How John Setka’s wrath destroyed labour leader
John Setka was on holiday when a stroll through Adelaide’s CBD sent him flying into a trademark rage.
Four days after Christmas 2016, while the rest of South Australia was snacking on leftover turkey, Aaron Cartledge’s goose was cooked.
Unbeknown to him, the former South Australian secretary of the CFMEU was the subject of an incendiary, profanity-laden attack by notorious Victorian union boss John Setka, who had been holidaying in Adelaide when he flew into a trademark rage.
The impetus for Setka’s anger came on a casual morning stroll through the Adelaide CBD, where he saw a small number of construction workers still on the tools during the holiday season.
Setka fired off a foul-mouthed email to every member of the national leadership of the then Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union, with the exception of Cartledge, laying the foundations for what Cartledge believes led to the end of his 30 year-career as a union member, official and leader.
“Happy New Year to everyone, sorry for the message while everyone’s on holidays, except for SA construction workers! As some of you will know, I am on holidays with my family in Adelaide, to my shock when I arrived on the 29th of December a number of jobs including the Hansen Yuncken job on North Terrace was working.
“This is what this branch has been reduced too (sic), what a disgrace, as far as I am concerned the officials of this branch deserve a good f..king for this, they are a useless bunch of weak c..ts and that’s being kind. On our first executive meeting for 2017 I will be recommending that we give these bludging f..kers no money until we get some answers, as for the poor workers here in South Australia, you don’t want to know what they said about the union. I hope that Aaron and his crew are having a good holiday with their families.”
Exactly two years later, Cartledge would be out of his $100,000-a-year job as state secretary, looking for work and living in temporary housing, his marriage having fallen apart amid the stress of his war with the Victorian branch of the CFMEU.
In his first-ever interview, the man who spent six years as SA CFMEU secretary and 18 as an organiser has sat down with The Weekend Australian to reveal the full details of the campaign that trashed his career and turned the SA branch into a radical outpost of Setka’s Victorian power base.
The story behind that email is in a way the story of the ideological battle between Cartledge and Setka, with Cartledge a more gentle, old-style socialist who believes in compromise and Setka the crash-through radical who rules by menace and intimidation.
Setka’s Adelaide connection is his wife, Emma Walters, who 20 years ago was starting her own political career in SA as a left-wing student activist. Walters was elected women’s officer of the Flinders University Students Union in the mid-2000s, where she used the position to advocate zero tolerance towards misogyny on campus. Today she finds herself cast in the role of dutiful wife standing by her man despite his guilty plea and conviction on charges of harassing her with text messages, one of which read: “You are a c..t just like the rest of your family.”
In what were presumably happier times, the Setkas came to Adelaide at Christmas 2016 to spend time with the aforementioned family. They stayed at the Oaks Embassy hotel on North Terrace in the CBD, where two major building projects were being completed nearby for the University of Adelaide and University of South Australia.
“They were both very important projects for the state,” Cartledge explains. “There were drop-dead dates written into the contracts with tough deadlines to meet. The unis had to be open for the student intake in March so some of our members had agreed to work through.
“There were only a handful of workers even working on the sites over Christmas anyway, predominantly young blokes without kids who were happy to take their holidays at another time of year when things would be quieter, away from school holidays. No one was forced to work and they had two or three weeks’ leave lined up for when they finished the job.”
Setka saw it differently. His email confirmed his desire to wrest control of the SA branch from the more moderate Cartledge and his popular assistant secretary, Jim O’Connor, who, along with Cartledge, was forced out of his job last year after being stripped of his powers by the national executive.
The Victorian intervention in the SA branch dates back to November 2014, when the union launched the first of three two-week blitzes on construction sites that resulted in 20 prosecutions for breaching right-of-entry laws.
SA head of the Master Builders Association Ian Markos recalls the period with sadness. “I had always had a good working relationship with Aaron,” Markos says. “We had had our blues but you could deal with him and get a negotiated outcome. What happened then was that they were pressuring the SA branch into becoming more aggro, and I remember saying to Aaron: ‘Mate, don’t do this, this isn’t you. You’re going to end up with a conviction yourself, you’ll never be able to go to the States for a holiday.’ It wasn’t the kind of thing we had been used to seeing in South Australia.”
Even this new push towards militancy was not enough to satisfy Cartledge’s detractors in the national office of the CFMEU, and certainly not Setka, who made his aims clear in the Christmas email.
The Weekend Australian has obtained the full minutes of the 2017 CFMEU national conference resolution where Cartledge’s legs were officially cut out from under him. That meeting was highly critical of the lower wages paid to SA construction workers, even though wages in SA are traditionally lower across all industries, in a state where houses sell for less than half the price of properties in Sydney and Melbourne. The meeting set new performance targets aimed at radicalising the SA branch, including “attendance at rallies, development of young delegates and members, participation of officials in broader union movement events e.g. May Day”.
Devastatingly for Cartledge, the conference resolved to put the SA branch into administration, with the appointment of a “strategic co-ordinator” to oversee the secretary’s performance. That person was Andrew Sutherland, a Ballarat man who was working for the union in Queensland, where he has a court conviction for blocking a crane at a building site. Following Cartledge’s departure as secretary, Sutherland assumed the role but is expected to return to Queensland next year when a new state secretary is elected. His likely replacement is another Setka loyalist, Taivairanga Savage, a Victorian hardliner who was sent to Adelaide last year as the union’s CBD organiser. Savage appears in his Facebook profile picture flipping his middle finger and wearing a black-hooded top reading “God forgives, the CFMEU doesn’t”.
The influence of the Victorians has come at immense cost to the union. A series of unlawful construction site entries led to an explosion in prosecutions, with 20 separate court cases against the SA branch since 2014 for breaches of right-of-entry laws, resulting in several million dollars in fines. This compared to just two court cases in the previous years of Cartledge’s tenure. The branch spent $413,194 on legal costs last year, up from $19,634 in 2017, and is selling its Adelaide headquarters to reimburse the CFMEU’s national office for the cost of fines.
Setka’s meddling even included telling the SA CFMEU not to fly the traditional blue Eureka flag favoured by the old Builders Labourers Federation, but the black stylised version Setka had designed in the same typeface as his favourite brand of boxing sportswear, Everlast.
“These blokes just don’t get SA,” Cartledge says. “We’re not a radical state; we’re a conservative state. People don’t hate their bosses here. A lot of the building firms we are talking about aren’t big operations. They’re often just six or eight people. The blokes who work on those sites are often mates with their bosses. They have beers together, they go fishing together, they’re in it together.”
The final nail in Cartledge’s coffin was his decision in 2016 to authorise four hard-fought enterprise agreements with construction firms Lendlease, Built, Hansen Yuncken and Watpac, giving workers a 4.5 per cent pay rise over four years. “National office told us not to sign the deals because they wanted to keep the pressure on with campaigns running on the east coast and wanted to hold out for more,” Cartledge recalls.
“My members started arcing up because they thought the money was coming and they were asking for backpay. I signed the agreements anyway. After that they just took all my power off me.”
Cartledge finds himself on a strange unity ticket not just with the Master Builders boss but also state Liberal Treasurer Rob Lucas. While Lucas says he won’t get “misty-eyed” about Cartledge’s tenure, he says he was “the least bad option” compared with the Victorian hardliners. The three men agree on one thing: industrially, SA may be set to become a whole lot worse. The union has changed its eligibility rules so candidates at internal elections need only have one year as members of the SA branch, down from the previous three, making it easier for interstaters to move to the state and nominate for positions.
Cartledge has let his membership lapse but says he is “half-tempted” to rejoin to run next year. “Part of me says I should do it to stick it to them, but I’m reluctant to go back into that toxic environment. It was relentless.
“ I would fly over to Melbourne for national executive and before the meetings would start, I’d see John and he’d say gidday and we would have a friendly chat. But the moment the meetings started, he would put on a show for everyone and puff his chest out, calling the SA branch f..king useless, a bunch of no-good f..king c..ts, saying the best thing that could happen was that we could all get f..king shot. In the end I was just spent. I’d used up all the fuel I had. You don’t realise how much of this you end up taking home. I spent too much time on it all and it took me away from my family.”