Those suffering because of CFMEU corruption don’t care about politics

The latest Building Bad revelations caused immediate, but predictable, political fallout.

Politics, though, is the last thing on the mind of the small business owner getting visits from bikies, or phone calls from Mick Gatto, or visits from CFMEU organisers known to be in league with the underworld.

The political blame game was probably not on the mind of the NSW CFMEU organiser whose car was recently torched outside his family home.

The honest CFMEU officials and delegates who realise that the bikies and underworld figures polluting the construction industry don’t give two shits about workers’ rights and safety are also sick of the politics.

So are the women getting bashed on state government construction sites.

They all want action.

As one astute union insider said on Monday, as long as gangs like the Comancheros are free to play the role of industry fixers and standover men with impunity, Australia’s construction industry will remain a place of corruption and fear.

What the honest brokers in the union and broader industry want is a clean-out of the underworld elements, be it inside the CFMEU or within building companies.

Right now, that clean-out is simply not happening, or certainly not on the scale required.

Corruption buster Geoffrey Watson, SC, said as much on Sunday night on national television and in this masthead.

In doing so, he said what many diligent detectives, state and federal, have conceded privately for months. Put simply, the existing response to fighting crime and corruption in the building industry is failing.

Geoffrey Watson, SC, has been investigating issues at the CFMEU for the union’s administrator.Credit: 60 Minutes

Watson was appointed last year by the CFMEU’s administrator, Mark Irving, KC, as his chief investigator and given the task of gathering credible evidence of organised crime infiltration in the union and broader sector. Irving and his administration are the ALP’s response to the Building Bad scandal.

Having publicly backed Irving, Labor can’t easily dismiss Watson’s findings, given he is the man Irving has chosen to combat the dark elements in the industry.

Watson made plain that gangland figures, including bikies, had not only run rampant in parts of the industry (most notably on Victoria’s taxpayer-funded Big Build projects but also in NSW), they were still at it, acting with relative impunity.

He also attacked Victoria Police for inaction and warned that the Australian Federal Police, which raided Gatto’s accountant last Thursday as part of an ongoing investigation under which no charges have been laid, had too limited a brief.

If the cops can’t do what’s needed, how the hell are a couple of albeit brave barristers in Watson and Irving going to tackle the problems? They can’t.

In other words, administration or police action can’t be the only answers to the scandal now laid bare. If you need any convincing of this, look no further than the case of Derek Christopher, the ex-Victorian union boss.

For seven years, he has been the subject of a Victoria Police investigation into allegations he copped bribes from building company bosses. It’s nuts that such an inquiry can take so long without charges being laid or the investigation ended.

Credit: Matt Golding

Regardless of the rights or wrongs of Christopher’s case, these delays send a strong signal to wrongdoers: break the law and you will probably get away with it.

I have spoken to many cops recently, and they repeatedly point out that unless a victim of an extortion – be it one perpetrated by a gangster or a union thug – is prepared to give a sworn statement, police are powerless to act.

For good reason, few people want to testify against terrifying bikies. Victorian Labor’s promised anti-association laws might help a little but are easy to game by bikies going underground, and require enforcement resources that don’t exist.

It’s why something more than hospital passes to under-resourced policing agencies is needed.

Federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s proposal of anti-racketeering laws is worth serious consideration, given they have been used successfully to break up mafia teamster rackets in the US.

It is worth stressing, too, that these rackets typically need three parties: a mobster, a dodgy unionist and a corrupt building company. In other words, this isn’t only a union problem. But anti-racketeering laws also need serious enforcement resources, which at the moment don’t exist.

Even the most ardent CFMEU haters are wary of Dutton’s deregistration plan, given the Hawke government’s deregistration of the Builders Labourers Federation led to dishonest union leaders simply re-organising via other unions, causing the problems that we see today.

What is needed is full accountability of the type that a good, targeted commission of inquiry can deliver.

Victoria had its chance with last year’s Wilson inquiry report, but it was so superficial it became part of the problem. Watson, while not accusing report author Greg Wilson of wrongdoing, rightly dismissed it as a cover-up.

It’s often mentioned that the two last royal commissions that looked at the building industry (2001 and 2014) failed to clean it up.

But the first merely glanced over organised crime and the second lost its way in its eagerness to machinegun as many unions as possible rather than land a targeted knockout punch on the worst offenders.

In the absence of a searing targeted inquiry into organised crime in the construction sector, what should happen in the short term is a major injection of funding into the administration.

It shouldn’t be Geoffrey Watson versus the underworld. At the very least he needs a team of investigators he can deploy. Irving needs vastly more backing to keep delivering public reports into corruption in the industry.

A federal-state taskforce needs to be properly funded (right now the funding is a joke), but also needs a legislated mandate that extends beyond simply trying to press charges and which also involves deterrence and asset seizure.

New laws around IR mediators need to be urgently introduced to get rid of the Gattos of the industry, and state governments should boycott any company in bed with bikies. Unless we see serious reform, those in the industry will keep living in a state of fear.

As Watson asked rhetorically on 60 Minutes on Sunday night, is this the sort of country anyone wants to live in?

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