I first wrote about this late 1995 article from The Age on the blog here on 25 September this year http://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2012/09/the-awu-scandal-15-november-1995-gillard-interviewed-in-the-age.html

My comments were pretty thin then but the article always stuck in my mind as leaving me unsettled when I read it.

It's now struck me clearly why.  It's a small reference, only a couple of lines, but to me it says so much about the Gillard protocol of lie and coverup things that can plausibly be covered up or dissembled over.

Here's a link to a much better quality copy of the original The Age article by Clare Kermond.

And this is the paragraph that I've been thinking about. In the paragraphs preceding it, Gillard blames her gender, her age and her political antecedents as the reason for her difficulties in gaining preselection.   And she's allowed to get away with discrediting genuine reports from eye-witnesses to theft, fraud and lies by referring obliquely to "factional disputes".

"In the number crunching that followed, union votes were crucial for the opposing candidates. The mud- slinging began in earnest and Gillard found her career used against her by some who argued that her role at Slater and Gordon should lose her the union vote (because)  the law firm had acted in some internal union disputes, although Gillard maintains she never personally worked on those cases."

That's a bald-faced lie, presumably delivered because of a Deed of Release between Gillard and the Slater and Gordon partnership with surviving confidentiality obligations on all parties.  That's interpreted as a licence to lie.   She'd worked on the Blewitt defamation matter, one element of the union (Wilson/Blewitt) being protected from legitimate enquiries from another by the Gillard/Murphy defamation sledgehammer.  And that's one of a huge range of matters in which she acted for Wilson and in the furtherance of Wilson's interests, not the unions'.

My point is that every single new piece of information about  this  important and complex fraud has been painstakingly unearthed through dint of complex enquiries, the goodwill of witnesses or good luck.   Gillard has done nothing to help the interests of the victims, her client the union, her partners at Slater and Gordon - or an old-fashioned notion like "doing the right thing".   She has gone out of her way to dissemble and conceal at every corner so as to advance her own interests and cause damage and distress to those like Kernohan who lost  so much because of her work.

The interesting observations now will be made as a consequence of the behaviour of latter day "done-nothin'-wrongsters" like Shorten, Roxon, Conroy and Ludwig the sentient (ie the influential one, not the senator).  At what point will they, like Robert McClelland, decide that enough is enough and the pain of the constant flow of embarrassing new material is just making the done-nothin'-wrongsters look very stupid, and very, very crooked.