Ms Gillard said yesterday she was prepared for continued opposition attacks, but repeated her vehement denials of wrongdoing and said Australians were sick of "negative personality based politics" from Tony Abbott.
The Opposition Leader yesterday continued his attack, telling the Ten Network's Bolt Report she had engaged in "gravely unethical" and "possibly unlawful" conduct. "The point I make is that the Prime Minister obviously misled the Western Australian Corporate Affairs Commission and the next point I make is that it is unlawful to do that," he said.
The row followed the release of a transcript of a 1995 meeting between Ms Gillard and her former partners at Slater & Gordon in which she agreed she had argued for the incorporation of the AWU Workplace Reform Association with the Western Australian Corporate Affairs Commission after its application for incorporation had initially been rejected on the grounds it was a union.
Ms Gillard admits that as a partner at Slater & Gordon in 1992 she provided legal advice to help union officials Bruce Wilson, her then boyfriend, and Ralph Blewitt incorporate the AWU Workplace Reform Association. She later described it as a "slush fund" for the re-election of union officials, but says she had no knowledge of the workings of the association, which Mr Wilson and Mr Blewitt used to defraud the union of thousands of dollars.
Mr Costa, who as NSW Labor Council secretary in 1996 opposed a royal commission into the affair, said yesterday the opposition had not made its case against Ms Gillard and that opposition legal affairs spokesman George Brandis had gone "way too far" in alleging laws had been broken. But he now supported an "inquiry into a range of allegations across the union movement" and said it would have been better for Ms Gillard to be "more up front" about the details.
News Limited's Sunday papers published a poll of more than 1000 people last week that showed 31 per cent of voters believed the Prime Minister had lied about the affair, 31 per cent believed she had been economical with the truth and 21 per cent believed she had told the truth. But 56 per cent said the issue would not change their vote at the election, due next year.
Asked about the allegation that she had misled the WA Corporate Affairs Commissioner, and whether it was unusual for the name of the union to be put on such associations, Ms Gillard told Ten's Meet the Press "this is all sleaze and smear from Mr Abbott and his team . . . I did not do anything wrong. The opposition spent the week in overreach and then humiliating backdown. One moment, apparently, I'm guilty of a crime, the next moment it slipped right back to 'conduct unbecoming' . . . The opposition doesn't really have anything to say here of substance."
Former Labor leader Mark Latham defended Ms Gillard and called on her former colleague Nick Styant-Browne to release the full transcript of her 1995 interview to put into context what she told her then partners. He told Sky News's Australian Agenda. there had been no conflict of interest because she did not charge for the work she carried out for Mr Wilson. "It was a small matter that in its day was exceptionally minor and insignificant and to beat it into something that it's not 20 years later I think goes to the heart of one of the sicknesses we have in politics of putting things on the agenda that is of no relevance to the country's future and of no relevance to how we understand Gillard's character," he said.
Costa calls on PM to assist police in any AWU probe | The Australian:
the dirty lying deceitful whore that is gillard is in it over her head, shorten, roxon, and most of the labour party politicians and union leaders know what happened and are just trying to cover their own arses! gillard has threatened them all that if she is dumped she'll dump them all in it and anything else they've done,why else is craig thompson still there? thats how manipulative and vindictive she is! labour, the unions and its leadership, and its supporters have not one ounce of morality or decency left!
ReplyDeleteUnderbelly has nothing on this mob!
ReplyDelete