Julia Gillard was a partner in the industrial practice of Slater and Gordon.   The other partner was Bernard Murphy, now His Honour.

Ms Gillard dealt with about 21 unions as clients.   Not one of those unions had an incorporated entity as recommended by Ms Gillard and established through her free advice which it used as a slush fund.   She did not give any of those unions the advice that she says she gave Wilson about the necessity to incorporate his unique slush fund.   Slater and Gordon did not offer the value-added-service of free incorporation advice to its other valued clients.

You probably know that Wilson had a genuine slush fund for re-election purposes in Western Australia.   It had a bank account.   Wilson apparently neglected to take Ms Gillard's advice about the benefits of incorporation when it came to the crunch.

The absence of incorporation did not seem unduly to affect this slush fund's ability to raise and deposit money, nor to successfully cause the withdrawal of monies from its bank account.

So what exactly did Julia Gillard, then a solicitor and a partner in Slater and Gordon say to her investigating managing partner Peter Gordon in the Record of Interview conducted on 11 September, 1995, after the discovery in a filing cabinet of the unrecorded file about her creation of the sham entity the Australian Workers' Union Workplace Reform Association Incorporated.

"It's, it's common practice, indeed every union has what it refers to as a re-election
fund, slush fund, whatever, which is the funds that the leadership team, into
which the leadership team puts money so that they can finance their next
election campaign. It is not proper to use union resources for election
campaigns so you need to finance them yourself. Some of them, you know, they
can cost $10,000, $20,000 -- they're not cheap. So the usual mechanism people
use to amass that amount of money is that they require the officials who ran on
their ticket to enter payroll deduction schemes where money each week or fortnight
goes from their pay into a bank account which is used for re-election purposes
from time to time. They also have different fundraisers, dinners and raffles
and so on to amass the necessary amount of money to mount their re-election
campaign.

(Several
lines redacted.)

The thinking behind the forming of incorporated associations is that it had been
our experience that if you did it in a less formal way, you just had someone,
say Fred Bloggs, say, oh look, I'll just open a bank account and everybody can
put the money into there, the problem developed that when the leadership team
fractured, as relatively commonly happens, you got into a very difficult
dispute about who was the owner of the monies in the bank account, so it was
better to have an incorporated association, a legal entity, into which people
could participate as members, that was the holder of the account."  

Julia Gillard did not give that advice to any other union.   The advice to incorporate was not adopted by the AWU or Bruce Wilson in any of the other funds or bank account related bodies that he was involved in.

Only the special purpose slush fund the AWU-WRA Inc was incorporated.   Julia Gillard's version of the reason why does not add up.

Perhaps the answer is to be found in the WA Building and Construction Industry Training Fund and its rules about the payment of grants money.   I do not have the guidelines applicable to grants made by the fund in 1992, but I am aware that it is a requirement of many government bodies that grants can only be made to natural persons or incorporated entities.

I would be grateful for advice from ethical lawyers, natural persons and lodges, societies and clubs with a view about this matter!