Legendary Irish rugby player Willie John McBride is credited with saying “get your retaliation in first”. That seems to be the strategy of ACTU stalwart Sally McManus. Nobody has ever accused McManus of lacking chutzpah.
Even by her formidable standards, however, it took some gall for her to pre-position the union movement for the government’s August productivity summit by blaming “poor management performance” for slow productivity growth, even as ever more appalling tales of CFMEU corruption leak into the public domain.
Launching a survey in support of the ACTU’s claim that it’s all the bosses’ fault, McManus said “too often, too many employers have equated lifting productivity to doing more with less, pushing people to work harder for longer. This leads to burnout, which harms productivity”. McManus says it’s “badly managed firms dragging down Australia’s overall performance”.
Not red tape, cumbersome planning rules, poorly designed tax systems or stultifying industrial relations laws.
Class warfare – from either side of the debate – will never yield an answer. Where you come out in this debate often depends on where you went in.
However, in a week when particularly explosive revelations in the never-ending saga of CFMEU corruption coincided with the Albanese government’s productivity schtick, let’s revisit recent history to see what influence union monopoly power and the ALP business model of “cash for policy” has had on productivity in one of our most significant industries – the building industry.
There are the allegations that a Queensland builder had to pay $110,000, via gangland figures, to secure industrial peace for a Gold Coast building project. In September 2024, a report by prominent anti-corruption barrister Geoffrey Watson SC found that the Victorian branch of the construction union “has been caught up in a cycle of lawlessness, where violence was accepted as part of the culture, and threats of violence were a substitute for reasoned negotiations”.
This month it was revealed that more than five CFMEU organisers in Queensland had been moved on after another report by Watson asserted the union’s former Queensland leadership ran a “violent, cruel, misogynistic” regime that “encouraged and celebrated the use of threats of violence, intimidation, misogyny and bullying”.
Meanwhile, in NSW former CFMEU leader Darren Greenfield and his son, branch deputy Michael, finally admitted to claims they had taken substantial bribes from subcontractors in return for access to jobs – claims they vehemently denied for years.
None of this will surprise anyone paying attention. In 2022, Federal Court Justice Anna Katzmann imposed big fines on the union and a couple of its officials for obstructing concrete trucks at a site in Kiama, south of Sydney. She described the union as “a notorious repeat offender” with an “extensive history of contravening industrial laws”.
“Notably, before the events the subject of this proceeding, in November 2018 the union had been found to have contravened s 500 of the FW Act 118 times and s 503 seven times,” Katzmann said. “Penalties were imposed in all these cases with apparently little, if any, deterrent effect … The union adduced no evidence to show that it has any system in place to ensure compliance or prevent or reduce the risk of its officials or employees breaking the law. It has adduced no evidence to indicate that it has taken any corrective action. It appears to have no culture of compliance.”
In a separate case in 2022, the High Court, no less, found it was appropriate to impose maximum penalties on the CFMEU to deter its compulsive law-breaking. The CFMEU’s resistance to compliance under lower penalties “was a compelling indication the penalties previously imposed have not been taken seriously … to the contrary, the CFMEU’s continuing defiance … indicates that it regards the penalties previously imposed as an acceptable cost of doing business’’, the court said.
Recently, the union movement and the government have become late converts to the cause of cleaning up the CFMEU. To give McManus her due, she has been particularly vocal in condemning the CFMEU and its culture. But latter day attempts to paint the CFMEU as a single bad apple in barrels of virtuous apples are hypocritical in the extreme.
The chokehold applied by the CFMEU and its restrictive practices, especially in Victoria, is the very model of monopoly union power at work. It has driven up building costs enormously and cost consumers and taxpayers a fortune.
It has made itself rich as Croesus – in June this newspaper reported the CFMEU’s construction division had $310m in assets. Rorts include sharing (with the equally conflicted Master Builders of Victoria) any surplus of the Victorian industry redundancy fund, Incolink, instead of giving the surplus back to workers.
In July 2024, quantity surveyor Rider Levett Bucknall found the CFMEU’s latest NSW wages deal would lift labour costs on projects by up to 19 per cent in its first year alone. Master Builders Association chief executive Denita Wawn said, also in July 2024, that “up to 30 per cent of increases occur on construction sites because of the activities of the CFMEU”.
So, in the decades this corrupt blight on our national integrity, not to mention our national productivity, was festering and growing, where were the union movement and the ALP? They were positively enabling its resistance to law and order, and feasting off its ill-gotten gains.
The ALP, with the union movement at its back, ran a decades-long campaign against the Australian Building and Construction Commission, the special purpose building regulator first introduced by the Howard government. The Rudd government turned it into the Fair Work Building Industry Inspectorate with considerably weakened powers. The Abbott government failed to re-enact the ABCC due to Senate obstruction, and it took a double-dissolution election win for the Turnbull government to reinstate it. All the while the ALP and the union movement complained bitterly that special purpose sectoral regulation was un-Australian – ignoring sectoral regulation of the finance industry, the health industry and its professionals, the childcare and aged-care industries, to name just a few.
When the ALP won power in 2022, so desperate was the new Albanese government to empower the CFMEU, workplace minister Tony Burke didn’t wait to pass the legislation abolishing the ABCC. He stripped it of funding, effectively neutering it, in advance of the legislation. Whether or not he intended it, Burke effectively supercharged CFMEU corruption and its disastrous effect on productivity.
Why? The CFMEU has long had an outsized influence on the ALP. According to AEC reports, the CFMEU’s direct contributions to the ALP for the federal election campaign in 2022 were double its campaign contributions in 2019 and comprised over a third of unions’ party-declared declarations in 2021-22. It was the gorilla of union donors contributing to the ALP regaining power in 2022. No wonder Burke said thank you.
And it’s not just money. By 2024, even left-wing columnists such as Bernard Keane at Crikey accepted that “the CFMEU’s relationship with the Victorian government is another example of state capture”.
We know of course that neither McManus nor the ALP government are the types to examine their own conscience. They belong unashamedly to the Willie John McBride school when it comes to confronting issues.
Still, if they are genuinely interested in improving Australia’s flagging productivity that is driving down the standard of living for ordinary Australians, they should be honest. The CFMEU is a case study, not an aberration, of the terrible outcomes that flow from unchecked union power, and a government in financial thrall to such unions.
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