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by Margo Kingston<\/a> My mouth fell open when I heard Abbott\u2019s final flourish in Thursday\u2019s speech denouncing Gillard as unfit for office. I remembered, suddenly, vividly, Tony Abbott\u2019s very own slush fund. Could he too have forgotten?<\/p>\n It\u2019s ancient history now, Abbott\u2019s slush fund \u2015 but less ancient than the slush fund now in the news. And there\u2019s many unanswered questions about it, and him.<\/p>\n In 1998, Abbott privately agreed to bankroll Terry Sharples, a disaffected One Nation member, to take legal action against Pauline Hanson.<\/p>\n Less than 2 weeks later, he categorically denied to the ABC that he had done so, and 18 months later he repeated the lie, this time to the Sydney Morning Herald<\/em>\u2019s Deborah Snow. But when she \u2018\u2026misleading the ABC is not quite the same as misleading the Parliament as a political crime\u2019.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n He then created a slush fund he called Australians for Honest Politics and raised $100,000 for it from 12 people he declined to name. The fund began bankrolling more court actions against Hanson and her party.<\/p>\n And there it rested, his lies largely unknown to the public, until court proceedings by Sharples he\u2019d helped kick-start finally resulted in her being jailed.<\/p>\n The overwhelming majority of Australians, like her or hate her, hated that, blamed Abbott for setting the legal wheels in motion, and wanted to know the details.<\/p>\n In a famous interview<\/a>, Kerry O\u2019Brien demolished Abbott\u2019s facade of misunderstood nice and proved to a much bigger audience that he was a serial liar.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s more!<\/p>\n The Sydney Morning Herald<\/em>\u2019s Mike Seccombe then reported<\/a> that, in 1998, the Australian Electoral Commission asked Abbott to disclose his donors<\/a>, as required by law.<\/p>\n He refused, telling the Commission that before seeking donations:<\/p>\n \u2018I spoke with one of Australia\u2019s leading electoral lawyers who assured me that the trust would not be covered by disclosure provisions.\u2019<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The AEC took him at his word and closed the file until forced to reopen it in 2003.<\/p>\n Abbott had lied again!<\/p>\n When I asked him on September 2003 why he took legal advice on secrecy before soliciting for donations, he said:<\/p>\n \u2018I didn\u2019t take legal advice on disclosure till after I got the AEC\u2019s letter. I sought legal advice and got oral advice from a senior lawyer.\u2019<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, he lied to the AEC.<\/p>\n Some would say that amounts to a criminal act under Section 137.1<\/a> of the Commonwealth Criminal Code (1992): the crime of providing materially false or misleading information in compliance with a law of the Commonwealth.<\/p>\n Me, I\u2019d give him the benefit of the doubt.<\/p>\n Except that in a later written statement to me, Abbott revealed that his lawyers had not even been briefed with the Trust document before giving advice, and refused to even name the lawyer. Not only that, he told me he wouldn\u2019t disclose the donors<\/a> because<\/p>\n \u2018\u2026.there are some things the public has no particular right to know.\u2019<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Much later, the Electoral Commission decided that Abbott did have an obligation to disclose his donors. Unfortunately, by this time, they could not legally compel Abbott to do so, because the Statute of Limitations has expired. So they asked him nicely. But he refused.<\/p>\n So, there\u2019s still unanswered questions \u2015 and it\u2019s a question of character, isn\u2019t it. So let\u2019s get this sorted?<\/p>\n There are questions of character over the PM and the alternative, both concerning slush funds.<\/p>\n She says she\u2019s done nothing wrong \u2015 apart from being used by her boyfriend.<\/p>\n He says she might be a criminal, no less.<\/p>\n Like many others, I haven\u2019t followed this story in detail, so I listened hard to their speeches on Thursday.<\/p>\n I couldn\u2018t see anything really bad in his allegations; he didn\u2019t show she was party to the Wilson fraud or had lied about her involvement. But, for me, she made the mistake of assuming her audience knew the detail. She needed to state simply what happened, hard though this must be, when her personal life is involved and, let\u2019s be honest, she\u2019s been made a fool of by a lover.<\/p>\n Too much lawyer talk, not enough human talk, I thought.<\/p>\n Still, I believe her. I believe she was sloppy, but innocent.<\/p>\n If that\u2019s true, then she has two choices now that Abbott has accused her of being a criminal.<\/p>\n She could sue \u2015 or, she could write to Abbott along the following lines.<\/p>\n I will call an inquiry into my involvement in and public statements about in the AWU slush fund \u2015 if you will consent to the same inquiry examining your involvement in and public statements about the Australians for Honest Politics slush fund.<\/p>\n They are both very old. They are both about character. And how Tony Abbott might react would say a lot about his<\/em> character.<\/p>\n (All the relevant material in the \u2018Abbott fund\u2019 archive of the Sydney Morning Herald\u2019s Webdiary may be found by clicking here<\/a>. A detailed timeline of the Abbott fund and subsequent communications between Abbott and I are in Chapters 15 and 16 of \u2018Not Happy, John\u2019<\/a> (Penguin 2004, 2007).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Margo Kingston Source: Independent Australia.net 30th November, 2012 My mouth fell open when I heard Abbott\u2019s final flourish in Thursday\u2019s speech denouncing Gillard as unfit for office. I remembered, suddenly, vividly, Tony Abbott\u2019s very own slush fund. Could he too have forgotten? It\u2019s ancient history now, Abbott\u2019s slush fund \u2015 but less ancient than the slush […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3434,3402,59,26,49],"tags":[83,165,269,2565,358,470,476],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3t0mw-r","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nSource: Independent Australia.net<\/a>
\n30th November, 2012<\/p>\n
\nconfronted him with his signed personal guarantee, he said that:<\/p>\n