A few words from me.   The purpose of this site isn't really to provide a singular consistent flowing narrative.   That's a task much better accomplished in a book where a competent writer/historian judiciously selects elements of fact from many sources and writes it up.

My purpose here is to give something of a log of various original source documents.   None of them is exhaustive.   As you read one you can see the deficiencies in another, the contradictions, the withheld information.   From some of those elements you may infer ulterior motives, conspiracy or the more common SNAFU.

This article about the AWU and Wilson is particularly insightful.   It was written at a time when several news organisations had the luxury of skilled researchers and writers on staff, and when Australia had an advertising market with relatively limited choices and thus there were considerable cash-flows available to pay for good journalism.   The re-hashing of press releases and barracking that passes for journalism in Canberra today is cause for a lot of red wine before bedtime.

Now to timing.   This piece ran in March 1996.   Only God, The Ingenue, The Bagman, The Boyfriend and the law-suit-averse partners at Slater and Gordon knew about the AWU-WRA.   The story of Wilson coming unstuck here was only based on the discovery of the AWU Members' Welfare Association and the repayment of money to the companies Wilson had ripped off into that account. 

As you read ponder just how lucky we are to have a political system that delivers up trained and qualified managers schooled in probity, fiduciary obligations, fiscal rectitude, project-management, ethics and the other skills we love to see as our Federal Government takes more of the national income pie and uses it to build the clean-energy-economoi of the future supported by the innovative economoi building infrastructure (designed on a beer coaster) the Nationalised Broadband Network - relax and know that Bill Ludwig is still in the chair calling the shots.   Solidarity Forever Brothers, for the union makes us strong.

Now you deserve a reward.   Get a stubby and march around the living room to the following - and think about Paul Howes, Bill Shorten, Bruce Wilson and the others who cast off self-interest to dedicate their lives to the welfare of others.