This is another guest article by one of our regular commenters, Blackswan. As you might be aware, the new administration in Australia has abolished the Carbon Tax and is currently engaged in the arduous task of cutting off the heads of the green Hydra that is government spending on climate alarmism. The climate gravy train is derailing in Australia.
While the article covers political and union corruption, an important thing to note is that most of it was unearthed by a handful of investigative bloggers, citizen researchers and refugee journalists who’d decamped to the blogosphere. None of this would ever have come to light without their tireless and mostly unpaid efforts, because the mainstream media there is a compliant and whipped cur, that long ago had its investigative teeth pulled.
Australia, which not too long ago I thought was doomed to turn into Australistan, is now leading the fight back.
If you’ve ever wondered whether the blogosphere can have an effect, ask Julia Gillard and the Union thieves now desperately scurrying for cover.
Pointman
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In 2011 Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard introduced a Carbon Dioxide Tax, despite a pre-election promise of … “There’ll be no carbon tax under the government I lead.” She was hailed around the world as being at the forefront of saving the planet from certain destruction. The world’s biggest and most expensive Energy tax, with a fixed price initially of $AU23.00 per tonne of emitted Co2 (when the EU was trading Emission Trading Scheme or ETS certificates at less than €2 per tonne) was inevitably passed on by manufacturers and primary producers, and consumers ultimately paid more – for everything, from a haircut to a cup of coffee.
As part of the Green Deal $AU10 Billion (or 10% of the carbon loot) is duly handed over to the UN each year. In July 2014 the tax was due to increase to $25 per tonne and be expanded onto transport fuel, and in 2015 to be linked to the European ETS, but still the CAGW devotees hailed the move as ground-breaking and necessary.
Meanwhile, as aluminium smelters, oil refineries and manufacturing closed down or fled offshore, the new Prime Minister Tony Abbott, elected on a promise to repeal the crippling Carbon Tax, has found it impossible to pass the Budget Bill through the Senate where a voting bloc from the Labor Party and the Greens stands in the way of our economic recovery, but on July 17 2014 the Carbon Tax Repeal Bill finally passed the Senate, though the deals done with the cross benches and any implications of those deals are still unknown.
During the last election campaign the Greens smugly gloated that Abbott would never be able to untangle their Green Gordian Knot and it seems they were right – Gillard’s toxic legacy lives on in the complex bureaucratic and financial juggernaut of Climate Alarmism.
Just who is Julia Gillard and why did she lie to the electorate about her intentions on the tax? Why did she yield to Green pressures when the environment had not been at the forefront of her election agenda?
Ms Gillard once declared in a magazine interview that she wished to become a “global philanthropist” – she just forgot to say that she intended to use Australian taxpayers’ money to do it. In the dying days of her Prime Ministership, before she was dumped by her own Labor Party as Leader and ignominiously consigned to the Back Bench, she sniffed the winds of change in her fortunes and systematically set about laying the groundwork to feather her post-political nest, using other people’s money.
In raising her international profile, an unprecedented record $AU100 million grant was made to the University of Adelaide in her home state of South Australia in the last weeks of her administration, and the grateful university Dons accorded her an honorary PhD, inviting her to join the faculty lecturing political science students, though her expertise remains suspect.
After all, it took her nine years to complete a four-year law degree and she never did her Articles, though to be fair, she did spend a number of those years working for the Socialist Forum, an exercise in re-badging the Australian Communist Party after it fragmented. She acted as its public officer, secretary, and legal adviser on the drafting of its constitution, as well as selling the membership on incorporating the association to absolve all office bearers of legal liability.
According to Gillard in a 2007 ABC interview, the Socialist Forum “ultimately amalgamated with the Fabian society” – most of its principals being members of the Labor Party, Gillard having been a member since the age of sixteen. The Socialist Forum adhered to the strategy “that power transformation could be facilitated through communists gaining control of the levers of power: i.e. Marxist infiltration of trade unions, educational facilities, cultural associations and political parties.”
Professor Gillard was also granted an honorary doctorate by Victoria University “for her outstanding contribution to Australian society”. That university needs to upgrade its research skills.
In October 2013, weeks after her Labor Government was annihilated at the Federal election (in which she declined to re-contest her seat), and with a lifetime parliamentary pension and benefits in excess of $300,000 per year, Prof Dr Gillard joined the Washington DC based Brookings Institute as a non-resident senior fellow, and a slew of highly lucrative speaking engagements around the world swiftly followed, including an address to Middle East leaders in Dubai where the word “misogynist” was never uttered despite her vow to “call out misogyny and sexism wherever I see it…”
But Brookings wasn’t her main goal in garnering further access to other people’s money.
As Prime Minister she unaccountably contributed $US303 million Australian taxpayer dollars to Global Partnerships for Education (GPE), the Washington DC based World Bank public-private organisation, making Australia the world’s most generous donor equivalent to the combined sum from the USA + Russia + France + Italy + Ireland + Japan + Switzerland – and all from a country with a population of only 23 million people.
This subsequently assured her appointment as Chair of the GPE Committee, announced by Alice Albright (daughter of Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright) and Gillard now leads a Board of Directors representing 18 different constituencies from developing country governments, donors, civil society organisations, private sector foundations, and multilateral agencies and regional banks, this year controlling distribution of a record $US28.5 billion donated dollars.
It was recently announced that publisher Random House has paid a six-figure advance for Gillard’s autobiography ‘My Story” to be released in October 2014, enthusiastically promoted by her ‘friends’ Hilary Clinton who sings Gillard’s praises in her own recent book, and a YouTube plug by Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s Managing Director, herself in court charged with embezzlement and fraud.
We can only wonder if Gillard’s tome will include any of her own possible charges by the Victorian Serious Fraud and Extortion Squad, who currently have her under active investigation after executing search warrants at her old law firm Slater & Gordon while she was Prime Minister. The evidence seized has been subject to a series of court hearings and appeal on the issue of ‘legal professional privilege’ and is ongoing.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced a Royal Commission into corruption within the Union Movement and it has now been sitting for some weeks. The sworn evidence to the Commissioner, Justice Dyson Heydon, has been explosive to say the least, and riveting to watch unfold via live-streaming on the internet.
Be in no doubt – this Royal Commission lifting the lid on a cesspit of corruption would never have happened without the groundswell of outrage born and fostered on internet blogs where citizen researchers, lawyers, businessmen and women, and investigative journalists of every stripe, found the only forum for their voices. Denigrated as irrelevant “internet nutjobs” by Gillard and her sycophantic Media lapdogs, blogosphere journalists are set to change the future of our nation, and the nature of our public administration. The Commission will hear evidence till the end of the year.
People are going to prison.
Gillard’s industrial law client-turned-lover in the 1990s, Australian Workers Union (AWU) heavyweight Bruce Wilson (now a short-order cook in a provincial seaside town), has been a font of information disclosing to the Commission that Gillard’s personal intervention was pivotal in the setting-up of the illegal incorporation of a phoney non-existent association in the AWU’s name, which would launder secret commissions from major construction companies, all concealed as services never rendered by phantom AWU employees who never existed.
At one point he tried to implicate a dead man as the fall-guy in his scheme, only to be left floundering when it was revealed the deceased colleague had provided police with a sworn statement to the contrary almost twenty years earlier.
While Gillard always protested that she had paid for extensive renovations to her home in the 1990s (and had receipts to prove it), she has never disclosed the source of those tens of thousands of dollars – or explained why several builders working on her renovations turned up at the Union’s head office demanding payment owing for work on her house.
In her own words, in transcripts of interviews recorded by her law firm partners when they discovered her nefarious activities, she had borrowed the deposit for her old run-down cottage and mortgaged the balance; was so far in debt her law firm Slater & Gordon were paying her salary months in advance, so she had zero equity in the property and no collateral. She was asked for receipts for all the renovation work done, but there is no evidence she ever produced them. Where did her purported $20,000 renovation loan come from? She wasn’t asked – so she didn’t say.
Now a string of tradesmen and others have given sworn evidence to the Commissioner that they had seen Wilson handing over huge wads of cash, either to her or to the builders, whereupon she gave them bank cheques for any invoices rendered. Of course such cheques don’t disclose the source of the funds and any receipts were in her name.
In Law & Order circles, that’s called money-laundering. It’s also called benefiting from the proceeds of crime and covering it up for twenty years is perverting the course of justice. Let’s toss in conspiracy to commit fraud, just for good measure.
One of Wilson’s go-pher underlings testified that he had been given thousands of dollars in cash by Wilson with all Gillard’s personal bank details and told to deposit it in her account.
Gillard’s earlier response to that revelation was … “So what? It’s not unusual for a man to give his girlfriend money.” Really? Five thousand dollars at a time? From a working man with a wife, a mortgage and two young children at home.
Was it the lawyer or the girlfriend who accompanied Wilson to a house auction in Melbourne where he bought the property in an underling’s name using cash from his illegal stash and a Specific Power of Attorney (SPoA) to do so, as well as raising a $150,000 mortgage on the property through Gillard’s law firm, but the donor of that SPoA swears under oath that Gillard was not present when she ‘witnessed’ his signature on the document.
In that $230,000 transaction she prepared the SPoA document (which authorised any purchase of any property in the state of Victoria), acted as legal representative for both the donor and her lover the recipient, as well as being the sole witness to the document. The source of the sale’s funds were falsely recorded in Slater & Gordon’s Trust Account Ledger thereby concealing the true origins of the cash. It was an extraordinary example of her ethics and her tenuous grasp of the law.
It seems that the sudsy Wilson/Gillard duo put hundreds of thousands of dollars through the rinse-cycle during the lucrative four years of their relationship. Despite being a salaried partner in the industrial unit of her law firm and an Officer of the Court, she dismissed her culpability by saying “I was young and naïve”.
She claims to have ended the relationship when she ‘discovered’ what he was up to, but at no time did she go to police or to her law firm partners or to her Union client officials to aid them in their fight to recover stolen Union money. She told nobody – and the secret accounts, still receiving funds, remained secret till the following year; her silence enabling the house purchased with the laundered money to be quietly sold, the proceeds of the sale so far unaccounted for.
In fact, the innovative Wilson/Gillard scheme for channelling oceans of excess cash has since become the template for other Union slush funds milked from workers and employers alike. For example, the long-serving National President of the Australian Labor Party and National Secretary of the Health Services Union, Michael Williamson, was recently convicted after pleading guilty to a mere $1 million theft and is currently serving a five-year prison term.
Investigators found he had misappropriated over $20 million during his long career, but the guilty plea to the lesser amount meant there was no trial, no witnesses, no prosecution of others who aided and abetted his criminal behaviour and his plea bargain assured immunity from prosecution for his family members and certain others involved in his schemes.
The Royal Commission continues, dealing with one Union at a time and revealing the heartbreaking stories of the treatment of corruption whistle-blowers, men and women alike, at the hands of their union ‘comrades’. Everything from being condemned to the intimidating silence of ‘coventry’, to having their office desks turned to the wall, or their offices ransacked and files and records stolen, being shoulder-charged in office hallways, their union mobile phones switched off, their union business credit cards cancelled, pursued and harassed in car chases on highways when terrified wives and children were passengers, shovels left on the doorstep of their family home, bullets in their mailboxes, threatening letters in the post, and obscene calls to their home phones.
Australian Workers Union (AWU) state president Bob Kernohan had already been pre-selected for a “safe” Labor seat in Parliament and was warned by an AWU Organiser to keep silent about the Wilson/Gillard 1990s corruption but he refused. He was then bashed in the street by several booted Union assailants, his head kicked in and told to keep his mouth shut. He hasn’t worked a day for almost twenty years, his health precarious, and his termination pay was withheld by that same organiser-turned-secretary for nine long years.
The AWU secretary in question was Kernohan’s own protégé, a young industrial lawyer he recruited to the Union over twenty years ago, and today that man is Julia Gillard/Kevin Rudd’s successor as Leader of the Labor Party; Bill Shorten is now Opposition Leader in the Federal Parliament.
Shorten himself is no stranger to controversy and dubious morals. He has had allegations made against him on many fronts, while his penchant for ogling attractive young colleagues and workers is legendary. Today he’s not smiling (or leering) so much because police currently have him under active investigation for claims he raped a 16-year-old girl twenty years ago at a Young Labor gathering, after cornering her in a bathroom. The Media refuses to name him, simply referring to a “senior Labor Party figure.”
Shorten is a union brawler and mauler, a Mr Fix-it, famous for declaring he proudly carries his union card into Parliament every day, declaring his only allegiance is to the Union Movement.
Despite ongoing revelations of Organised Crime, Shorten continues to dismiss the Commission as a “political witch hunt”.
The Royal Commission is due to report to the Abbott Government at the end of the year. Commissioner Dyson Heydon cannot bring criminal prosecutions – he can only make recommendations to Government and, through the Attorney General, to Directors of Public Prosecutions in various jurisdictions, and it remains to be seen who will be summonsed to testify under oath at the Commission, and who will subsequently face criminal prosecution, either for perjury or their previous crimes.
The level of corruption revealed so far, perpetrated by Union bosses, politicians, party apparatchiks, Union-controlled superannuation funds and major construction companies in paying bribes and secret commissions has astonished even those who expected the worst, but the Commission’s sworn evidence so far remains largely unreported by the Media – the most glaring omissions being from our national broadcaster, the taxpayer-funded ABC (whose $1.2 billion dollar funding had almost doubled while Labor was in office), being an enclave of defiant Left-wing apologists and gatekeepers for the Labor Party.
The majority of reports that have made it into print or onto our commercial television networks (whose licensing fees had been slashed by $300 million per year by the Labor government) has largely been to further denigrate whistle-blowers with spurious allegations of their own corruption, and though such claims have been refuted by a number of auditors, accountants and bookkeepers, that detail rarely makes it into the news – just the mud-slinging media releases from the Unions and their high-priced lawyers, aimed at discrediting and intimidating witnesses.
On 19th June 2014, Gillard was interviewed on Washington’s Diane Rehm Radio Show, with an earlier invitation on her website for pre-interview questions from listeners. Every week over 2.6 million people tune in, and with that in mind, many Australians warned Rehm to research the background of her guest a little more closely. Rehm obviously has her own priorities and obligations as Gillard duly went to air without challenge.
The comments thread on that site is worth a look because you’ll hear the outraged ‘voices’ of Australians incensed at the international promotion of our first female Prime Minister who is also the most compromised individual ever to hold the reins of government, shoe-horned into the job by her corrupt Union puppet-masters.
Her claims of “misogynist persecution” are totally spurious (considering most of her critics are women), covering the real reason for her abject failure in Australian politics – her incompetence, her pathological lying, her immoral lifestyle centred on a string of other women’s husbands (including a Cabinet colleague) and her corrupt background as a lawyer, forced to resign by the only law firm that ever employed her, and never to practise law again.
As evidence of Union/Labor corruption continues to mount, we anticipate that Gillard and the rest of the Organised Crime cabal will be brought to account and answerable to the Australian People, she for her abject betrayal of the trust that once was hers, but which she threw in the face of a nation which afforded her and her Welsh immigrant family every opportunity for a productive and honourable life. As a rabid Marxist/Socialist/Fabian, Gillard’s raison d’être has been self aggrandisement and personal wealth, a betrayal even of her own kind.
The Fabian logo, the image they concede to be their hallmark, is a fanged wolf draped in a sheep’s hide.
The fact remains; she was never democratically elected as Prime Minister of Australia at all. In 2007 she was appointed Deputy PM to Kevin Rudd by the Union Czars controlling the Labor Party and its Caucus vote, while in 2010 she ousted the chaotic Rudd in a late-night coup to seize the helm of government for herself, endorsed by those same Union heavyweights.
In the subsequent 2010 Federal election, the majority popular vote went to the Opposition Liberal Party, but Gillard refused to concede defeat for weeks before signing an agreement with the Greens and three Independents to form a pork-barrelling Coalition that bled billions of dollars from the Treasury and held the slim majority of a single seat.
Held to ransom by the Greens she introduced the economy-crippling Carbon Tax. It was a coup d’état that defied the democratic will of the People, and she relentlessly wielded power and abuse of her Office to destroy the careers and the lives of all who opposed her, whether they be senior Labor stalwart MPs, Labor Senators or journalists seeking to publish disclosure of her highly questionable legal background.
Her Slater & Gordon mentor and boss, Bernard Murphy, whom she and Wilson consulted in their schemes and who left the law firm when Gillard did, was given lifetime tenure as a judge in the Federal Court despite never having been a barrister, while others she wished to silence or reward found other highly lucrative judicial appointments, or on Boards, appointed to her Front Bench or in diplomatic postings to prime locations around the world.
This woman, by any measure, has been an abject failure in any aspect of her professional life as she continues to play the gender card in deflecting any criticism of her incompetent tenure in Australian government. Gillard has defamed and slandered her accusers under Parliamentary privilege and repeatedly challenged those accusers to prove her “state of knowledge” on the Wilson corruption matters – perhaps she’s hoping for a Rebekah Brookes-style verdict.
She is a fraud (claiming to have an Economics Degree of which no record can be found) and is demonstrably a liar in claiming to have only worked “in a part-time job as a typist” for the Socialist Forum (SF) in her “student days”. She was the SF public officer, a signatory to its bank accounts, an elected office bearer and appointed an SF spokesperson, drafting its Articles of Association and remained a driving force on the management committee or as an organiser until 2002 when it merged with a revamped Fabian Society. In 2007 she gave the Inaugural Fabian Society Annual Dinner key-note speech in Melbourne.
She lied repeatedly to conceal her Marxist background from the Australian people, just as she denies any accountability for her questionable activities in her short-lived legal career.
Those who continue to fête her with honorary academic degrees and prestigious appointments in education will rue their haste, as the most cursory examination of her record in Office will show that (true to her Marxist credo), as she changed the national education curriculum and lowered the bar to the lowest common denominator, Australia’s education ratings in the OECD steadily declined since she was Education Minister. As Industrial Relations Minister her Legislation and subsequent Regulation paved the way for her Union puppet-masters to snatch billions of dollars from workers and their employers.
Lay down with dogs (or wolves), you get up with fleas.
It must be getting itchy under those sheepskin coats. You scratching yet Ms Clinton, Ms Lagrande, Ms Albright, Ms Rehm?
On second thoughts … they run in packs … the Sisterhood looks after its own.
©Blackswan
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Filed under: Article Tagged: Australia, Blackswan, Julia Gillard 
