The disclosures by The Age this week involving a gangland associate, a Gold Coast developer and the CFMEU are disturbing. Not only because they are innately concerning, but also because they show, yet again, that the cancerous network of thuggery, intimidation and misfeasance that contaminates business, industry and wider society throughout this country continues. It is a stain on the nation.
The Age reported that Melbourne gangland associate John Khoury was paid $110,000 by Queensland-Melbourne joint venture Glen Q to help secure industrial peace on the Gold Coast, where the developer was building a 16-level project at Broadbeach.
Queensland Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie.Credit: Joe Ruckli
A meeting was held between influential CFMEU figures and Khoury. This occurred four months after the federal government forced the union into administration.
There is no suggestion the union attendees have done the wrong thing, and the administration has also cleared them.
But the payment to Khoury by the developer was uncovered during federal police raids. A money trail was thus revealed between a front company in the name of Khoury’s accountant to Glen Q’s project.
Also involved was Nick Maric, a Melbourne construction boss now a Queensland government contractor, who has separately retained the services of Khoury and Mick Gatto to deal with the CFMEU.
From left: John Khoury, Nick Maric and Mick Gatto. Maric has for years had Khoury and his business partner Gatto on a retainer to deal with the CFMEU.
Glen Q’s payment to Khoury focuses light on how business and construction is done.
Our reporting also highlights the rivalry between the CFMEU and the Australian Workers’ Union, with representatives of the latter supporting two firms led by figures with criminal links to foil the CFMEU.
One of the firms, 24-7 Labour, is owned by two men convicted of running a drug-trafficking operation between Queensland and Victoria.
The other insidious tentacle in this network is the use of bikie gangs, such as Comancheros, who have muscled their way into the construction business, often under the guise of working for security and labour hire companies.
Following The Age report, the Queensland government on Thursday announced an expansion of its inquiry into the CFMEU.
Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie said the inquiry’s terms of reference would be widened to operate more akin to a royal commission in being able to compel witnesses to front it, and that allegations of cross-border criminal links to the union would be investigated.
The terms of reference and a commissioner will be announced next week, and the inquiry will begin soon after. This is welcome news.
The Queensland move aligns with the urging of the Labor-appointed CFMEU administrator Mark Irving, SC, who has called for more help from federal and state governments to “focus on crime and corruption across the industry”.
The administration believes it is time for a wider frame than just the CFMEU. As do we.
Irving’s appointment followed The Age’s Building Bad investigation, undertaken with The Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian Financial Review and 60 Minutes.
Next month marks a year since the construction and general division of the CFMEU was placed in administration for up to five years.
Optimists might have hoped this was a new dawn in dealing with the union. Pessimists might believe it was another false dawn.
Last month, we reported that the administrator, after finally having doubts about his appointment dispelled in the High Court, is preparing a national purge of union organisers accused of violence, underworld links or maintaining secret ties to ousted union bosses.
Despite the clearing out of officials, the nexus between the union, underworld elements and bikie gangs appears as strong, as venal and violent as ever.
A year ago, the Fair Work Commission outlined in documents in the Federal Court that the CFMEU and its members had broken federal law more than 2600 times, costing the union more than $24 million in fines.
Fair Work Commission general manager Murray Furlong told the court: “Since 2003, the CFMEU has been the subject of findings of contraventions of federal workplace laws on more than 1500 occasions, plus 1100 contraventions by its office holders, employees, delegates and members.”
There have been two royal commissions into the CFMEU – in 2002 and 2014. It’s not as if the political parties and authorities do not know what is happening.
In placing the union into administration, the administrator’s role was seen as “ensuring that the Construction and General Division and its Divisional branches return to a position where they are democratically controlled and operate effectively and lawfully in the interests of members”.
We accept that given the magnitude and intertwining of interests, change will not occur overnight. We do not dismiss the hours and labour needed for forensic examination.
However, Australia has been hostage to this standover conduct for a generation. In the past year, The Age has published, on average, an editorial on the state of affairs every two months.
Last July, we said: “A thorough clean-out of [John] Setka’s cronies – the corrupt, the violent and all underworld figures – is needed. A new generation of decent unionists must take their place. It will require strong and concerted action from the federal Labor government, which ought to be given some credit for its swift and effective response so far to the damning revelations.”
This is not what has followed. Premier Jacinta Allan’s farcical claim to have ripped out the industry’s rotten culture at its roots is exposed as empty rhetoric. It has barely been pruned back for the winter.
Federal minister Amanda Rishworth’s pointing to the CFMEU being put into administration last year and vague pronouncements about a working group hardly inspired any greater confidence.
Governments, regulators, companies and the union movement owe it to all of us to do much better.
We look forward to the day when we can say: It’s over. All the criminality, the violence, the intimidation is now dust in the wind, and those who perpetrated this cancerous malignity have been brought, and held, to account.
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