Kathy Jackson has been convicted by a jury of embezzling $35,000 of Health Services Union funds, and pleaded guilty to stealing almost $68,000 more. This is in addition to being ordered to repay $1.4 million of misappropriated funds after being sued by the union in 2015. Tony Abbott famously described her as a “brave, decent woman” and “heroic” when she tried to hide her own corruption by pointing the finger at her factional enemies. The anti-union royal commission overseen by sex pest Dyson Heydon gleefully called Jackson as its star witness, before ignoring the emerging evidence of her criminality: “What do you do when your star witness in a politically motivated inquiry turns out to be an alleged thief…? Just ignore it. The credibility of the Royal Commission into trade union governance and corruption should suffer a serious blow from its glaring omissions on the allegedly corrupt behaviour of Kathy Jackson and how it has treated her throughout these hearings. … Jackson was always the commission’s star witness and treated far too gently… How seriously can the rest of the recommendations of this interim report be treated when this commission is prepared to ignore such serious allegations against a friendly witness?” Her guilty verdicts are further proof that TURC was a politically motivated circus.
(Separately, Jackson is awaiting a decision [$] on the will of barrister David Rofe, who “wrote about 40 wills, most after 2010 as he slowly succumbed to advanced dementia”; Jackson “admitted in a signed affidavit to personally typing Rofe’s final will” which awarded her as much as $3 million from his estate. She reportedly met him [$] “almost two years after he was diagnosed with dementia”. The NSW Supreme Court will decide which, if any, of his many wills was valid.)