Bruce Wilson arrives at the royal commission into trade unions. Credit:Nick Moir In a sworn statement, Mr James said he was never paid in cash and that Ms Gillard told him that “as Bruce brought her the cash she would pay me by cheque”. “I never was paid in cash and I don’t know what happened with the cash Bruce handed her,” Mr James said in a sworn statement. Wayne Hem, a former records keeper for the AWU, told the royal commission Mr Wilson gave him $5000 in cash and told him to deposit it into Ms Gillard’s bank account. Mr Hem said he presumed the money was for payment of work done at the Abbotsford house, because the Kerr St renovations had been completed and he assumed the work had been paid for.

However, Mr Wilson said he had no recollection of giving the money to Mr Hem or having told him the money was for Ms Gillard. Mr Wilson also denied allegations that a secret slush fund he established in 1992 which Ms Gillard, a solicitor with Slater and Gordon at the time, helped incorporate, provided no services in return for thousands of dollars in payments from the Thiess construction company. Mr Wilson and union bagman Ralph Blewitt established the slush fund called the Workplace Reform Association. Mr Wilson's brother-in-law Joe Trio was a Thiess executive at the time. Mr Blewitt has admitted to filtering payments from Thiess to the Workplace Reform Association. Allegedly, money from the slush fund was used to pay for a $23,000 deposit on a house, purchased in his name, for Mr Wilson. Appearing before the royal commission into trade unions on Thursday, Mr Wilson claimed Thiess was aware that no services were provided in 1992, but says a service was provided in 1993. He said Thiess paid monthly invoices as part of a mutually agreed contractual arrangement that spanned both years.

Mr Wilson said safety training services were only provided from 1993 because Thiess had been “dragging its feet” and had not provided the necessary training facilities for the union to provide safety training in 1992. “There was no capability of doing it,” Mr Wilson said. “That’s not my fault. That’s Thiess’s fault.” The workplace safety training was to be provided as part of a Thiess Dawesville Channel project in West Australia. Mr Wilson said Thiess general manager Nicholas Jukes was at the time aware of the invoicing arrangement, including a decision to backdate payments to January 1992 for a three-month period during which no services were provided. “He knew that the training hadn’t commenced,” Mr Wilson said. “The agreement that we had with Thiess… was that there would be this arrangement from the nominated start date of the contract to the nominated finish date of the contract and that was roughly three years.”

Mr Wilson said the arrangement was similar to retainer arrangements legal professionals might strike with an employer. “If for whatever reason you don’t do work you still send the bill I bet,” he said. Mr Wilson said he did not assume Thiess would not check the invoices, saying they were a major construction company and not a “Mickey Mouse outfit”. Mr Jukes told the commission this week that he was not responsible for the day to day running of the Dawesville project, but based on discussions with his colleagues, believed the AWU provided a representative to provide training of Thiess workers. “I believe that the service provided waned over the course of the project. I do not know the names of the representatives the AWU provided,” Mr Jukes said in a sworn statement.

Mr Wilson claims that a former Australian Workers Union colleague, Glen Ivory, was appointed to provide the safety training for which he was paid $15,000 from the secret slush fund. He disputed a sworn statement by Mr Ivory, now deceased, that a training officer was never appointed to the Dawesville project. “It was never discussed at executive level, nor was a training officer ever appointed,” Mr Ivory’s statement said. Mr Wilson said: “I’d like to know who prepared this statement for Ivory, because it wasn’t him.”