The Australian ran a great piece today Mark Latham: You’re bonkers Its very long and includes a copy of an exchange of emails between Latham and Hedley Thomas, but is for subscribers only. Larry Pickering has posted the full article on his facebook page but I thought Id just give you one of the emails from Hedley which gives a great brief of why Gillard still needs to provide answers, it also puts Latham in his place: Sunday, 6 July 2014 4:17 PM To: “mark l” Cc: Michael Stutchbury Subject: RE: The Politics of Smear Hello Mark As much of your commentary on the AWU slush fund scandal is facile, distorted and uninformed by relevant facts, any effort by me — or anyone else — to respond to you is effort wasted, and time that I will never get back. That’s why I didn’t respond to your first two emails. But it’s Sunday, I’m at work anyway, and when I got your third email, I figured ‘what the heck’, I’ll give you something to chew on. Do you know that it is customary in journalism to ask questions of a person about their conduct before — not after — publication of a story about that person? The exception of course is in a comment piece, which your rant last weekend clearly was — yet you seek my input now, after publication? Seriously? Because I think that you are unethical and untrustworthy, and because your writing has an impact on the AFR and its readers, and because I doubt the AFR is aware of your lack of rigour and your failure to apply basic journalistic standards, I’ve copied this to Michael Stutchbury. Mark, here are some questions for you. They revolve around the narrow topic that you are beating up at the moment, the one dealing with Kon Spyridis, a builder involved in the renovation of Julia Gillard’s home at the time of the AWU slush fund scandal. 1. How does what a builder, Kon Spyridis, said, somehow ‘exonerate’ — as you claimed in your last article in the AFR — the former PM in relation to the payments that were made to Spyridis, and presumably to others, for renovations at her house in Abbotsford, Melbourne? 2. Do you understand what you are suggesting with your ‘exonerate’ assertion? 3. Kon Spyridis said under oath at the Royal Commission last month that he was paid directly by Gillard (which is what he had said to The Australian more than a year earlier, which is why myself and a colleague reported this at that time, which is how you knew Kon had even said it in the first place, which makes your conspiracy theory about my reporting even more weird). But why are you trying to suggest that Kon Spyridis would, somehow, know — (is he telepathic?) that Julia Gillard’s boyfriend, the AWU boss Bruce Wilson, had not first paid the money to Julia Gillard? 4. That last question is important, Mark, because, as you know, Athol James, another builder, said under oath at the Royal Commission last month that he was paid by Gillard, too — when, according to Athol James, Gillard had first been paid ‘wads of notes’, by Bruce Wilson, in Athol James’s presence; and in circumstances, according to Athol James, where Gillard had told Athol that she would pay him withcheques as Bruce Wilson paid her with cash. Is this one of those inconvenient truths that you find difficult to fairly characterise in the AFR or elsewhere, Mark? 5. It’s a fairly simple scenario based on evidence, isn’t it? Bruce Wilson has access to lots of cash from the AWU slush fund that his girlfriend, as a solicitor at Slater & Gordon, had helped to establish with her legal advice, and he uses some of this slush fund cash (and instructs other officials to do so, too) to pay for renovations at the house of his girlfriend, who in turn pays the builders doing the work. Sometimes, money goes directly to a builder / tradesman from AWU official Ralph Blewitt, according to Blewitt. Sometimes it goes via Julia Gillard, according to Athol James. Just a shame if it is the proceeds of crime — due to the defrauding of a building company, Thiess, which was putting hundreds of thousands of dollars into Wilson’s slush fund, which had only come into existence because of his girlfriend’s legal advice and correspondence with the West Australian Corporate Affairs Commission. 6. Wouldn’t you be on stronger ground, Mark, by accepting that slush fund cash, or at the very least, cash direct from Bruce Wilson (who, with his wife and children to support from his union official’s salary, had no other source of additional cash), very likely did go into Julia Gillard’s house, and even personal bank account. That way, Mark, couldn’t you then argue that she didn’t know such cash represented the proceeds of crime? After all, Julia Gillard herself had said union money might have gone into her renovations — she didn’t think that it had, for sure, but she could not rule it out — see the transcript of her interview with Slater & Gordon in 1995 when they were abruptly parting company. 7. Why did you omit from your last piece in the AFR — in which you were hanging your hat on Kon Spyridis — the sworn evidence of Athol James and Wayne Hem at the Royal Commission? Was it because their sworn testimony ran contrary to your bogus ‘exonerate’ argument, so you needed to dishonestly omit it? Or were you being really sloppy? 8. If Victoria Police and / or the Royal Commission in coming weeks produces documentary evidence from a bank showing that $5000 in cash (or a sum thereabouts) was deposited into Julia Gillard’s bank account at that time, as Wayne Hem has said happened, in Hem’s sworn testimony (in addition to his evidence that he went to Julia Gillard’s house with an AWU official, Bill ‘the Greek’ Telikostoglou, who was paying a tradesman at her house with cash), will you attack the police detectives? Will the police be ridiculed, similarly to how you ridiculed other witnesses as ageing ‘oompa loompahs’? Does it bug you that police are getting evidence inconvenient for your one-eyed narrative? 9. Does it ever trouble you, or cause you to consider a tactical retreat from your fixed position, that the earlier evidence of Ralph Blewitt (I think we agree that he was thoroughly corrupt) that he, too, had paid cash to a tradesman at Julia Gillard’s house at this time, has been generally corroborated by the sworn evidence of Wayne Hem and Athol James? Three witnesses, Mark, all with similar-fact evidence — Blewitt, Athol James and Wayne Hem. They’re not mates, are they? Not part of a right-wing hunting pack, are they? Not employed by News Corp, are they? Not wielding a ‘whirring chainsaw of News Corp vindictiveness’, are they? They have no connections, as you know. Hem was not even a union official, he was a staffer, a clerk who also babysat for Wilson. Against them, you’re backing the evidence of Kon Spyridis — even though Kon can indeed be telling the truth about being paid by Julia Gillard, and still not harming, in any way, the evidence of the others. 10. Athol James is now 84, and he’s been silent about these matters until the police found him recently. If, to adopt the type of conspiracy craziness you go in for, Athol James had ever wanted to cause Gillard mischief or pain by making false and adverse claims for political reasons, wouldn’t you expect that he would have done that when she was PM, in July-August 2012, when the AWU slush fund story was most prominent? The evidence of Athol James, if he had told the media or The Australian back then, would have been very damaging — and possibly even career-ending — for the then PM. But the first that you and I and the wider public ever heard from Athol James was when he went in the witness box at the Royal Commission. For doing his duty as a citizen, albeit an elderly one with confidence in his memory, you chose to lampoon him and characterise him as a senile fool. Having ignored your first two identical emails, I’m glad you persisted with a third — although I don’t expect you to deal with my questions or arguments, and I won’t get back the time taken to respond to you today. Each of your columns on the AWU could be exposed for the distortions and malice you peddle. It’s not journalism, Mark. It’s you using the AFR to try to rebuild bridges to a party, and its members, that you once trashed. Cheers Hedley
Posted on: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 05:42:09 +0000
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