The CFMEU engages in thuggery? Who would’ve thought

This latest round of revelations is not just a disaster for the union, it’s also a full-blown crisis for the Labor governments that have tolerated and protected criminality for far too long, writes Peta Credlin.

Who would have thought? The CFMEU is a bunch of thugs!

But far from being shock revelations, what our media colleagues have done is dramatise and make contemporary what has been in numerous court judgments and royal commission reports for decades: the kickbacks, intimidation, corruption and criminality endemic in the union

The real issue is not the well-documented thuggery itself but its ongoing toleration by state and federal Labor governments. No attentive reader of newspapers, let alone savvy political insider, could credibly claim to have been shocked by the lurid CCTV footage of the union’s Victorian head, John Setka, delivering a scarcely coded threat to a bolshie subordinate; secretly recorded union insiders’ animated explanations of kickbacks and pay-offs to new entrants into the industry, plus how the $100bn Victorian Big Build is a CFMEU-run union honey pot; or the heart-rending account of a young traffic controller who suicided the night after being threatened and locked in a shed for hours because he wore the wrong T-shirt on to a building site.

The difference, I suppose, is that the media can publicise sting operations in ways judges can’t, hence the Channel 9 expose may ultimately drive more real change than thousands of pages of judicial reports and court judgments. Especially given that the media revelations, unlike the prosecutions launched by Coalition-established agencies and the reports of Coalition government-appointed royal commissions, can’t so readily be dismissed as part of the “giant right-wing conspiracy”.

Anthony Albanese

Change that’s abundantly needed, given that the construction industry accounts for almost 10 per cent of our total economy, is worth nearly $400bn a year, yet has costs estimated at 30 per cent more than comparable economies overseas due to union-driven rorts, rackets and rip-offs.

Is it any wonder we have a housing crisis and infrastructure projects that blow out by billions and cripple state budgets?

At least as important as the crimes sensationalised over the past few days is the ongoing political crime of a Labor Party that has long been sustained by a corrupt and criminal union and has consistently run a protection racket for union heavies who treat the law with contempt.

For years now the CFMEU has been the ALP’s biggest donor, funding it to the tune of about $1m annually in affiliation fees, and has had the biggest bloc vote at Labor conferences. Premiers and prime ministers from the Left faction – that’s most of them these days – are ultimately beholden to this vicious union.

Under the kind of media interrogation that Victorian Labor leaders rarely face, Premier Jacinta Allan first refused to take questions on her government’s complicity in the CFMEU’s racketeering and then insisted that she’d immediately taken action against it.

Even though, as infrastructure minister, she’d failed for over a year to respond to a letter outlining a whole series of intimidatory acts in support of a CFMEU closed shop, only eventually to fob it off by referring the complainant back to the head contractors who were complicit in it.

Quite rightly, there have been calls for Allan to stand aside but, like her predecessor Daniel Andrews, she is beholden to the CFMEU. But it’s not just the Victorian Premier. Reports are that the Prime Minister had the same material before him over the same period, failing even to respond let alone take effective action

In 2003, royal commissioner Terry Cole said of the CFMEU: “It knows that it has a network of militant unionists throughout Australia … It knows it can bring pressure to bear on major contractors … by threatening action on projects unrelated to any dispute on a particular project … It knows … that pressure will be so intense that even the most major contractors will ultimately surrender.”

Jacinta Allan

Daniel Andrews

In 2015, royal commissioner Dyson Heydon delivered two separate volumes specific to the CFMEU and said of various officials: “John Setka … may have committed blackmail … David Hanna may have fraudulently made additions to his house … Darren Greenfield may have made a death threat and taken bribes”.

Even Bill Shorten, who once described the Heydon royal commission as a “politically motivated witch-hunt”, conceded this week that the latest CFMEU expose might actually be a once-in-a-generation chance to “straighten out” the union movement. As the minister who put the corrupt Health Services Union into administration in 2012, Shorten is far from the most at fault Labor leader. All of them have been on notice for years about the real nature of the CFMEU given this newspaper’s front-page story, also in 2012, that Setka had even then faced some 60 charges including “assaulting police … resisting arrest … (and) wilful damage” and had been convicted on 40 of them.

As opposition leader, Anthony Albanese did expel Setka from the ALP over gross references to women but for years continued to accept the CFMEU’s financial and voting support.

This is what makes the pious declarations from Labor leaders, from the Prime Minister down, including the current CFMEU national secretary and the ACTU head, that they had no knowledge of criminal conduct and have zero tolerance of criminality so fraudulent and self-serving.

This latest round of revelations is not just a disaster for the union, it’s also a full-blown crisis for the Labor governments that have tolerated and protected criminality for far too long. Almost the first act of the Rudd-Gillard government, was to abolish the Australian Building and Construction Commission, the tough building industry cop on the beat that had helped to keep the crooked union in check for much of the Howard era.

And almost the first act of the incoming Albanese government was to abolish for the second time the ABCC (which had finally been re-established in 2016), even though it had prosecuted literally dozens of CFMEU officials and imposed literally millions of dollars in fines.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that abolishing the bodies that Coalition governments set up to protect people from union intimidation is the devil’s bargain Labor leaders make to keep the peace inside the Labor movement and to keep the donations flowing.

Now that millions of Australians have finally seen and heard for themselves what that means in practice, this shameful cover-up must surely be at an end if Labor leaders are not to be the guilty accomplices in all the CFMEU’s crimes. It’s within the Prime Minister’s immediate authority to order that the CFMEU be disaffiliated from the Labor Party, not just put into administration as happened on Wednesday. And unless there’s also the re-establishment of an ABCC-like body to police building sites, all we’ve got is window-dressing.

Every day that this cancer is unexcised, Labor governments will bleed – and deservedly so. In the 1980s, Bob Hawke had the moral courage to outlaw the Builders Labourers Federation. Not so Albanese. Just whose side is this PM on? Surely not that of the industrial criminals who have bankrolled his hold on power?