ANALYSIS

What do you do when your star witness in a politically motivated inquiry turns out to be an alleged thief who may have stolen more than $1 million? Just ignore it.

The credibility of the Royal Commission into trade union governance and corruption should suffer a serious blow from its glaring omissions on the allegedly corrupt behaviour of Kathy Jackson and how it has treated her throughout these hearings.

The inquiry has always appeared politically motivated but the question was, despite this, was it a worthwhile process to root out corruption in the union movement and lead to a well-needed overhaul of questionable governance practices around slush funds and the like. The jury has been out on that.

Yet the 1817-page interim report by Commissioner Dyson Heydon dealt with a range of issues both serious and trivial but ignored Jackson. There was an