It’s time to straighten up our building sites with a strong regulator

If only feigning shock could restore order to the nation’s building sites. If that were the case then the procession of supposedly gobsmacked Labor politicians responding to The Age’s recent investigation, with The Australian Financial Review and 60 Minutes, would have ensured peace across billions of dollars of public spending and the workplaces of countless Australians.

The Labor politicians, together with leading unionists, have emphasised their surprise at the presence of organised crime figures and men with strong links to bikie gangs on building sites. This was no doubt alarming to the public, and the extent to which it was unknown to those who should have known will be a matter of some dispute.

Police officers monitor a protest outside by construction workers outside Melbourne’s CFMEU office in 2021.Credit: Getty

Days before our investigation broke, the federal opposition was already concerned enough to propose an amendment in parliament that would have prevented a person with more than 10 criminal offences from being an officer in a registered organisation like a union.

It cited the CFMEU’s conduct as its major justification. The government barely acknowledged the Coalition’s idea, but it is one The Age would suggest warrants consideration.

As bad as the problem is, this emphasis on unsavoury individuals risks overlooking the endemic standover tactics and intimidation that is the stock-in-trade of many in the CFMEU.

Reprehensible acts of abuse have been recounted hundreds of times in the courts and also caught on camera as part of the media investigation. How many others occurred with nobody watching and nobody talking?

On building sites it all adds up to “pressure”, the euphemism often used to describe the CFMEU’s activities, be it handpicking subcontractors, dictating working conditions or demanding a certain delegate post for a certain favoured mate.

Pressure is also leveraged through talk of safety. One of the persistent disgraces exposed in court judgments is the cynical abuse of “safety concerns” to prosecute industrial grievances and shut down sites.

The template is for a delegate or official to walk onto a site and point out a minor, or sometimes imagined, safety infraction and shut down an entire project. Safety is too important to become a plaything for power games.

Enough. It’s all gone on for years and The Age says enough. A clean-out and a clean-up are both required.

John Setka, then Victoria’s CFMEU secretary, at a 2017 protest against the Australian Building and Construction Commission.Credit: Justin McManus

This is not about black-banning from the industry people who have done time. As CFMEU national secretary Zach Smith and ACTU boss Sally McManus both noted recently, construction is always likely to offer a pathway to people with criminal backgrounds to build law-abiding lives.

But these people should rightly face barriers to holding positions of power in the same way as applies in many professions. A fit and proper person test for anybody wanting to hold a position of authority in the industry should be a minimum.

The test could be administered by the Fair Work Commission in the same way as it handles entry permits.

This unique quality of the industry is just one facet that favours a specific regulator. Construction has a specific, and challenging, character.

To that end, the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) should be re-established. The Albanese government abolished the commission and the current arrangement, where its responsibilities were handed to the Fair Work Ombudsman along with a funding cut, is manifestly inadequate.

A new iteration of the ABCC should have strong coercive interview powers to break the cone of silence and culture of fear that pervades the sector.

CFMEU flags fly at a North Sydney building site this month.Credit: Peter Rae

This approach is taken in numerous spheres in our society, where there is sufficient public interest, including anti-corruption bodies and organised crime investigations.

Penalties should be drastically increased at least to the level of doubling – as proposed by the federal opposition – and a new commission would require certain and substantial resourcing with well-trained inspectors in all states.

It is true that these proposed powers would be strong and, so, a sunset of 10 years could be considered so that policymakers could decide whether they were still warranted after this crisis has passed and the recovery can be judged.

To those who argue the ABCC was ineffective, we would ask, why did the CFMEU hate it so intensely? State governments also allowed this “cancer” on the construction industry – as a former investigator described it – to flourish on their projects. Should those governments also be judged ineffective and shoved aside?

Perhaps a revived ABCC could use another name to avoid any unhelpful political connotations. Should Labor propose or support one, it would also operate with some level of bipartisanship elevated above a long-standing anti-union sentiment in some elements of the right.

In the face of a problem at the scale exposed in this investigation, surely strong measures are warranted. A decent regulator is one such measure.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.