Courtesy of Piers Akerman/Daily Telegraph:  

For more articles by Piers go to; http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/

Wednesday, November, 14, 2012,

A former trade union member and employee of the AWU has revealed he was instructed to deposit about $5000 cash in June 1996 into Julia Gillard’s bank account by her then boyfriend Bruce Wilson.

The revelation in The Australian newspaper is supported by a contemporaneous entry in a confidential diary kept by then AWU joint national secretary, Ian Cambridge, now a Fair Work Australia commissioner.

The Australian has seen and verified the authenticity of the 1994-96 diary, which recounts hitherto unknown numerous events and conversations during the AWU fraud scandal.

Cambridge has told the newspaper said the diary “included contemporaneous records of conversations with individuals about various matters, some of which were not within my direct knowledge and which I was unable to verify”.

He said his position as a member of a quasi-judicial tribunal made it inappropriate “to now offer any public comment about these issues”.

According to the riveting story, Wayne Hem has signed a statutory declaration in which he says he deposited the money after being given Gillard’s account details along with a wad of $100 and $50 notes by Wilson, then an official in the AWU’s Victorian branch.

Gillard, then a salaried partner at law firm Slater & Gordon, was Wilson’s girlfriend and solicitor at the time.

Hem’s newly signed declaration attests to the approximate $5000 cash deposit he made to Gillard’s account as well as other cheques he was separately instructed to deposit into Wilson’s other secret slush fund, the AWU Members Welfare Association (No 1) Account.

The Australian independently verified from internal Commonwealth Bank documents in 1995 that Hem was signatory for deposits of a number of cheques totalling more than $100,000 into that slush fund account.

Gillard had provided legal advice in 1992 that helped Wilson and his union ally, Ralph Blewitt, set up a slush fund – the AWU Workplace Reform Association – which the two men used in the ensuing years to issue bogus invoices and fraudulently receive hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Gillard, who has at all times strenuously insisted that she did not do anything wrong and was unaware of the workings of the association, yesterday declined to answer questions from The Australian.