I’m no fan of John Setka. But he’s right about one thing

It’s hard not to be disappointed by the tepid findings into the corruption and organised crime that became entrenched in parts of Labor’s signature Big Build projects.

The problems happened as a result of the informal racketeering accord struck by the CFMEU, certain building companies and various thugs, gangsters and bikies. But you won’t see any of them named in the report by ex-senior bureaucrat Greg Wilson released on Wednesday.

CFMEU members protest outside Parliament House in Canberra earlier this month.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

In some ways, it’s not surprising the final report is as underwhelming as the denials by politicians that they didn’t know how bad the situation had become on these taxpayer-funded mega projects.

If you give a career public servant limited terms of reference to conduct their inquiry – as the Allan government did in this case – they’ll deliver a highly constrained report.

As is often the case, what is omitted can arguably tell the public more about this scandal than what Wilson has included.

When Victorians learnt of the Building Bad scandal care of this masthead, The Australian Financial Review and 60 Minutes, they wanted the crooked and corrupt held to account along with those who oversaw the systemic failures that empowered the wrongdoers.

Instead, the report mostly tells us only what we already knew and what has already been established by previous royal commissions: that the various state and federal mechanisms meant to combat crime, corruption and wrongdoing in the building sector aren’t working.

The entrenched failures of regulators, policing agencies and watchdogs to work effectively together to combat problems in this vast and vital part of Australia’s economy are legendary. If one is being charitable, you could say it is helpful for Wilson to again point this out while offering some obvious policy changes to improve inter-agency co-operation and encourage whistleblowing.

But the real question is: how did this failure persist to the point where union bosses thought they could act like gangsters and the actual gangsters somehow morphed into industrial relations consultants on the books of major companies?

The truth is that many agencies responsible for enforcing civil and criminal laws considered it too resource-intensive, difficult and politically sensitive to take on those in the CFMEU and building companies doing the wrong thing.

Some even held a belief, rightly or wrongly, that the ALP didn’t want the boat rocked, especially when it came to the election-winning projects that quickly became a contractor-bikie-union-gangster feeding frenzy.

What is missing in Wilson’s report is a condemnation of this failure by our law enforcers to act, and, more importantly, an attribution for this failure up the political chain of command. It’s a disgrace that bikies have got rich off the back of the taxpayer thanks to union-backed rorts on projects that the Labor government ultimately oversaw.

It shouldn’t have taken the media to jolt the system into action or do the job of the cops and regulators. That this is what happened speaks to a gross political failure that has, as yet, gone largely unchecked.

Wilson’s report doesn’t tell us who knew what and when. Victorians are left not knowing which public servants were told about the corruption and which politicians they in turn informed. We don’t know what deals the CFMEU struck behind closed doors with some of those responsible for overseeing the Big Build.

I’m no fan of John Setka and his CFMEU executive cronies. They deserved to be forced out of their jobs. But Setka is right in decrying the fact that there has been no political accountability.

Not a single agency head, senior public servant or politician has been made answerable for the failures that left Melbourne to host its own version of the New York mob’s decades-old partnership with local construction unions.

Corporate accountability is also nowhere, save for the recent touch-up of CBUS.

Wilson’s report tells us all yet again that it was a broken system that allowed problems to fester. But it is only political accountability that drives lasting, wholesale change.

That’s a chapter someone else has been left to write.

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