Independent politician: guilty of using others money.

[pietillidie]

Thompson did not commit his crimes when he became an ALP Politician.

Magistrate Charlie Rozencwajg also found Thomson guilty of using union funds for his personal use after he had left the HSU and taken up his role as the Labor member for the NSW seat of Dobell.

Correction: Thompson did not commit most of his crimes when he was an ALP member.

Naughty boy, should be punished now that he has been found guilty. With friends like him who needs....

More material for the writers of Rake. If you (anyone) hasn't seen the new series, it's a ripper. Check out episide 1 on iView from last week - a rip snorter of a season starter. Episdoe 2 was pretty darn good too.

Ha! Rake is my favorite show ever! I was literally re-watching old episodes when I read your post - didn't know there was a new season underway.

Mr. Greene! I will not let you make a mockery of this court!

[Culprit]

Well the Whistle Blower on Craig Thompson has just been found guilty and has been order to pay back 1.4 Million Dollars She deflected the attention onto Thompson and his misuse of credit Cards with the help of the LNP to remove Thompson. His discrepancies look pretty minor now.

[David]

Still, kind of makes the royal commission into unions (at least in concept if not in the way it has been conducted) pretty defensible, doesn't it? The HSU, at least, seems to have been run in a similar method to the Tour de France or the Russian business sector after the break-up of the Soviet Union - you know, if everybody else is doing it...

How widespread is this behaviour in unions, exactly?

[Culprit]

Still, kind of makes the royal commission into unions (at least in concept if not in the way it has been conducted) pretty defensible, doesn't it? The HSU, at least, seems to have been run in a similar method to the Tour de France or the Russian business sector after the break-up of the Soviet Union - you know, if everybody else is doing it...

How widespread is this behaviour in unions, exactly?

This isn't just a Union thing. Any business that give staff credit cards is open to fraud.

[stui magpie]

Still, kind of makes the royal commission into unions (at least in concept if not in the way it has been conducted) pretty defensible, doesn't it? The HSU, at least, seems to have been run in a similar method to the Tour de France or the Russian business sector after the break-up of the Soviet Union - you know, if everybody else is doing it...

How widespread is this behaviour in unions, exactly?

This isn't just a Union thing. Any business that give staff credit cards is open to fraud.

Most places though have measure in place.

To answer David's question, I wouldn't say it was widespread. There's many good and decent people who work for unions and there's some self interested scum as well. Not too different to most places.

One large difference is the accountability and transparency of the books when you effectively have a monopoly revenue stream. That particular branch of the HSU as I've said before seems terminal.

I woudn't surprised in the least if that behaviour was found to occur at the CFMEU, I would be stunned if it happened at the ANMF or CPSU.

[Tannin]

The HSU, at least, seems to have been run in a similar method to the Tour de France or the Russian business sector after the break-up of the Soviet Union

What utter rubbish. The HSU leadership is nothing, repeat nothing, compared to either of those two. Oh, they are crooks, have no doubt of that, but piddly little amateurs by any normal business standard. Even Kathy Jackson, who seems to have been the Queen Bee, only got away with a piffling 1.4 million. In terms of union official fraud that's huge, but by the standards of Australian business fraud it's chickenfeed, barely worth the bother of stooping over to pick up off the floor. Senator Slimey Sinodinos - darling of the Liberal Party, disgraced ex-minister for Finance, and ongoing icon of the blue tie mob, got into the NSW taxpayer for 20 million (he was foiled at the last minute, but not for want of trying); Alan Bond and the scumbags behind HIH both took down investors and creditors for billions, and they are only the first two to come to mind. Plenty more where they came from, and most of them with intimate connections to the Liberal Party.

And these guys - as far beyond the bumbling small-timers of the HSU as a vulture is beyond a cockroach - are mere babes in the woods compared to the likes of Putin's crowd.

You need a sense of proportion, David.

[stui magpie]

The HSU, at least, seems to have been run in a similar method to the Tour de France or the Russian business sector after the break-up of the Soviet Union

What utter rubbish. The HSU leadership is nothing, repeat nothing, compared to either of those two. Oh, they are crooks, have no doubt of that, but piddly little amateurs by any normal business standard. Even Kathy Jackson, who seems to have been the Queen Bee, only got away with a piffling 1.4 million. In terms of union official fraud that's huge, but by the standards of Australian business fraud it's chickenfeed, barely worth the bother of stooping over to pick up off the floor. Senator Slimey Sinodinos - darling of the Liberal Party, disgraced ex-minister for Finance, and ongoing icon of the blue tie mob, got into the NSW taxpayer for 20 million (he was foiled at the last minute, but not for want of trying); Alan Bond and the scumbags behind HIH both took down investors and creditors for billions, and they are only the first two to come to mind. Plenty more where they came from, and most of them with intimate connections to the Liberal Party.

And these guys - as far beyond the bumbling small-timers of the HSU as a vulture is beyond a cockroach - are mere babes in the woods compared to the likes of Putin's crowd.

You need a sense of proportion, David.

Point of order. When you refer to the HSU that is actually several different unions, or more technically accurate, branches. At least in Victoria. But the branches have little affiliation with each other except for the name, for all intents and purposes they are separate unions.

http://hsu.net.au/about-us/branches/hsu-in-victoria/

It's the Number 1 branch in Victoria that Jackson was from. It has a sordid history and was the branch that was for some time merged with it's NSW equivalent when Craig Thomson was there.

No 2 branch has it's own issues, an organisational equivalent of "little man syndrome" would be a way to describe it, but it's never been even considered in the same light as the No 1 branch which is widely considered a joke.

3 and 4 are pretty low key and seem to be well run professional organisations.

So, let's not tar all the HSU workers with the same brush.

[Tannin]

Thankyou Stui. A very useful point.

(I confess to never really getting up to speed on these new-fangled amalgamated unions. In my day, we had a zillion little ones, some of them with names longer than their membership lists.)

[David]

Right. What's the point of having these different unions? They're not in competition with each other, so why not consolidate?

[stui magpie]

Congratulations, you're about 30 years late.

They used to be on competition with each other, heaps of small unions as tannin alluded to. Then there was a big amalgamation under hawke and the number of unions was reduced dramatically, new super unions were formed who basically had a monopoly on their membership base and the era of unions as a business commenced in Australia.

[David]

Thanks. I guess it goes to show how little I know about unions or their history in this country - wasn't aware of any of that. If you'd asked me I would have thought that there was just one HSU, one MEAA and so on.

Do you oppose Hawke's reforms, generally speaking? I can see advantages and disadvantages to both amalgamation and decentralisation. I wonder what some of our long-time unionists on here think of this subject.

[stui magpie]

Interesting question, do I oppose the reforms.

That's a topic that i reckon you could get some serious divergent opinions on.

Personally I'm ambivalent. There are obvious benefits and obvious weaknesses. Whether one outweighs the other is a matter of opinion.

[3.14159]

Not everybody thinks she's an unprincipled scoundrel!
Tony Abbott
25 August 2011 Kathy Jackson is a brave, decent woman, and she is speaking up on behalf of 70,000 members.

Christopher Pyne 25 Feb 2014
Kathy Jackson is a revolutionary, and Kathy Jackson will be remembered as a lion of the union movement.

Funny thing is though, we didn't need a Royal Commission to find this out, it was Kathy Jackson, under pressure to account for the millions stolen from members of the HSU that brought this to light in an attempt to save her own skin.
This paralysed the last government and led this one to believe that bringing down Labour leaders by subjecting them to the Royale Star Chamber is the new black when it comes to drawing the public's ear way from debate on things that really matter.
So far we've spent over $50 million and have discovered bugger all and worse yet have brought down the reputation of the work of Royal Commissions by Government that is using them to bring down it's enemies.
"If" the Government has ANY evidence of wrong doing by these Unions give the evidence over to the federal police who can do the job of investigating so much better and at a fraction of the cost.
Yesterday the P.M told the ALP "not to play politics with the Royal Commission!"
If the P.M is serious he isn't just out of touch with the Australian people, he's out of touch with reality!

[Tannin]

I agree with Stui in broad on amalgamation, it was a mixed blessing overall. (My union days finished up about the time that the amalgamation craze was more-or-less finishing with just a few left to go.)

The big modern unions don't have the hands-on workplace understanding that the little ones did. On the other hand, someone of David's generation probably doesn't even know what a demarkation dispute is, which is most certainly a blessing. Dreadful bloody things!

Stui's suggestion that unions now somehow have a "monopoly" which the unions of, say, 40 years ago did not is, to say the least, odd. There used to be occasional to-ing and fro-ing around the edges (thus demarkation disputes) but this was very much the exception. In 99% of cases, there was one union to which everyone in a given occupation belonged (juast as there is today), and (outside of rare edge cases) certainly no question of having several different ones covering the same occupation in the same workplace. (That was more a US thing - the Yanks were big on that as I recall. No-one knows why. Daft idea.) The main organisational difference today is that you can change occupations to something else vaguely related and still retain your membership of the same union 'coz it covers lots more trades.

And, of course, the modern unions have, by working hand-in-hand with employers, set up a whole string of mutual non-profit industry super funds which have been fabulously successful and saved members billions of dollars in fees and consistently return substantially higher benefits than the grasping banks and for-profit super companies.

[Dangles]

The HSU, at least, seems to have been run in a similar method to the Tour de France or the Russian business sector after the break-up of the Soviet Union

What utter rubbish. The HSU leadership is nothing, repeat nothing, compared to either of those two. Oh, they are crooks, have no doubt of that, but piddly little amateurs by any normal business standard. Even Kathy Jackson, who seems to have been the Queen Bee, only got away with a piffling 1.4 million. In terms of union official fraud that's huge, but by the standards of Australian business fraud it's chickenfeed, barely worth the bother of stooping over to pick up off the floor. Senator Slimey Sinodinos - darling of the Liberal Party, disgraced ex-minister for Finance, and ongoing icon of the blue tie mob, got into the NSW taxpayer for 20 million (he was foiled at the last minute, but not for want of trying); Alan Bond and the scumbags behind HIH both took down investors and creditors for billions, and they are only the first two to come to mind. Plenty more where they came from, and most of them with intimate connections to the Liberal Party.

And these guys - as far beyond the bumbling small-timers of the HSU as a vulture is beyond a cockroach - are mere babes in the woods compared to the likes of Putin's crowd.

You need a sense of proportion, David.

Point of order. When you refer to the HSU that is actually several different unions, or more technically accurate, branches. At least in Victoria. But the branches have little affiliation with each other except for the name, for all intents and purposes they are separate unions.

http://hsu.net.au/about-us/branches/hsu-in-victoria/

It's the Number 1 branch in Victoria that Jackson was from. It has a sordid history and was the branch that was for some time merged with it's NSW equivalent when Craig Thomson was there.

No 2 branch has it's own issues, an organisational equivalent of "little man syndrome" would be a way to describe it, but it's never been even considered in the same light as the No 1 branch which is widely considered a joke.

3 and 4 are pretty low key and seem to be well run professional organisations.

So, let's not tar all the HSU workers with the same brush.

ABC News just said she's from the number 3 branch.