Michaelia Cash’s own-goal over CFMEU blackmail charges

Jobs Minister Michaelia Cash walks behind a whiteboard back in March.

Michaelia Cash should find a new whiteboard to hide behind after the withdrawal of blackmail charges against CFMEU Victorian leader, John Setka, and his deputy, Shaun Reardon.

And Dyson Heydon, the trade union royal commissioner, can join her.

It was the commission’s star witness, the American-born Boral chief executive Mike Kane, who “respectfully’’ suggested to Heydon back in 2014 he exercise his legal powers and refer Setka’s alleged conduct to Victoria Police for investigation under the blackmail provisions of the Crimes Act.

Impressed by Kane’s evidence, Heydon told him he was making “powerful points’’, later adding: “If anyone within Boral does have ideas for the future regulation of institutions so as to avoid this happening in the future, we’d be interested in seeing that.’’

Alleging criminal blackmail in an industrial relations context always looked like legal overreach. Almost four years on, the result is a fiasco for Heydon, prosecutors and the police.

As union lawyers pointed out, it is rare for a serious charge in a committal proceeding to be abandoned by the prosecution before its evidence is finished. It is worth noting the plug was pulled before Kane was subject to cross-examination scheduled for Friday

Rather than weakening the CFMEU, the blackmail case, and its extraordinary collapse, has left the union leadership emboldened.

It is another remarkable own goal for Cash and the Coalition.

Originally hoping to secure its biggest union scalp from Heydon’s commission, the government now watches on as the CFMEU claims the moral high ground.

To say Cash had been enduring a bad time politically over recent months would be an understatement.

She and her replacement, Craig Laundy, are being blamed by their business allies for failing to stop the merger of the nation’s two most militant unions, the CFMEU and the maritime union.

Her botched handling of raids on Bill Shorten’s old union has left the government’s newish union regulator, the Registered Organisations Commission, diminished, even discredited.

Meanwhile, as ACTU secretary Sally McManus builds momentum for changes to workplace laws which business view as already too pro-union, Laundy admits the government has ¬allowed Labor and unions to take over the industrial relations policy debate “unchallenged”.

Laundy has told bemused employers they “need to organise the way unions do” and campaign with the government against Shorten. But rather than taking up arms, yesterday’s debacle must leave many employers again shaking their heads at the Coalition’s political incompetence.