The revolution might not be televised, but you can see the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption proceedings live-streamed into your lounge room.
Such is the overwhelming public demand for riveting daytime televised reality shows that the commission is competing with Judge Judy in bringing this much-awaited courtroom drama to a computer near you via a mere click on their website.
The proceedings began in earnest on June 10, but much of what was heard in evidence has been well rehearsed in the Murdoch press over the past couple of years.
Anyone with a passing interest in the matter would be more than familiar with the alleged slush fund, the Australian Workers Union (AWU) Workplace Reform Association, set up in 1992 by then AWU officials Bruce Wilson and Ralph Blewitt.
The fund was established with legal advice provided by Julia Gillard, at the time a solicitor at the law firm Slater & Gordon in Melbourne. She was in a relationship with Wilson at the time.
The fund apparently received hundreds of thousand of dollars from the Thiess construction company. This money was supposed to pay for training services designed to improve workplace safety at the Dawesville Channel project near Perth that Thiess was managing. It is unclear from the evidence just how much training actually took place.
Counsel assisting the Royal Commission Jeremy Stoltjar SC accused Wilson of setting up the fund “deliberately and knowingly” as a means of obtaining funds from Thiess. He also submitted that Wilson and Blewitt should be charged under the Western Australia criminal code.
Yet much of the week’s hearing centred on whether any of the money from the fund was used to pay for renovations to Gillard’s home in Abbotsford, Melbourne. The evidence was contested, but on the face of it the allegations that money from the fund was used for these purposes more than 20 years ago would appear to be difficult to establish “beyond reasonable doubt” in any criminal proceedings that might follow.
Along the way, allegations were also made by another former AWU official that Labor Party leader Bill Shorten was part of an alleged cover-up regarding the fund. When they were aired in 2012, and again in February this year, they were denied by Shorten and he has refused to give a “running commentary” on issues raised in the commission’s hearings.
Of much more interest than the commission’s proceedings was the column by Grace Collier in the Weekend Australian of June 7-8. After declaring that she would “race to join the Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union” if she were a construction worker because they look after their members, she then tipped a bucket on the AWU.
Collier asserted that the AWU “is not so much a union; it is more a business that uses the legal structure of a union to fund its core activity which is putting people it can control into parliament. The AWU is the union employers clamour to deal with and they pay for the privilege. In return, the AWU sells itself to employers, doing deals that leave workers worse off.”
At the end of the week’s hearings, the commission released a number of issue papers that are expected to provide the basis for any recommendations it might make to the federal government. The issues canvassed include whether there are adequate powers to investigate union officials, whether the use of union funds and assets are effectively covered by legislative powers and how union elections should be funded.
The release of these issues papers seems to be a case of the commission putting the cart before the horse — one would expect the issues to present themselves following an assessment of the evidence received over a period of time.
Their release at this early point would seem to indicate that the commission has already made its mind up about what will emerge and how these issues might be dealt with.