Sunday, September 23, 2012
The school, the cliquey in-group who can do no wrong, and the unfortunate prefect
who stuffed up counting the annual fete’s takings
The schoolyard is life’s stage at its
Darwinian brutest. And here I don’t mean
“stage” as a chronological, passing thing; rather, “stage” as in the raised surface
on which we rehearse, over and over, the script for the rest of our lives. You might be initially reassured by its being
only a rehearsal – there’s no real audience – but there’s quite enough
happening backstage (i.e. in-school) during these years to make opening night and
beyond, before an actual audience (i.e. the big wide world), seem like no big
deal. At least for some. For others, if you struggled during the
“rehearsal” years, the rest of one’s life can seem like the teenaged backstage
bullies have merely moved 20 metres, into the prime seats, in adulthood.
Following the last week’s oh-so-Melbourne,
storm in a pinafore (or so I initially thought) saga of sacked MLC principal
Rosa Storelli has had all the elements of a Year 9 drama. Whether you see this drama as set in the
primal schoolyard (as I suspect Ms Storelli does), or the boardroom (where Year
9 is only a fondly remembered, middlebrow David Williamson school play) makes
all the difference as to who you perceive as the baddies.
The known facts seem to be in surprisingly
little dispute. Ms Storelli’s employment was subject to a salary-packaged
arrangement. Salary packaging, which
basically means (legally) minimising assessable income for tax purposes, is common
for highly-paid executives and for workers across the board in the not-for-profit
sector (who are usually not highly-paid).
Where these two groups coincide, as they appear to in Ms Storelli’s case
– a highly-paid principal of a not-for-profit school – a salary packaging deal would
appear to be both irresistible and complex.
A “secret Deloitte report” into alleged
overpayments to Ms Storelli shows two types of shortfall, totalling $716,905.
The first is a relatively straightforward imbalance between money that the
school has paid to third-parties (including a nanny) under salary sacrifice
arrangements, versus that which the school has so far been reimbursed by Ms
Storelli. This apparently amounts to
about $267,000 (accrued since 1997-98), of which more than $100,000 is for the
nanny alone. The nanny’s $100,000+ is
separately itemised because this was an amount Ms Storelli apparently had
previously agreed (in early 2012) to repay the school, with the Board’s full
knowledge and consent, at least at that time.
We also know in some detail how and when this particular debt accrued:
“As the nanny's salary went up, so did the
amount deducted from Ms Storelli's salary. In 2001-02, the nanny was paid
$31,151 - the same amount deducted from Ms Storelli's salary. But there [i.e.
from 2002-03] the salary deduction stayed: $31,151 a year being deducted, while
the nanny's wages climbed to $45,433 by 2012”.
The second type of shortfall is the more
complicated matter* of fringe benefits tax (FBT). Apparently, the school has paid FBT of $1.33
million on Ms Storelli's expenses, but allegedly recovered only $882,105 under
salary sacrificing, leaving what the board says is a FBT-reimbursement shortfall
of about $450,000.
Ms Storelli appears to dispute her
liability for repayment of the $716,905, other than for the nanny’s
$100,000+. Her main defence here seems
to be that one or more of three previous chairs of the school board (Christine
Kilpatrick, Margaret Jackson and Lyndsey Cattermole) – not the board itself –
had made oral and written representations to her stating that those other liabilities
were properly the school’s, and not Ms Storelli’s personally. Ms Storelli has
also pointed out that all of the disputed arrangements were on the record, at
least such that accounting-consulting firm Deloitte (which has done the
school’s external audit every year since 2006), must have been aware of them,
and so at least implicitly approved them.
On the other hand, the school board and
Deloitte have presented a formidable and united flank. Their strategy here appears threefold: to continue throwing further mud at Ms
Storelli; to not even address suggestions of past negligence on their own (or
their predecessors’) part; and to profit from (in the case of Deloitte, and possibly
at least one other large accounting-consulting firm) doing the first two of
these. (I am assuming that the “further Deloitte review . . . into the salary packaging arrangements
of other senior staff at MLC” now under way is not pro-bono. Less clear is whether the two other big
accounting-consulting firms, which both have partners on the school board, PwC
(at whose offices Ms Storelli was formally sacked at) and KPMG also have/had
vested financial interests here.)
The mud-throwing by the school board and profiting by one or more big accounting-consulting firms is transparent, once you juxtapose
their repeated, shrill cry of “governance”, against the reality of corporate
boardroom seats in 2012. Interlocking
directorships make boardrooms – and here the school was moulded identically to
just about any given listed company – self-perpetuating** cliques. Calling them “bullies”, as Ms Storelli has,
may strike you as childish regression, or desperation, but in this case their
pack behaviour and systemic abuse of power over a visibly weaker victim is
stark. If you think I’m exaggerating,
here is how “governance” has been sanctimoniously invoked by the board three
times in recent days:
“A source close to the board said Ms
Storelli had previously offered to repay the outstanding nanny money
interest-free over four years. To accept
the repayment interest-free caused a fringe benefit tax problem for the
college, and would not represent corporate governance best practice”. [Note that this doesn’t explain why the board
was happy to renegotiate Ms Storelli’s contract in March 2012, apparently
including the interest-free element, against its own high standards of “best
practice”].
“‘You can't have your CEO able to hand out largesse bonuses to the people she was the boss of. This is a standard governance issue’ [also] said a source close to the board” (emphasis added and quote edited). [This
refers to annual bonuses of $40,000 to $50,000 allegedly paid in several years
to MLC's director of corporate services Christian Gusner and funding for Ms
Storelli’s long-time personal assistant Prudence Vernall to attend a
professional development course in the USA
Board treasurer Tony Peake said: “after
detailed forensic financial analysis by Deloitte, the board's unanimous
decision was taken with deep regret, but with good governance as the
foundation for the decision” (emphasis added).
[Translation: after Deloitte were
paid more money, they picked up things that they missed the first time. You might say that Deloitte’s regular audits
were “standard” governance (like public schooling, darling, you DO get what you
pay for), its second bite at the cherry (the one that led to Ms Storelli’s
sacking) “good” governance, and its pending further review promises to be no
less, I’m sure, than “best” governance.]
Talking of corporate waffle, the pending
further Deloitte review “is also looking at why another staff member [Christian
Gusner, I’m guessing] and Ms Storelli’s salary packages were handled
internally, and not by Salpac, the external company that handles salary
packaging for the majority of MLC staff”.
Translation: when it comes to minding
your lunch money, the bully clique has some hired muscle, too. Or at least the services of a company whose
apparent proficiency in the tax minimisation industry overcomes the dubious
literacy of its website’s self-promotion section:
Update
25 September 2012
When I read yesterday yet another media
snippet from a “source close to the board” (i.e. presumably a board member,
speaking off-the-record), I was confused by its tone:
On one hand, the anonymous board member invokes
the parol evidence rule as confidently as a know-it-all first year commerce
student, but on the other hand there is something disconcertingly personal
about “Why would the school pay for her house to be cleaned”. Apart from its vagueness as to which house is
meant (Ms Storelli has apparently lived in off-school residences since 2004),
there is the odd focus on cleaning as an apparently dubious element of Ms
Storelli’s salary package. Out of all
the expense items that might, in the court of public opinion, scream that Ms
Storelli was living the high life of the expense of “the school” (= school
fee-payers and taxpayers), house-cleaning doesn’t seem to be up there (especially
as Ms Storelli has not, so far, been accused of overpaying and/or sending off
her cleaner on “professional development” courses overseas).
My first strong hunch is that this
anonymous board member was a woman (who generally have much more of a “thing”
about cleaning than men), and more specifically, a woman with a bee in her
bonnet about cleaning. More
specifically still, my profile suspect is of a formerly high-flying woman who
is currently “reduced” (as she sees it) to doing her own cleaning. Enter Belinda Probert.
The MLC board’s official website (as
accessed today), and most of the non-Fairfax media coverage in the last week
have referred to Ms Probert as “the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of La Trobe
University”. In fact, she left this
position more than a year ago, in July 2011,“to do more policy and research work”.
Judging by Ms Probert’s subsequent
appearances on Google – but more importantly, her plain desperate reluctance
to give up an old job-title that has long been someone else’s – she has spent
the last 15 months with plenty of time on her hands, and with much less money
that she has long enjoyed. I therefore suspect that Ms Storelli’s
cleaner – and much of the fuel in the current fire more generally – boils down to a matter of concentrated, venomous jealousy –
as magnified by Ms Probert’s current under-employment.
It would appear that sitting on various
corporate/school boards is Ms Probert’s only paid current role – it is unclear
whether MLC board members are paid (most corporate boards, of course, pay
generous “honorariums”) but judging from KPMG partner and etiquette-columnist Bernard
Salt’s carefully worded We-are-saints-doing-a-thankless-task column in
today’s Herald Sun***, which notably doesn’t invoke the “and we’re not even
paid for it!” angle, I would guess that the MLC board members are paid – and
quite well – for doing their jobs. For
most, this honorarium would be merely the second/third/fourth layer of icing on
their nice main-job package, but for Ms Probert, who AFAICT currently lives on
this “icing” alone, the task of demolishing Ms Storelli’s cake – admittedly,
it’s a bit rich – is her main job. This
task has even, it seems, involved Ms Probert going back to her first year
commerce notes on the parol evidence rule.
And so far, you’d have to say, it’s been a
job well done. The cake has gone, and
its eaters (not just Ms Probert) are loudly proclaiming what a thankless task
it was, too.
Further
update 26 September 2012
Belinda Probert wrote a column published
yesterday (which I didn’t see until today) in which she seems to claim that the MLC board are all unpaid.
Personally, I have trouble swallowing many
things said by Ms Probert. Her prose in
this snippet: “the discovery by a
completely independent and highly regarded firm such as Deloitte” (same URL)
seems out of the “completely unique and highly acclaimed” Bali
villa-rental (or whatever) web-ad songbook.
Then again (and granted I probably should
have made this disclosure earlier), I have taught and marked w-a-y too many
contract-law-for-first-year-commerce-students to not have my own “thing” about
such students’ textual follies and legal over-simplifications. What’s worse, Ms Probert seems to show that
they don’t ever grow out of this.
* Herald Sun journo James Campbell (“Sacking of MLC principal Rosa Storelli is rich drama” 23 September 2012) is oblivious to the messy complications of salary packaging. “[T]hanks to the generosity of the Federal Government, Ms Storelli was able to pay for a lot of things including her mortgage, her car, her private credit card bills and her nanny from her pre-tax income”. The fact that Ms Storelli apparently owes a large bill for FBT indicates that the “generosity of the Federal Government” does rather come with strings attached. Even more dubiously, Campbell
** The MLC board has been literally self-perpetuating since 2008, with all new directors, other than the principal, “elected” by the existing board. As an aside, so it’s evidently now not just we gays who are tampering with nature by reproducing asexually or its corporate equivalent, the spawn of a board's naturally-infertile, collective wank. But in a possible strange bed-fellows twist, here I also concur with the words of former MLC chaplain David Bell: “I'd like to see a return to more church influence in the school. I do suspect the corporate model has now failed. It's not a corporation, it's not a big business, it's a school for heaven's sake.” (Footnote added 5pm 23 September 2012)
*** Bernard Salt “MLC board member defends
merits of a community board following sacking of principal Rosa Storelli” Herald
Sun 25 September 2012
Other
References (URLs paywalled):
Ellen Whinnett and Fiona Hudson, “How
Methodist Ladies' College's powerbrokers rang alarm on principal Rosa
Storelli's expenses” Herald Sun 22 September 2012
Ellen Whinnett and Fiona Hudson, “MLC board
asks sacked principal Rosa Storelli to repay $700,000” Herald Sun 22 September
2012
Stuart Rintoul “Sacked principal faces
demand for $700,000 following 'overpayments'”
Australian 21 September 2012 (Reference
added 5pm 23 September 2012)
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Archbishop
Peter Jensen – YOU need to resign as Archbishop of Sydney
Following my recent post on the perils of
“we”, comes a particularly egregious jump from the singular to the plural:
Evidently, Archbishop Jensen is quite the
amateur actuary. I am puzzled why he
first emphasises the “I”, because I thought that it was uncontroversial that gay
men and lesbians have higher rates of the following than the general
population: substance misuse, mental
illness, and suicide. Gay men (at least in Australia
From this list, suicide is the only item
which incontrovertibly shortens one’s lifespan.
If Archbishop Jensen really thinks that the suicide rate of gay males and
lesbians in Australia
The other items in the above list also
probably shorten one’s lifespan. AFAICT, tobacco is most actuarially
contra-indicated substance to misuse, but again, if Archbishop Jensen is really
saying gay men and lesbians should give up smoking (and if so, I’m all with
him), his worthy micro-message is hopelessly lost in his broadside. Likewise, if he is concerned about gay men’s
continuing high rates of HIV infection (and who isn’t?), why on earth wouldn’t
he use last night’s media spotlight to plug the single, scientifically-accepted
prophylaxis for this highly-preventable (since c.1985, at least) condition –
condom use in male-to-male anal sex?
Of course, the previous paragraph is
rhetorical – Archbishop Jensen’s use of the qualifier “practising”* gays makes
it plain that his concerned body-politic “we” does not, by definition, include
gay men, other than non-practising ones.
His logic is impeccable, though.
Non-practising gay men don’t need to worry about HIV infection – if you
hate yourself enough to deny your core being, then you’re “objectively” all the
more likely to add to Archbishop Jensen’s oh-so “compassionate” body count.
* I assume by “practising” he means
sexually-active.
Update
7 October 2012
See now:
Monday, September 03, 2012
Julia
Gillard’s beige-picket fence
In a nation supposedly obsessed with real estate,
last week’s crescendo of media coverage over PM Julia Gillard’s links with
corrupt union practises distinctly lacked in solid, irrefutable bricks and
mortar. Instead, what you might call the
mere chattels were being lobbed thick and fast.
It is no accident that the language of real
estate – e.g. the property “ladder” – is largely interchangeable with
career-speak. Both presume an only
upwards (or at worst, sideways) trajectory; no one ever seems to have the misfortune
of riding the property (or career) “snake” all the way down – not within the
discourses of the main game, anyway.
Careers and houses can also be broken down
into the same three, sometimes conflicting components, of which getting the mix
right is the best chance for success:
income earned (or rent saved, for owner-occupiers), capital
accumulation, and work-life balance/property liveability (jobs with oppressive
hours/conditions are akin to “renovator’s delights”). There is also arguably a fourth component, which
I’ll label “cosmetic improvements” (“if any”, as the usual real estate
disclaimer continues, while leaving out, of course, the “cosmetic”
prefix). In the career sphere, CVs are
notorious for “cosmetic improvements”; i.e. such “improvements” are presumed to
be a negative force, needing to be stamped out.
In real estate however, cosmetic improvements are eminently fair play in
general, and a well-trodden path to enhancing capital gain in particular.
Quite enough has been said about Julia Gillard’s
chattels (including apparently corrupt ex-partners), whether cosmetically or
otherwise. What I now propose is to focus
on Julia Gillard’s improvements; including, more specifically, whether they are
cosmetic or structural. I mean this in
the literal, real estate sense: I’ll
leave to my readers to extrapolate whether the PM’s early career can now be
regarded as cosmetically-, as opposed to structurally/legitimately
enhanced.
Before we can get to the actual bricks and
mortar however, we need to canvass the prerequisite loan application form. As we are talking about pre-low doc/sub-prime
loan times, career/income is an essential box-to-be-filled on this form. We know that from October 1987*, Julia
Gillard was a solicitor, and then from sometime in 1990, a partner at Melbourne law firm Slater and Gordon. In or in the months after
September 1995, she left Slater and Gordon (the date and circumstances of this
appear to be in dispute). In the March
1996 federal election, she ran unsuccessfully as a Labor Senate Candidate (if
Julia Gillard was still in the employ of Slater and Gordon up to this time, she
appears to have been “on leave” during the campaign). Sometime during 1996 (but after March), she became
Chief-of-Staff to the then Opposition Leader of the State of Victoria
In any event, the known real estate
adventures of Julia Gillard are more or less limited to the years 1991 to
(September) 1995, years during which her career/income, as a partner of Slater
and Gordon can be presumed to have been stable or upward. Hence let the bricks and mortar analysis
begin.
In May 1991*, Julia Gillard purchased 36 St Phillips St Melbourne 1/85 Kerr St
Even at $200,000, the most likely figure
Julia Gillard paid for 36 St
Phillips St
As I said near the outset, even the most
flagrantly cosmetic improvements in real estate are usually fiscally- (and
seemingly also for most people, although not in my case, ethically-) sound. In the present case of Julia Gillard and 36 St
Phillips St, we do not know her sale price (I’m assuming here that she sold
this property when she purchased her present residence in Altona), but we do
know the cost, and most other details, of the renovations she undertook there
between late 1992 and 1995. Hence,
whether these renovations were capital-gains successful for PM Gillard is necessarily
a moot point. However, renovations, at
least when not intended for short-term on-selling, also can be presumed to have
a “liveability” factor gain (as set-off against an “income” loss). Julia
Gillard’s renovations at 36 St
Phillips St
Media coverage of Julia Gillard’s botched
renovations has either replayed them as comedy or racism – the latter (if not also the former) because the ethnicity (Greek) of two of
the seven (at least) tradesmen PM Gillard had working for her was portrayed by
her, in her 1995 interview, both stereotypically and negatively. I’ve extracted the renovations parts of the 1995
interview transcript below (square brackets are my annotations). For me, contra to the hapless-Julia comedy
angle, and a necessary factor to be considered in the “racism” question, the
key issue is: whether, with her renovations, Julia Gillard was the architect of
her own misfortunes? As she expressly –
but oddly stumblingly (“No, I, I, I suppose . . .”)* – acknowledged in 1995, PM Gillard at no time
had a builder in charge of the overall renovations, never mind an architect.
The only logical answer to my “architect”
question therefore seems to be “yes”.
Again, I’ll leave it my readers to ponder the present-day implications
here. I will allow one caveat in my
answer, however: the timing and necessity of the 1970’s décor (but apparently
otherwise functional) bathroom, specifically, was dictated to Julia Gillard by
her then partner Bruce Wilson:
“Bruce whilst I was away [in Aug-Sep 1994] decided
that I should just get it done so he commenced with a group of friends
demolishing the bathroom.”*
Evidently, and perhaps not surprisingly,
Julia Gillard and Bruce Wilson’s relationship broke up soon after this “Surprise!”
bathroom demolition (the 1995 interview does not give a more exact date, but
clearly the relationship was over sometime before the date of the interview).
Finally, back to the cosmetic vs structural
renovation issue. Although I’m no
builder/engineer/architect, it seems to me that Julia Gillard has pioneered a
new hybrid between cosmetic and structural renovation (“cosmuctural”,
perhaps?). A cursory look at the lie of St Phillips St
“[It] was because the way in which the glasswork and the paving were done at that
time was causing water to go into the foundations.”*
Paving’s permutations could certainly
exacerbate run-off into the foundations, but I am genuinely at a loss to
understand how window (I am assuming) glazing, however configured, could do so
also. Perhaps PM Gillard meant the
window frames and seals, as opposed to the glass itself. Either way, I can’t help but think that Julia
Gillard has gone for a “solution” here that is both expensive and slapdash, and
not particularly pretty to boot. An
external inspection (front street and rear lane) of 36 St Phillips St
This is a shame, in some ways, as these two
front-facade aluminium windows would quite possibly have possibly have been the
last of their kind to be installed anywhere in Melbourne’s inner-suburbia,
given that the “heritage” bandwagon was already well and truly rolling in 1994
– albeit not yet in Abbotsford, it appears***.
More than as a mere token relic of the thousands of Melbourne
inner-suburban terraces given Mediterranean façade makeovers between the 1950s and early
1990s, however, PM Gillard’s retaining, post-1994, of the front-facade aluminium
windows would have given 36 St Phillips St an architectural unity. You see, beyond the beige front façade and
beige picket-fence, no. 36 appears to be structurally unaltered since the 1970s
– its sides and back are peeling, ramshackle even.
* All references here are to “Slater and
Gordon transcript of a meeting between Peter Gordon, Geoff Shaw and Julia
Gillard on September 11, 1995”, published as “What Julia told her firm” Australian 22 August 2012; URL
paywalled, but edited extract below
** The housing stock of St Phillips St
*** No one has been accused, to date, of
breaking heritage rules in 1994. There
is an official heritage report on 36 St Phillips St available via Google
search, complete with a photo of a ramshackle-looking (but judging by the car
in the photo, last ten years or so) façade and front fence.
--
Slater and Gordon transcript of a meeting
between Peter Gordon [PG], Geoff Shaw and Julia Gillard [JG], at the time
respectively senior partner, general manager and partner at the firm, on
September 11, 1995.
[Extracted from an edited, apparently
leaked, transcript published as “What
Julia told her firm” Australian 22 August 2012; URL paywalled]
[snipped]
JG: Yep. I've, I moved there [to 36 St Phillips St
Then substantial renovations got done on
the property last year [1994], which included the kitchen being entirely redone
and the bathroom and laundry being entirely redone and internal plastering and
painting being done, and yes, so I got all that work done in September,
October, Novemberish last year.
PG: OK. Did you contract all of those works
to the one subcontractor or builder or did you manage them yourself?
JG: No, I, I, I suppose I should do it
piece by piece. I originally got glasswork and [external?] paving work done;
that was because the way in which the
glasswork and the paving were done at that time was causing water to go into
the foundations. I contracted with a glassworker/ woodworker person called
Athol James, who I found in the local newspaper, and contracted with a paving
place that I got from the local newspaper after getting, I got three quotes and
then picked the lowest one of them, so that got done first.
I then, I then got the floors done and I
got Athol back to do that, so the front of the house, the old part was the
original baltic pine floorboards. The back part was chipboard and I wanted to
get the floorboards matched with old baltic pine so I could get it all sanded
down and polished. I'm sure this detail is really exciting you. And Athol came
and did that, got old pine and matched it all up and you know all of that sort
of stuff, which was a substantial job. And then I got some bloke in I think
that he recommended to do the sanding, so that was what happened next.
Then what happened after that was I got the
kitchen done, I purchased Ikea cupboards and stuff, purchased the actual
appliances from a Radio Rentals place in Clifton Hill, and purchased a granite
bench top from a local place near me called the Marble Centre, that's also in
Abbotsford, and then I had installers who were recommended by Ikea put it all
in. His name was Taugney the Swedish Builder, and he took a substantial amount
of time to do all of that though I was the envy of Leonie, I recall at that
stage, for having a Swedish builder.
That left me with the kitchen functional
but the, the kitchen had like cork in it, all of that had basically been ripped
to shreds when they had taken the old cupboards out and put the new cupboards
in so it needed tiling, it needed tiling on the splashbacks, you know around
the sink and around the stove, it needed plastering work, kitchen ceiling, that
sort of thing, and I had had a long-held plan to fix the bathroom and laundry.
Both were a sort of 70s renovation which amongst other things was red and
yellow in colour and I therefore wanted to get it replaced.
I went away to, for a holiday, in late
August early September last year [1994] and I had been talking for a long time
about getting this bathroom and laundry work done.
And,
Bruce whilst I was away decided that I should just get it done so he commenced
with a group of friends demolishing the bathroom.
By the time I came back the bathroom had
been demolished so I had no option but to get the rest of the renovations done
and a series of tradespeople who Jim Collins predominantly organised, Jim
Collins being an organiser at the AWU, who he recommended through his local
football club, a series of tradespeople came in and did the renovation which
predominantly consisted of the bathroom, completing the kitchen, tiling on the
kitchen floor, plastering work, replacement of ceilings and the like.
PG: To the extent that in respect of the
bathroom it was required to purchase product tiles or grout or whatever, how
was that paid?
JG: I went and picked tiles both for the
bathroom and the kitchen from various tile shops and paid for them.
PG: Right.
JG: When they were delivered.
PG: Yep. In terms of the tradesmen who did
the work in those areas, who were they?
JG: I don't, I don't recall their names. I
have some of their receipts at home. There was a tiler, an electrician, a
plasterer who had with him a general roustabout person and a plumber and they
all knew each other and had worked together before, but it wasn't like one of
them was the builder who was organising everybody else. So they came in and did
it and I paid each of them. I've had occasion over the course of the weekend to
look through my personal records in relation to this matter and I do have a
series of receipts from various of them about bits of the work that was done.
PG: Right, and I take it the inquiry over
the weekend may have extended to this work as well, the Athol James work, the
glasswork, the paving, the floors and the sanding.
JG: Yes, I've got, I recall, I recall
particularly dealing with Athol because he came back more than once and sort of lived at my place for a substantial
period of time whilst he did the floors, I don't specifically recall
whether I've got a receipt from him, I think I do. I've certainly got his
number and stuff in my address book from having used him.
PG: OK. Julia, it would be helpful to us if
we could have copies of those.
JG: Yes.
PG: Do you have a problem with supplying
them to us?
JG: No, no problem at all.
PG: Good. So that, is it fair to say as a
general summary of that work that all of the work was paid for by you?
JG: I believe all of the work was paid for
by me. I was getting receipts, I was paying it. I at that stage borrowed an additional $20,000 from the bank to pay
for the renovations. I had occasion to ask Geoff if I could be pre-paid,
which he did. I don't recall the amount. But that was recouped out of my pay
for the first six months of this year. And, between that pre-payment and the
borrowing of the $20,000 from the bank, I paid for that work.
PG: Right.
JG: I should say that, when I say the
20,000 from the bank: that was the bathroom, the work that was organised
subsequent to the demolition of the bathroom. Athol James, the tiler, sorry
Athol James, the paver, Taugney the Swedish builder I had paid over time as
work was done.
[snipped]
This
year [ie. 1995] I had additional work done on my
place to try and do something about the outside, the outside is still not
painted the right colour, and needed, needed further work done on it. Bill the
Greek recommended to me a friend of his called Con, the last name I believe to
(be) Spiri, Spiridis or Spiritis or a word to that effect. Con organised for
me, or Con came and did the following things.
There are, there were two of the original
Victorian windows on either side of the house that were not functional and the
wood was rotting. I wanted them replaced by new windows. Contrary to the
directions I gave him about that he replaced them with aluminium sliding
windows which I was particularly unhappy about. The veranda was slate and it
was coming up and the posts which held up the veranda in part were rotting so I
contracted with him to replace the posts and to tile the veranda. He did tile
the verandah after a fashion, but the job is uncompleted. He did put in posts
but he put in, ah, what's the word, decorative posts chiselled out with
patterns, rather than plain posts. Given it's a Victorian weatherboard house I
was pretty unhappy about that as well. And he mortared the fence and put
pickets in it which was required to complete the fence.
When I came home and saw the posts and the
windows which got done in, done in one day I raised it immediately with Bill
the Greek in fairly vociferous tones and said this has just totally buggered up
this job. This is just hideous, you know, you need to talk to Con about it.
Bill had been the link to Con. Bill said he would speak to Con about it. Con
came back subsequently and did the fence and I raised it with Con. Con said he would get, he knew he had made
an error with the windows. He would get the windows replaced with wood windows.
He didn't think the posts were his fault because that was the sort of posts
that were described to him so there was an ongoing debate about whose fault it
was that the posts were the wrong posts. He basically half finished, did most
of the fence though bits of it are uncompleted and then he didn't return. I
periodically raised with Bill what on earth is happening with Con and these
windows and these posts and the tiling's uncompleted and the fence is
uncompleted. Bill would say I'll fix it, I'll fix it but it never got fixed.
Life
got a little bit more crazy than it had been and I ceased to sort of pay much
regard to it or think about it but there was this uncompleted work at the
property or to the extent it was completed large bits of it were done wrong. I don't know what transactions Con and Bill have had about the
account for that work, but I believe what has happened is Con has gone to the
AWU looking for Bill or looking for payment for the account.
[snipped]
PG: OK. Is there anything else that you
think we need to know about?
JG: No, I think that's it, I can't think of
anything else.
PG: OK. Thanks. The interview was continued
because we needed to talk about . . .
JG: Sorry, I'm getting confused, the, Geoff
when we were not on tape asked me a series of questions about things that I
have had done to the house that I don't recall getting invoiced for. It
occurred to me that one of those things is, and Geoff has actually seen this
with his own eyes. Bill the Greek, whilst I was at work one day, built for me a
low level brick fence. I didn't ask him to do that. The result was truly
hideous and I think Geoff saw it when he dropped me off one night and everybody
else who's passed my house has commented on it. In order to try and make it
look less hideous, part of the work that
Con was to do was to mortar it and put pickets on it that goes like that to try
and stop it looking quite as Greek, dare one say.
I didn't, I've never, I didn't pay for the
bricks, I didn't pay for the bricks. I've never had an account in relation to
the fence. Now, I don't, I don't know what that means about where Bill got the
bricks from, and I don't know whether that means anybody worked with him on the
fence, that I haven't paid. He, you know, he pleased as punch sort of said he
had built it for me. That he had built it for me. Whether that means he himself
did it, given Bill's obvious difficulties with the truth I no longer know.
PG: What are Bill's obvious difficulties
with the truth?
JG: He's just a big Greek bullshit artist.
[snipped to end]
[snipped to end]
 |
| Front facade of 36 St Phillips St, Abbotsford
|
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| East facade (view over back fence) of 36 St Phillips St, Abbotsford
|
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| South facade of 36 St Phillips St, Abbotsford |
Update
23 November 2012
The plot thickens, as (mostly) minor
document after minor document is drip-fed onto the broadsheets’ front pages. If Little Red Riding Hood (22/11 corrected from "Goldilocks") had been a lawyer (or
ex-lawyer), she would have had no trouble with her trail of breadcrumbs disappearing
when they were most needed. A lawyer’s
every billing moment leaves at least a footprint in the forest. But in Julia Gillard’s case, piecing together
these footprints into a coherent trail remains a work in progress.
In the mean time, the two most major recent
developments* have received scant follow-up.
The first is that the money defrauded by Wilson and Blewitt largely came
from big-end-of-town corporate pockets – i.e. “donations” presumably used to
buy industrial peace. The second is that
“big Greek bullshit artist” Bill Telikostoglou was not just an over-promising
tradie working on Ms Gillard’s home reno, but a senior AWU figure, at least one senior
enough to receive a “large” redundancy cheque of $16,218, in August 1995,
apparently to smooth Telikostoglou’s exit from his (oddly unspecified) AWU role. Admittedly, in dollar terms here, we are not talking sheep
stations – just cosmetic, structurally-pointless cheque-writing for dumps in
the back streets of Abbotsford (and yes, that’s a metaphor as well).
Julia Gillard’s position at the moment reminds
me of a certain ex-US
* These two developments are covered in Hedley Thomas, “Rushed cheques and a quiet exit: how the
AWU 'covered up' fraud”, Australian, 16 November 2012
