A political scandal that threatens to bring down Australia’s fragile government deepened yesterday, with a trade union reporting to police allegations that a lawmaker paid prostitutes with thousands of dollars of union money.
The allegations date back to 2005 and 2007 when Labor Party backbencher Craig Thomson was national secretary of the Health Services Union. They were first raised by a Sydney newspaper in 2009, but police did not investigate at the time because the union, which is aligned with the governing Labor Party, never made a complaint.
Yesterday the Health Services Union’s executive board voted unanimously to refer the matter to police and cooperate with any investigation of Thomson, who was elected to government in 2007.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard refused yesterday in parliament to detail her dealings with Thomson.
Opposition leader Tony Abbott interrupted question time to demand Gillard make a statement about discussions she or her office had with Thomson over a Labor Party loan that helped him pay legal fees.
However, Gillard walked out of the chamber, along with about 30 other Labor Party members, during Abbott’s speech, prompting the conservative leader to accuse the government of stonewalling.
“They are defending the unjustifiable,” he told parliament.
Thomson stepped down as chairman of a powerful parliamentary committee late on Tuesday.
“The current circumstances will clearly distract from the important work of the committee,” he said in a statement. “I continue to reject claims of wrongdoing.”
Gillard has faced repeated questions on Thomson, who abandoned his defamation case against the newspapers that first ran the allegations, but not before New South Wales Labor had paid A$90,000 (US$ 94,141) toward his legal fees.
Thomson denied the accusations and said that an unnamed man took his credit card and forged his signature to pay for visiting prostitutes at a Sydney brothel. Thomson also said that that man had repaid the money.
With opinion polls showing the government has become deeply unpopular, observers agree that the ruling Labor Party would have little hope of retaining Thomson’s seat in a by-election.
Abbott said the government’s preoccupation with defending Thomson was preventing parliament from addressing issues of national importance.
“They are defending the indefensible and justifying the unjustifiable to protect their own position in government,” Abbott said. “This is a prime minister who is so determined to stonewall, who is so determined to ignore issues of integrity in government that she won’t listen to the debate.”
Kathy Jackson, who replaced Thomson as the union’s national secretary then ordered an audit of its books during his tenure, said police would be given full access to financial records.
“Police are investigating this matter and we are not going to cause any impediment to them and will provide every record that we have available,” she told reporters.
She added that an audit report represented to the union in 2009 “established a basis for suspecting that there may have been misuse or misappropriation of union funds.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion