Victoria Police is cooperating with the Royal Commission and as a result some original documents have been exhibited during the Commission's proceedings.

One set of documents comes from the police Operation Tendment - you'll get some sense of the scale of their enquiries by the number of exhibits.   Each Exhibit bears this tag on the top:

This is the letter from Thiess to the Australian Workers' Union - Workplace Reform Association.   It's an Operation TENDMENT exhibit published by the Royal Commission last week.   We have not published it before today.

Note it is dated 16 March, 1992, signed by Joe Trio on behalf of Nick Jukes.  Carmen Lawrence's Labor Government had announced that Thiess was the contractor for about $60M worth of work in building the Dawesville Cut - and that the project would run from January 1992 until December 1994, ie 36 months.

Note the peculiar 54 hours work per week at $36 per hour.   That's $1944 per week, about $100,000 per year or $300,000 over the projected course of the contract.   Note the letter from Thiess backdates the commencement of the arrangement from March to January 1992.   When the project was completed 8 months early in April 1994, the payments continued from Thiess until the aggregate amount of around $300,000 had been reached.   Some references documents are here.

The application documents seeking incorporation of the association are below:

Here is Ray Neal's signature on the Certificate of Incorporation:

Finally, Thiess and the AWU thought it would be good to put together a Memorandum of Understanding between the company and the union regarding "workplace reform" at the Dawesville Cut.   We've had the MOU, dated 11 June 1992 for a couple of years but the signatures were redacted from our source, the WA Police FOI file.   The Royal Commission has filled in the blanks there, one Michael Forshaw signed on behalf of the AWU.

I posted on the MOU in September 2012 - here. 

(Michael Forshaw was the General Secretary of the AWU - he replaced none other than Graham "The Fixer" Richardson when he "retired" from The Senate.   Nice work.)