Bill Shorten has told the union royal commission he would “never be a party to issuing bogus invoices” as he rejected assertions that payments from employers to the Australia Workers’ Union created conflicts of interest during wage negotiations.

The Labor leader defended his record at the head of the AWU, saying he always put workers’ right first.

Shorten also defended payments – which were explained as funding for occupational health and safety training, paid education leave, and advertisements in union journals – during his second day in the witness stand in Sydney.

Shorten: I answered ‘hundreds of questions’ at trade union royal commission – link to video

The former high court judge overseeing the Coalition-established royal commission into trade union governance and corruption, Dyson Heydon, intervened at one point on Thursday to chide Shorten for “non-responsive” answers to some questions.



Heydon noted the opposition leader had been “criticised in the newspapers in the past few weeks” and it was understandable that he wanted to rebut that criticism.

“What I’m concerned about more is your credibility as a witness … and perhaps your self-interest as a witness as well,” Heydon told Shorten.

“A witness who answers each question ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘I don’t remember’ or clarifies the question and so on gives the cross-examiner very little material to work with. It’s in your interest to curb these, to some extent, extraneous answers.”

Outside the commission, Shorten’s frontbench colleague Brendan O’Connor denounced Heydon’s remarks as “a very remarkable intervention by a royal commissioner” .



“He made some prejudicial comments about the appearance of Mr Shorten which I think calls into question the motives of the establishment of this royal commission into the union movement,” Labor’s workplace relations spokesman told reporters.

“I’ve said all along this is a witch-hunt. It has been established by the government. It is not a court of law; it is not a judicial inquiry. It is an executive inquiry.”

The commission focused on Thursday on a range of payments the AWU received from companies including Winslow Constructors, ACI Glass, Chiquita Mushrooms, and joint-venture road builder Thiess John Holland.

“I would never be party to issuing any bogus invoices, full stop,” Shorten said in response to questions about $300,000 in payments from Thiess John Holland to the AWU’s Victorian branch and national office between 2005 and 2008.

The counsel assisting the inquiry, Jeremy Stoljar, suggested that a “serious conflict of interest” would exist if union representatives conducting enterprise bargaining negotiations struck a “side deal” with the employer so that payments were made to the union.



Shorten rejected the characterisation of such payments and said they related to services such as training delegates, sending delegates to union events, providing seminars and advertising in union journals.

“You make this look like somehow a company paying something to a union for services rendered is somehow different to pursuing the best interest of the members,” Shorten said, arguing that he had negotiated good outcomes for workers.

Shorten was secretary of the AWU’s Victorian branch from 1998 to 2006, and also served as the union’s national secretary from 2001 until his entry into federal parliament in 2007.

Stoljar also questioned Shorten on Thursday about the appropriateness of companies paying the union dues of AWU members.

The inquiry has previously heard evidence of tens of thousands of dollars in payments from Victorian-based building company Winslow Constructors to the Victorian branch that were described as “membership fees” for employees.

Shorten was asked whether he agreed with the AWU’s current Victorian branch secretary, Ben Davis, that “employers paying membership dues on that scale profoundly weakens us in the workplace”.

Shorten said he would prefer that people paid their own union dues because that meant the members were “more engaged” in the services of the union.

But he added that “what profoundly weakens organising capacity is when people are not in the union at all”.

“In a beauty parade, union or non-union, union is better,” Shorten said.

In a full day of questioning on Wednesday, it emerged that Shorten’s 2007 campaign to enter parliament received about $75,000 in previously undisclosed support, including a company-funded campaign director. Shorten wrote to the Labor party’s Victorian division on Monday asking it to update its returns to the Australian Electoral Commission.



Stoljar ended his questions to Shorten shortly before 3pm on Thursay.

Shorten has not been formally excused from the commission because it is possible he will face more questions after the inquiry hears from witnesses in further AWU-related hearings expected in late August or early September. Other entities could also apply for leave to ask questions of Shorten.

Heydon ended proceedings on Thursday by thanking Shorten for his attendance and saying if he were required to return “every effort will be made” to accommodate the least inconvenient time “in view of your responsibilities”.

Shorten spoke to reporters briefly on his way out of the building.

The opposition leader said he was happy to have people compare his record of “standing up for workers in Australia” against that of the prime minister, Tony Abbott.



Shorten said he had answered “hundreds of questions” at the commission and argued “there was no evidence demonstrated” of any conflicts of interest.



“The truth of the matter is every day I was a union rep I was standing up for our members and, of course, where we could we would cooperate with employers for the best interests of our workers, no conflict of interest whatsoever,” he said.



Shorten did not directly criticise Heydon when asked whether the commissioner had overstepped the mark with the intervention on Thursday.



“He has a job to do. I get that. It’s Tony Abbott’s royal commission but I am more than satisfied with the opportunity to put forward the case for Labor and the case for standing up for workers,” Shorten said.



“As far as I was concerned I was willing to cooperate.”



When asked if he could guarantee that when he was AWU secretary there were no people counted as members who had not voluntarily signed up, Shorten said: “I always made sure and stood for the policy that our members were in the union and that they were signed up and we knew who they were, absolutely.”



Shorten said he still had the credibility to lead Labor to the next election, due in 2016.

“What we saw in the royal commission is they were asking questions about a particular clause in a particular agreement. This was at the same time when Mr Abbott and his cohorts were taking away the conditions of all Australian workers,” he said in a reference to the Howard government’s Work Choices laws.



“I think it’s part of the rite of passage for a Labor leader that in Mr Abbott’s government you get called before a royal commission.”



Shorten said he would “leave it for others to judge” whether the commission was engaged in a witch hunt – a term the Labor party has previously used to described the inquiry.



Abbott offered a muted response to the proceedings when asked about the commission during a press conference in Grafton in regional New South Wales.

The prime minister said he would not offer “a running commentary”.



“Obviously there are matters unfolding at the royal commission and I’ll just leave those matters to speak for themselves. The important thing is to ensure that we have the best and cleanest union movement,” he said.

But the employment minister, Eric Abetz, dismissed what he described as “some of the quite bizarre and hyperventilating-type commentary by the Labor party that it was a witch hunt”.

“The Labor party has been running a campaign to smear and belittle the royal commission,” he said. “I think that most people are quite horrified by some of the evidence that has come to light as a result of the royal commission.”

The commission will resume hearings in Canberra on Monday to examine issues connected to another union, the Construction, Forestry, Mining, and Energy Union (CFMEU).

