Setka latest ‘bogeyman’ for enemies of CFMEU

Straight-talking Dave Noonan is the calm amid the storm surrounding the Victorian unionist.

CFMEU national secretary and union stalwart Dave Noonan in Adelaide. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

Dave Noonan calls it “the John Setka sideshow”, the protracted and acrimonious battle between his Victorian construction chief and fledgling Labor leader ­Anthony Albanese that exploded again this week in the midst of the CFMEU national conference in Adelaide.

The straight-talking Noonan makes no bones about which side he is on. “John has been treated terribly,” the national CFMEU construction secretary told ­Inquirer on Friday.

“We all have flaws. I have flaws. You have flaws. John has flaws and is working to fix them.

“I’m not going to get into detail about what happened between him and his partner (Emma Walters). I have never commented on that. John has commented on it. He’s made certain concessions about his behaviour. But John Setka is not what all this is about.”

Noonan, 55, has been the ­national construction secretary of the CFMEU since 2007. Unlike his tattooed, buffed and potty-mouthed comrades wandering around Adelaide’s Glenelg beach in T-shirts adorned with skulls and cobras, Noonan is an ­approachable, measured man, dressed neatly in a CFMEU polo shirt monogrammed simply with crossed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags and a basic union logo.

He speaks thoughtfully and without profanity as he talks through the CFMEU’s many ongoing battles — with the Morrison government, the ABCC, the Master Builders Association, ­Albanese, Jacqui Lambie, the ACTU … with almost everybody at the ­moment, it seems.

You get the sense this is how the CFMEU likes it — the ultimate outsiders union or, to borrow a phrase from the biker culture that informs its collective fashion sense, the 1 per cent who don’t fit and don’t care.

While Noonan isn’t an eye-roller, he talks with a sense of acute and jaded indifference about the Albo-Setka stoush, as if it’s nothing more than a focus group-driven re-run of what he regards as Kevin Rudd’s confected display of ­machismo against CFMEU bovver boy Joe McDonald ahead of the 2007 poll.

“Joe was kicked out by Kevin for swearing,” Noonan says dryly, “which is funny given what we all know about Kevin’s use of language now.”

We are sitting in a coffee shop in beachside Glenelg, where 150 CFMEU leaders and organisers have spent the past five days at the Grand Hotel.

As we are chatting, one conference delegate wanders past us along Jetty Rd, wearing a black T-shirt that says “SCAB-HUNTER” in crosshairs on the front, and a drawing of Ned Kelly in his tin helmet on the back with the words “No Ticket No Start”.

Noonan is aware of the union’s reputation for menace, and unfazed by it. He says people shouldn’t read too much into the use of gangster- and boxing-inspired streetwear by the members and leaders of the union.

“It’s just marketing,” he says almost sheepishly. “The young construction workers seem to like it. We are working-class, blue-collar people. We have got all sorts of shapes, sizes, colours, nationalities. We are not a closed industry.”

Noonan is frustrated but not surprised that the Setka blow-up has overshadowed the key themes of this week’s conference — free-trade deals, the plan to pay building subcontractors every 65 days instead of every 30 days, and workers’ safety, with conference delegates reduced to tears on Tuesday when they were addressed by five families who had lost loved ones in accidents.

They included Adelaide widow Pam Gurner Hall, whose husband, Jorge Castillo-Riffo, was crushed in a scissor lift building the new Royal Adelaide Hospital in 2014.

“I couldn’t give a damn about all the politics surrounding John Setka,” Gurner Hall told Inquirer. “I just want justice for my husband, and the only people who have helped me to that end all the way are the CFMEU.”

It is tragedies such as these that gives you a clearer sense of what drives the membership of the CFMEU and its militant ­approach to employers and governments. Noonan’s own life story contains some bracing moments that epitomise the sense of injustice that gives the union its ­aggressive edge. That sense of injustice is fuelled by two things — indignation at having been ripped off, and fear and fury over avoidable workplace injuries and deaths.

Noonan was born in the town of Wooroloo, outside Perth, in a hospital that’s now a minimum-security prison that was home to disgraced businessman Alan Bond and crooked Labor premier Brian Burke.

He was studying an arts degree before he decided to become a fisherman in Fremantle, where he says young staff were often bullied, abused, even raped at sea, paid on the basis of their catch, forced to pay for fuel and use of the boat, meaning they incurred a debt to the skipper if they didn’t catch anything.

When he was at sea Noonan was locked in a -20C fridge on a fishing vessel for half an hour in total darkness.

“There were two of us in there and the guy I was working with had got his stuff and gone back up the gangway,” he says. “Some time later someone closed the hatch. The light went out. I just thought it was someone was taking the mickey out of me. After a while I realised they weren’t. I was stuck there in the dark, bitterly cold, for 25 minutes, but it felt like longer. My mate’s older brother had died in a freezer a couple of years before at the same port in the same industry. I had an emergency alarm with me but it didn’t work. We had got back to port and the blokes were going to the pub. Apparently the skipper said: ‘Has anyone seen Dave?’. One of the blokes said they thought I’d gone home. The skipper said he had better check. He opened the hatch. I was 19 and I would have died. That was my last season.”

Noonan then worked at a kiln making house bricks, where the owners imposed a rule that if any worker went out on compo, the other staff would have their pay docked to cover the cost. He moved to Melbourne in his 20s and got his first construction job building a synagogue in St Kilda, joined the union, and has been there ever since.

He seems genuinely offended when asked about claims of criminal links to his organisation, repeated again this week by Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton.

He points to the dismantling under cross-examination of the Victorian Police Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana before the Cole Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption, after Fontana ­alleged bikies had carried out threats and assaults for the CFMEU, claims the police chief subsequently backed away from.

“He was demolished,” Noonan says of Fontana’s evidence. “He admitted he was wrong, he admitted his so-called intelligence was wrong, and he apologised.”

Noonan concedes, however, there may be some rank-and-file members who are also members of motorcycle gangs, but argues the same would be true of other workplaces and organisations.

Noonan says claims of bikie links are part of what he calls a broader smear against the union. He talks about one organiser currently facing criminal charges for trespass because he had tried to get a female toilet installed at a site where women are employed, and the bosses called the cops on him.

“These things are conflated along with false claims of criminality, the mythical bikies … it’s bogeyman stuff and, frankly, if they weren’t picking on Setka they would find another unionist to pick on,” he says.

He finishes with this concession. “John does give them plenty of material to work with.”