,Lappy you ok with unauthorised transactions and bogus invoices. 2015Comments
The purpose of the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption was not to “get” Bill Shorten. In fact, when the royal commission got under way, no one even predicted that the Opposition Leader, a former state and national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, would be called to give evidence. The AWU was named as one of the handful of unions to be investigated. But given that the AWU claims to be one of the biggest unions in the country, its inclusion was hardly surprising.The fact Shorten has now been cleared of any criminal or unlawful behaviour — given the current suite of laws — does not mean that what he did was ethically right DANNY FORTSON Nor does it mean that other AWU officials are off the hook.There is also a possibility that the AWU has violated the Registered Organisations Act by inflating the number of members — think jockeys and netballers — something that occurred on Shorten’s watch. (More members mean more votes at Labor Party conferences and greater influence in parliamentary preselections.)One of the extraordinary things is that so many of these former union officials don’t think they did anything wrong. Cesar Melhem, who took over from Shorten at the AWU and is now a Labor member of the upper house in Victoria, argued on the weekend that a secret side-payment to the union was fine because it was really members’ money.Unfortunately, that doesn’t explain the secret bit or the need for bogus invoices: training and research that were never undertaken, advertising space that was never used, ball tickets for balls that were never attended.
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