June 11, 2014
“When Bob Kernohan, then a senior [AWU] official, raised concerns about a union slush fund and dodgy dealings he was told by a young Bill Shorten to think about his future, a royal commission has heard.
[The Royal Commission also heard that in 1996,] Kernohan was sent three bullets in the mail and bashed by at least three men when it became known he was planning to go to the police with concerns about union bank accounts and the sale of a property. ‘Keep your f****** mouth shut. Stop talking to the press, you grub’, the men yelled during the July 1996 beating, Mr Kernohan said in his statement to the royal commission into union corruption.
Mr Kernohan said his friend and campaign manager Bill Shorten had at the time told him he was ‘lined up to take a safe Labor seat of Melton in the Victorian parliament’. When he raised concerns about the Sydney court proceedings, Mr Shorten said ‘Bob, think of your future’, according to Mr Kernohan. ‘If you pursue this, a lot of good people will get hurt and you will be on your own’.
Kernohan said that was the end of his political ambitions. ‘Any chance I had of entering parliament … I knew that had evaporated the minute I walked away from Bill Shorten’, he told the commission.
Source: The Australian