bobmcgee

Plains Wanderer …

The Plains Wanderer is a little ground dwelling bird which has, as its closest relatives, the Seedsnipes of South America, a clue to its Gondwanan origins. It’s very cute and sadly very endangered.

It was found to be doing quite well on some farmland in the vicinity of Terrick Terrick National Park. This was on country that had never been sown to improved pasture and had been grazed by sheep for many, many years. Quite a lot of farmland was purchased and added to the park to conserve the bird. It had been well studied by this stage and the scientific advice to Parks Victoria was to continue a grazing regime.

Parks knew better, the sheep came off.

Dr Mark Antos has been studying the Plains Wanderer in the Park over recent years and has documented their catastrophic decline. They require low herb and grass with about 50% bare ground to do well. Two years of high rainfall and no grazing has turned the environment into something entirely unsuitable. Their plight made the Weekly Times recently which tells us …

… no Plains Wanderers had been seen as part of bi-monthly surveys since March 2011.

Meanwhile, it is my understanding that another researcher, working on private land, has continued to find the little buggers on land that is being grazed. In other words they’re better off outside the park than they are on land purchased with public money for their conservation.

Today, though, some good news. In the survey conducted this weekend one Wanderer was caught and banded. One hopes it signals the beginning of a recovery.

Nicci Rox …

THE nation’s chief law maker Nicola Roxon is totally satisfied the prime minister did not act improperly over the setting up of a union slush fund.

Julia Gillard has consistently denied she did anything wrong or personally benefited from setting up the Australian Workers Union Workplace Reform Association for her then partner Bruce Wilson while working as a lawyer in the 1990s.

Ms Gillard has conceded the association was a slush fund that Wilson and other union officials used to fund their re-election campaign.

She told West Australian authorities the purpose of the association was for training and workplace safety.

Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon says allegations against Ms Gillard are unwarranted.

“I’m totally satisfied that Julia had not done anything improper or anything unlawful and in fact no actual allegation of impropriety is being made against her,” Ms Roxon told ABC radio.

I wonder how much comfort that gives our Julia given the company it puts her in …

Ms Roxon was asked whether Mr Thomson should be suspended from the ALP until the matter is resolved.

“It’s an option in theory, and maybe as things develop,” she said.

“But we haven’t had actually any content. There’s been all this swirling allegation [but] no one actually is aware of what is being alleged in detail.”

And she was vigorously defending Mr Slipper after having every opportunity to read the emails that ensured he had no prospect of a defense …

On Tuesday night, it emerged during a Senate estimates hearing that the Attorney-General was briefed on June 9 about the hundreds of dubious or distasteful text messages sent by Slipper to his staffer James Ashby.

Four days later, on June 13, Roxon instructed the Solicitor-General to seek to have Ashby’s case struck out. She also gave instructions to seek a waiver for the government to be allowed to use the texts to have Ashby sacked.

Also on June 13, in a further attempt to shut down the case, the government offered to pay damages to Ashby to settle his sexual harassment claim.

Two days later, despite her knowledge of the scale and nature of the texts sent by Slipper, the Attorney-General held a press conference and said this: ”The Commonwealth strongly believes that this process has been one which is really for an ulterior purpose … the Commonwealth has obtained a vast amount of material … It will be clearly shown … that there were in fact clear intentions to harm Mr Slipper and to bring his reputation into disrepute and to assist his political opponents and that was the purpose for the bringing of this claim.”

The political mischief in this case has never been in doubt. What was misleading about the Attorney-General’s statement was that the ”vast amount of material” was not merely vexatious. It buttressed a sexual harassment claim. It was also political dynamite.

Roxon also said something that was untrue: ”We aren’t bringing a strike-out application; Mr Slipper is.”

The shadow attorney-general, Senator George Brandis, told me yesterday: ”These texts, on any view, contain dozens of instances of predatory sexual conduct. So the Attorney-General’s claim that this was merely a vexatious case was extraordinary. Any person who read the texts would know instantly that Ashby had a case.

So, Ms Roxon, do you really believe it was entirely kosher to set up a slush fund? Do you believe Ms Gillard was present when Mr Blewitt signed the power of attorney that she witnessed? Did Mr Hem drop five grand in her bank account? Was her house renovated with proceeds of the slush fund? Do you think she may have withheld details of a swindle from her client the AWU? Do the missing documents cause you no concern?

Or is it the case that Julia is exactly as innocent as the other people you have recently defended?

ICAC …

Yesterday morning, Mr Watson, Counsel Assisting, and Mr Rosario Triulcio on the stand. The line of enquiry concerns why an old friend of Mr Obeid might buy a farm …

MR WATSON: Well, all right. Well, I’ll drop that. You don’t know
anything about farming?

RT. No.

Mr W. You didn’t know what went on on Donola before?

RT. Oh, no.

Mr W. And you didn’t know whether it was economically viable as a farm?

RT. No.

Mr W. Wouldn’t have known whether they ran goats or rats or cows there would you?

RT. I’m assuming they didn’t run rats.

Mr W. All right.
THE COMMISSIONER: Not four-legged ones.

Russ hour …

How was your trip to work, Моя дорогая.

How to die in the bush …

Mutawintji National Park, NSW.

A 24-year-old woman telephoned emergency services about noon on Tuesday to say the group, from country Victoria, were lost, after the Hyundai Excel the trio were travelling in crashed.

Her Triple-0 call cut out, with little to no reception in the rugged terrain. Emergency crews used GPS co-ordinates to trace the call to inside the national park, but by the time they located the car about 8pm, the group had abandoned it. Police, SES and paramedics called off the search at nightfall and resumed it yesterday morning.

At 9.40am, after walking about 20km, the woman arrived at a sheep station in Acacia Downs and raised the alarm. She appeared to be in “reasonable health” according to police, telling officers she had left the two men at a water hole.

The men were found five hours later about 15 km apart, one was dead the other seriously dehydrated. The dead man was 33.

Remember this … all three were alive when their car was found and would probably have remained so if they had not left it.

Even the Red Kangaroo must take shelter and conserve moisture during the heat of the day.

A UNION employee who was concerned about wrongdoing told the national head of the Australian Workers Union in June 1996 that he deposited about $5000 cash into Julia Gillard’s bank account at the request of her then boyfriend Bruce Wilson.

The disclosure by Wayne Hem forms part of a contemporaneous and confidential 150-plus-page diary that was kept by the then AWU joint national secretary, Ian Cambridge, now a Fair Work Australia commissioner…

In a statutory declaration signed in Melbourne on Sunday and in lengthy interviews with The Australian over the past fortnight, Mr Hem declared he had deposited the money after being given the account details of Ms Gillard along with a wad of $100 and $50 notes by Mr Wilson, an official in the AWU’s Victorian branch.

Ms Gillard, then a salaried partner at law firm Slater & Gordon, was Mr Wilson’s girlfriend and solicitor at the time.

Ms Gillard had provided legal advice in 1992 that helped Mr Wilson and his union ally, Ralph Blewitt, set up a slush fund – the AWU Workplace Reform Association – which the two men used in the ensuing years to issue bogus invoices and fraudulently receive hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Prime Minister issued a short statement through spokesman Sean Kelly.

“As The Australian is well aware, the Prime Minister has made clear on numerous occasions that she was not involved in any wrongdoing,” Mr Kelly said.

“I also note that despite repeatedly being asked to do so, The Australian has been unable to substantiate any allegations of wrongdoing.”

But remember …

But it is vital to highlight what the Hem entry does not say – and what Hem does not say now.

He does not say Gillard ever wanted her union boss boyfriend to ask Hem to put about $5000 into her account in mid 1995.

Nor does Hem say that she knew she was receiving a financial benefit. There is no evidence of that and there could be several innocent explanations for the payment. We do know, however, that Hem was concerned about dishonesty by Wilson and this prompted him to blow the whistle.

On Diaries …

The disclosure by Hem to Cambridge [in 1996 about the deposit] came eight months after concerns were first raised publicly by a Liberal minister, Phil Gude, in Victoria’s parliament, about Gillard allegedly getting a benefit in relation to the renovation of her house. Gude wanted a probe into what he was told at the time. He has insisted union officials had been to see him with evidence that Gillard was a beneficiary of union money.

Gude told the Victorian parliament in October 1995 that Gillard had been forced to leave her law firm; that she was directly linked to the misappropriation of union funds; that she had benefited from renovations to her own house; and that she had to pay money back to the AWU so that she and Wilson could “cover their tracks”.

Gude made his claims a short time after Gillard’s confidential tape-recorded interview on September 11, 1995, with Peter Gordon – and her abrupt departure from the firm. Its partners had lost trust and confidence in her.

Gillard told The Australian immediately after she was accused in the Victorian parliament in 1995: “Every allegation raised about me is absolutely untrue; there is not a shred of truth in any of it.”

On Hem …

BANK documents show the man who claims he was told to pay about $5000 into Julia Gillard’s bank account was entrusted to deposit more than $100,000 in cheques into an Australian Workers Union secret slush fund.

Wayne Hem, 58, told The Australian in interviews and in a statutory declaration that he was given the cheques in mid-1995 and told to put them into “a bank account for something I recall as the AWU Welfare Fund”.

He said that Ms Gillard’s then boyfriend Bruce Wilson, the corrupt branch head of the AWU, handed him the cheques on several occasions and told him to go to the Commonwealth Bank to make the deposits…

In a September 1996 affidavit filed in the Industrial Relations Court, the AWU’s national head Mr Cambridge named the Victorian Welfare slush fund account as one “used to hold and/or launder union funds, as a step in the conversion of those funds to unauthorised, invalid, irregular and possibly illegal uses”.

Mr Cambridge stated in his affidavit that the account was unknown to other union officials, and involved payments totalling $234,000.

Justice perhaps …

The sentence in this case, Justice … ?, troubled me greatly. Good to see this …

Queensland’s Attorney-General has appealed the “manifestly inadequate” sentence handed to a man who viciously attacked his ex-girlfriend, slicing off part of her tongue, two years ago.

Mohammed Tasleem Tahir, 23, will be eligible for parole from September next year, despite bashing his 20-year-old ex-girlfriend with an empty Bundaberg Rum bottle, slicing open the corners of her mouth and then cutting off part of her tongue with a knife. <Brisbanetimes>

Author: bobmcgee

Dumb ways to die …