$100 million and 1 year, apparently.
I can’t make up my mind about this royal commission into the Trade Unions.

On the one hand, we have the Labor Party leader Bill Shorten dismissing it as a political  witch-hunt, a complete waste of tax payers’ money, an unacceptable threat to trade unionists’ freedom to fleece their members en masse, and that it’s better off left to the police to prove what everyone already knows, anyhow.

It should be left to the police, he says, to confirm what the Australian public have known all along: that a vast number of trade unionist officials are up to their filthy necks in the mire of rorting some of the most disadvantaged people in the country in the name of advancing worker’s rights. To confirm that the likes of Craig Thompson and Lloyd Williams of the HSU, who already stand in the docks accused of shamelessly pilfering the coffers of their members (some of the lowest paid workers in the country), are not the only union officials lining their pockets. To confirm once and for all that the practice of unionists getting filthy rich exploiting the workers’ practice is endemic. That it is par for the course and, in fact, what the union leaders signed up for in the first place.

On the other-hand, if Abbot gets his way, they are likely to catch a lot of Labor so-called ‘consultants’ and ‘advisers’ (such as the author of a certain online journal) who became stinking rich in the slush and swill of last year’s failed Rudd re-election campaign.  For that reason, I am compelled to give my urgent, full and unreserved support to the honourable Opposition Leader’s highly-principled stance on this singular issue and oppose Abbott’s political witch-hunt commission at all costs.