seems to have happened.
 
ALAN JONES      If she’s done nothing wrong, why do the Government time after time after time, refuse to allow you to table documents which would have proved the validity of your case and put all of those things on the public record?
 
JULIE BISHOP    Precisely, Alan precisely. Julia Gillard kept demanding that I prove she broke the law, that I prove she was unethical. I tried to table the documents, some of them in her own handwriting and many of them from her firm’s files, and yet they refused to allow me to table them so that they could be on the public record and people could judge for themselves.
 
ALAN JONES      You’ve constantly said, she’s constantly said this week that you, Julie Bishop, haven’t one shred of evidence against her, you’ve come into the Parliament, you’ve pedalled rumour and hearsay, sleaze and smear and that’s been her unending defence. But she’s admitted providing legal advice to Mr Wilson and his union colleague Mr Blewitt to set up this association.
 
You’re a lawyer, in providing legal advice, aren’t you obligated to point out to the person you are advising that what they are contemplating is illegal?
 
JULIE BISHOP    Absolutely. What she did was she gave her then boyfriend, who also happened to be an official of the Australian Worker’s Union which was a client of her firm in its own right, she gave her boyfriend advice on how to set up an association in the name of the Australian Workers Union, but she had no authority from the union to do that.
 
The Commissioner for Corporate Affairs in Western Australia, where they wanted to register this bogus organisation, would not allow a body to be incorporated in the name, the Australian Workers Union, without confirmation that the AWU permitted it. So Julia Gillard made the representation to the Commissioner, that yes this was allowable, that she was authorised by the Australian Workers Union to set up such an entity. That was false in a material way and to mislead the Commissioner for Corporate Affairs is an offence.
 
But the point is Alan, had she not made that misrepresentation to the Commissioner, the bogus organisation could never have been set up and the fraud could never have been permitted to occur.
 
ALAN JONES      It is illegal, is it not, to represent to the West Australian Commissioner for Corporate Affairs an organisation as something which it is not?
 
JULIE BISHOP    That’s right, and this was not authorised by the AWU, it didn’t have the requisite five members -  it’s just the law - it has to have five members, it didn’t, it only had Wilson and Blewitt.
 
ALAN JONES      And she’s providing legal advice, she’s obligated to advise them that what they are doing is illegal and she didn’t do it.
 
JULIE BISHOP    That’s right. And worse than that the purpose for which the organisation was set up, you know the Incorporations Act is for setting up not for profit charities and sporting organisations, you know your local tennis club, that sort of thing. She told the Commissioner for Corporate Affairs that this was an organisation set up for the purposes of workplace safety when she knew it was a slush fund.
 
ALAN JONES      She used those words slush fund.
 
JULIE BISHOP    They were her words, her words. She knew it was a slush fund that would receive moneys for helping her boyfriend get re-elected.
 
ALAN JONES      Well the Webster dictionary describes slush fund as quote “a fund for bribing public officials, or carrying on corruptive propaganda”.
 
JULIE BISHOP    That’s right.
 
ALAN JONES      Now several times this week you asked, did she write to the West Australian Commissioner for Corporate Affairs when they raised concerns about incorporating this association. Did you write back to validate the legality of the entity. She a refused to answer the question but as the editorial in today’s Australian says she gave every impression there was no letter.
 
Yet in the meeting with Gordon, the senior partner, which was recorded, what has been called the exit interview after which she either left or he sacked her, he said this, Peter Gordon quote “there’s been a letter back from the authority suggesting it might be a trade union and therefore ineligible for incorporation under that legislation and that we had prepared a response submitted on Wilson’s instructions to that authority, suggesting that in fact it wasn’t a trade union and arguing the case for its incorporation”.
 
This is Gordon speaking to Gillard in the interview. He says” “my recollection is that all of that happened in or about mid-1992 is that right?” Gillard: “I wouldn’t want to be held to the dates without looking at the file but whatever dates the file shows are the right dates”. Gordon: “yes and to the extent that work was done on that file in relation to that, it was done by you?” Gillard: “That’s right”. So you argued there was a letter she wrote back, she declined to answer that and still hasn’t answered.
 
JULIE BISHOP    On five occasions I asked her directly whether she had written to the Commissioner for Corporate Affairs vouching for the bona fides of this association. You see, put yourself in the shoes of the Commissioner for Corporate Affairs. He receives an application to register a body called the Australian Workers Union Workplace Reform Fund (sic) so he quite rightly assumes it must be a body that the Australian Worker’s Union is setting up and so he asks for proof that this is the AWU’s entity because otherwise it’s a misleading name. She wrote back arguing for its incorporation, in other words, telling the Commissioner that it met all of the legal requirements of the act and in three material ways it did not.
 
She misled the Commissioner for Corporate Affairs, had he known the truth, it would never have been registered, the sham organisation never would have existed and at least $400,000 couldn’t have been siphoned through it.
 
ALAN JONES      And all this week, she said, no correspondence has ever been produced. But the file at Slater and Gordon’s gone missing and the file at the West Australian Corporate Affairs has gone missing, how the hell would the correspondence be produced?
 
JULIE BISHOP    Well Alan, there would be two copies of this letter, the one on the Slater and Gordon file, and I say file because she didn’t ever open a file, so in a folder at Slater and Gordon you’d find this document and the original should be on the Corporate Affairs file in Western Australia.
 
We now learn that the Corporate Affairs file of that era were sent to State Archives.  State Archives have the cover but no documents inside. They have the cover, but no documents. The Slater and Gordon file that they refer to in that exit interview has mysteriously disappeared.
 
ALAN JONES      She confirmed in the 1995 interview with Gordon that she drafted the rules for this association in mid-1992. The association she in the same interview described as a slush fund and when the West Australian Corporate Affairs Commission queried whether the association was a trade union and therefore ineligible for incorporation under questioning from Peter Gordon she agreed that quote “their firm had prepared a response”. When Gordon interrogated her basically she said yes “I did that, I was the one who wrote the letter”. Now over and again, over and again she said that your case was sleaze and smear.
 
JULIE BISHOP    Indeed, I was putting to her precisely the allegation that her former partners were putting to her at that exit interview and I find it utterly inconceivable that the Prime Minister could stand there and stonewall about a letter she knew was at the core of her, I’ll say sacking, from Slater and Gordon, although she will say she left of her own accord. But when you read that interview you can see that they are building up to sack her.
 
ALAN JONES      She says she’s got no recollection of receiving or sending the claimed correspondence on this matter.
 
JULIE BISHOP    That is extraordinary given that her entire legal career centred around her misrepresenting the purposes of this organisation to the Commissioner for Corporate Affairs.
 
ALAN JONES      Absolutely and she finds out in 1995 that the boyfriends a crook. She ditches him, Slater and Gordon ditch the AWU, she admits to Slater and Gordon it’s a slush fund, but she doesn’t tell anyone. She doesn’t tell the AWU, doesn’t tell the police.
 
JULIE BISHOP    I asked a question a couple of weeks ago, about Mr, Justice Kirby’s view that we have a duty as citizens to inform the police if we are aware of a crime. It’s called a misprision of felony in legal terms. At the very least she’s guilty of that.
 
ALAN JONES      I mean, I find all this, listening to you speak, I find all this unbelievable. She’s given legal advice, [inaudible] which has misled the public. Isn’t it unlawful under the Association’s Incorporation Act for an association to be named in a way quote from the act “likely to mislead the public as to the object or purpose”?
 
JULIE BISHOP    Section 43, yes it is and Alan. What’s worse, people were misled as a result of it. Thiess Contractors in Western Australia donated money to this organisation believing it was for workplace, to the AWU for workplace safety. But she knew it was a slush fund for the benefit of her boyfriend.
 
ALAN JONES      And she acknowledged in this interview to Gordon that she quote had “drafted model rules for that and had submitted those rules to the relevant Western Australian authority”. That’s not hearsay, that’s from the transcript of the interview. She wrote the rules.
 
JULIE BISHOP    That’s right there’s about 10 pages of them.
 
ALAN JONES      And those rules, mislead the public, mislead the Commissioner.
 
JULIE BISHOP    And I tried to table them in the Parliament. Also the application to incorporate, which has in her own handwriting the words, 'Australian Workers Union'. So she knew she was misleading the Commissioner for Corporate Affairs by using that name and giving the impression that this was a legitimate association that would hold a bank account, she knew it would hold a bank account, into which money would go, she says for the re-election of her boyfriend as a union official.
 
ALAN JONES      What about this? Gordon in the interview said this to her: “did you get advice from anyone else in the firm in relation to any of those matters?” Gillard: “no I didn’t”. And then Gordon says this: “Did the firm’s recognised lawyer on incorporations Tony Lang have anything to do with the model rules or the drafting of them?” Gillard: “No. I had just in my own personal precedence file a set of rules for Socialist Forum which is an incorporated association in which I’m personally involved”, I might add the Socialist Forum morphed out of the Communist Party of Australia but that’s another story, “and I just kept them hanging around as something I cut and past from for drafting purposes”.
 
JULIE BISHOP    I was shocked when I read that.
 
ALAN JONES      So she’s cut and pasted the rules from something in the Socialist Forum when the firm have their own incorporation expert and she didn’t consult with him. Is it unreasonable to draw the conclusion that that was central to the secrecy of all of this?
 
JULIE BISHOP    That’s the conclusion I have drawn, that if anybody else in the firm knew about this, the sham would have been exposed, because any first year lawyer, let alone a partner of a law firm, would take some basic steps before incorporating something in the name of the AWU. First you would ask the AWU, do you agree to this entity being set up? Lawyers would ask for a resolution of the AWU, none of that was done.
 
ALAN JONES      Gordon said to her: “Do you recall whether, when it was necessary to argue the case with the relevant West Australian authority, that you consulted anyone else in the firm as to what would or would not become acceptable or appropriate?” Gillard: “I don’t recall talking to anybody else in the firm about it”.
 
JULIE BISHOP    It was to be kept secret from the firm and that’s why the opening of the file, or her failure to open the file is so relevant. Had she opened a file in the name of the AWU Association it would have alerted other partners to the work that she was doing. By not opening a file, she kept it secret from everybody else in the firm who would have otherwise been alerted to what was going on.
 
ALAN JONES      And for your efforts you’ve been called this week a narcissistic bimbo. They’re nice people aren’t they?
 
JULIE BISHOP    It gets worse. Unfortunately it’s par for the course and that was an opportunity for the Prime Minister to show some standards and pull her backbencher into line, but instead that’s the kind of language they use.
 
ALAN JONES      In that interview, she said in 1995, so that’s really close and contemporary, “I can’t categorically rule out that something at my house didn’t get paid for by the association, or that something at my house didn’t get paid for by the unions”. That’s what she said in 1995, but now she can categorically deny anything was paid for by the unions.
 
JULIE BISHOP    Well if she has the receipts to show that she paid for it then she should produce them. She claims in that interview to have had receipts. The other day, in a statement in front of journalists, she said she had gone back and checked her records and she can say she paid for all her renovations.
 
ALAN JONES      Then why would she say in 1995, I can’t categorically rule out that something at my house didn’t get paid for by the association or something at my house didn’t get paid for by the union? You asked this week why the builder would call on the AWU offices and demand payment for the work he’d done on Julia Gllard’s house, if Julia Gillard was paying for the renovations herself?
 
JULIE BISHOP    Alan this is the event that alerted the AWU for the first time to the fact that Bruce Wilson was committing a fraud. A builder who was doing work on Julia Gillard’s house turned up at the AWU offices asking to be paid. Why would he go to the AWU? Why wouldn’t he put the bill in her letterbox? Why didn’t he go to Slater and Gordon? Why didn’t he confront her and say pay my bill?
 
He went to the AWU, they were so concerned that they began investigating. That uncovered the existence of half a dozen bogus bank accounts. When I say bogus, they were not authorised by the AWU in Melbourne. They didn’t learn at that time of this sham organisation in Western Australia but that’s what alerted them to it and Wilson was then confronted. They, the union said they were going to charge him, they were going to send the charges to the police and that’s when Slater and Gordon got involved again.
 
Wilson went to see another partner at Slater and Gordon to get him to represent him in these police charges. This partner Bernard Murphy, must have been told of the bogus organisation in Western Australia and realising the massive conflict that this placed the firm. Here they have Mr Wilson confessing to a fraud against their biggest client, Slater and Gordon had to send both clients away. They lost their major, most prestigious client to a competitor law firm.
 
ALAN JONES      Where Nicola Roxon worked.
 
JULIE BISHOP    And that was all the result of Julia Gillard’s advice to her boyfriend back in 1992.
 
ALAN JONES      Just finally Wayne Hem was an AWU staffer. He’s made a statutory declaration. You don’t make those lightly that he was given $5000 by Mr Wilson to deposit in Julia Gillard’s bank account in or about 1995. And the personal diary of Ian Cambridge, the AWU Joint National Secretary at the time, disclosed in the personal diary that he’d had that conversation in 1996 at which Mr Hem told him of the cash deposit. Mr Wilson said on the ABC this week he couldn’t remember but it could well have happened.
 
JULIE BISHOP    Well he actually went on to say, “I won’t argue with that”, I won’t argue with that and yet Julia Gillard in the midst of all these allegations about receiving funds stolen from the union, claims that she can’t recall $5000 being put into her personal account.
 
Alan I would remember $5000 today, back in 1995 it was a lot of money. It’s still a lot of money today and she says she can’t recall it. I find that simply unbelievable.
 
ALAN JONES      It is unbelievable. Just what do you detect the mood to be in the Labor backbench, what does the electorate saying to you about all of this?
 
JULIE BISHOP    I have received more correspondence, emails and phone calls over this issue than any other issue in my 14 years as a member of Parliament and by far the majority are demanding an independent inquiry. Many want a Royal Commission, but most want an inquiry and they say, quite rightly, if she’s done nothing wrong have an inquiry so she can prove she’s done nothing wrong, clear her name.
 
If I were her lawyer, if I were advising her I would say establish this inquiry and then prove your innocence because she’s maintained she’s done nothing wrong. I don’t accept that, indeed Alan a case has been made to answer for charges under the Criminal Code and under the Associations Incorporation Act. We’ve made out a case, it’s now over to the police, or the Prime Minister if she wishes to clear her name by holding an inquiry.
 
ALAN JONES      Thank you for your time, you’re probably looking for rest, you’ve earned one. Good luck, happy Christmas to you and all the best for the New Year and thank you for giving your time to talk to me today.
 
JULIE BISHOP    And the same to you and your listeners Alan.
 
ALAN JONES      Julie Bishop, the deputy leader of the opposition.

- Ends -