Courtesy of Piers Akerman/Daily Telegraph:

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

Piers Akerman –, Monday, November, 19, 2012

DISTRACTION ALERT! DISTRACTION ALERT!

Prime Minister Julia Gillard is heading off – again – for another photo opportunity with US President Barack Obama.

Forget for the moment that Obama has his own mushrooming problems with his administration’s account of its handling of the deadly attack on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya, which saw four Americans including the local Ambassor, murdered by terrorists.

Concentrate on the very real credibility problem that has arisen for Gillard over her involvement with the former union boss Bruce Wilson, for whom she set up what she has described as a slush fund when she was a partner at Labor law firm Slater & Gordon.

Remember that at the time she set up the AWU Reform Association for Wilson, the AWU was a client of the law firm and that the so-called Reform Association actually had nothing to do with the AWU.

Get the picture?

Gillard has insisted she did nothing wrong but there are outstanding questions which she has never answered about the work she did for Wilson and what she knew about his fraudulent use of the funds that were paid into the slush fund.

Now the Labor Party is attempting to shift the focus onto the deputy Opposition leader Julie Bishop with claims that she “has some questions to answer” about her work as a lawyer.

Frontbencher Brendan O’Connor told the ABC’s Insider program yesterday Bishop should come clean about her own past as a lawyer, particularly when she acted for building products company CSR Ltd as it fought claims by former workers exposed to deadly asbestos fibres from its mine at Wittenoom, in Western Australia.

“Clearly there have been some matters arising out of her role as a lawyer at CSR where she used, allegedly, procedural tactics to deny victims of asbestosis their day in court,” he said.

“Now she wants to go around spending her entire time not involving herself in foreign affairs, as she is supposed to as shadow minister, but instead seek to smear the government and the Prime Minister with unsubstantiated allegations, and I think there are some questions that she should be answering as well.”

Bishop, who acted for CSR in the 1980s under her then married name Julie Gillon, told The Australian she was simply doing her job as a lawyer for CSR and denied any wrongdoing.

Last week she pledged to continue to press Gillard in parliament over the AWU issue, saying she still has questions to answer.
The Prime Minister has repeatedly and emphatically denied wrongdoing in relation to a union “slush fund” she helped set up for her former boyfriend and union official Bruce Wilson when she was a salaried partner at law firm Slater & Gordon. The fund was later used to defraud hundreds of thousands of dollars from the AWU. Gillard says she had no knowledge of the operations of the fund.

There is no evidence that she received union money, or that anyone other than Gillard paid for the renovations to her Abbotsford home in Melbourne’s inner-east in the mid-1990s.

Gillard last week failed to respond to detailed questions about $5000 allegedly paid into her bank account on the instruction of Wilson in mid 1995. She accused The Australian of a smear campaign and of “being unable to substantiate any allegations of wrongdoing”.

There are a number of problems with the smear campaign the Labor campaign is trying to mount against Bishop.

The first is that she there are transcripts of the cases she worked on and therefore a record.

The files relating to all of Gillard’s work on the slush fund have gone missing.

Second is that there were never any allegations that Bishop may have had a conflict or have acted improperly.

That is not the case with Gillard.

Further, Bishop is open to questions and Gillard is not.

Make up your own mind, but better still, why does not the Prime Minister just answer the questions that are being asked by all major news organisations except the ABC?

Launching another smear campaign is not going to make this issue disappear.