CFMEU whistleblower lifts lid on 2014 meeting with Anthony Albanese over organised crime allegations

Andrew Quirk warned Anthony Albanese about the CFMEU’s suspected links to organised crime during a 2014 meeting in which the whistleblower also detailed fears following a spate of murders he believed were connected to the building industry.

CFMEU whistleblower Andrew Quirk. Picture: Nikki Short

A CFMEU whistleblower personally warned Anthony Albanese about the union’s suspected links to organised crime during a meeting in his office more than a decade ago in which the former official also detailed fears for his family’s safety following a spate of murders he believed were connected to the building and construction ­industry.

Andrew Quirk walked into ­Albanese’s Sydney electoral office in inner-west Marrickville unannounced on the morning of February 3, 2014, seeking a meeting with the then shadow minister for infrastructure and transport over concerns that details of an internal union inquiry into corruption were being leaked to ­notorious underworld figures.

Quirk admits he hadn’t made an appointment but says Albanese and his then chief of staff and a former assistant secretary of the NSW Labor Party Damien O’Connor readily took Quirk into a special meeting room. After all, they had known him for years.

Anthony Albanese at his electoral office in Sydney. Picture: Tim Hunter

Quirk had just left Marrickville police station where he had filed a report over concerns for the safety of his family after he was publicly identified in media reports at the time as one of the ­authors revealing confidential allegations of organised crime links to the union’s NSW branch.

Seated on a low couch with a coffee table between them, Quirk then handed Albanese a letter he had recently sent to the Construction Forestry and Maritime Employees Union’s national secretary Michael O’Connor that outlined his concerns about the relationship between the union and outlaw bikie gangs and criminal syndicates.

In that letter, he raised the alarm bell that for the first time since the 1960s, the union was at risk of being penetrated by the mob.

Quirk now wants it known that he had tried to alert the Labor Party’s parliamentary wing as to what was going on inside the construction division of the CFMEU’s NSW branch more than a decade ago but little was done to pursue it.

“Both of them (Albanese and Damien O’Connor) I had known for years,” Quirk recalls to The Australian. “Albo was stunned but professional about it … the best way I could put it is that he put on a poker face.

“I went to them because I wanted them held to account.

“I was angry, I was scared for my family, I told them I was worried about my family. I might have been stressed.”

The meeting, in which Quirk laid out his concerns, lasted barely 10 minutes. Albanese then asked Quirk if he wanted him to pass the information on to then opposition leader Bill Shorten.

“My heart dropped,” Quirk says. “I thought he has just given Shorten a hospital pass.”

Quirk says that not long after the meeting, he received a call from Queensland Labor senator Mark Furner, who confirmed to him that Shorten’s office had received the letter and it was being passed on to Australian Federal Police.

Quirk had known Furner, now a minister in the Queensland Labor government, from earlier days when he went to Queensland to work as a union delegate for the National Union of Workers at the Golden Circle factory in Brisbane.

Quirk’s subsequent battle with the CFMEU is well documented. He was sacked from the union in 2015 for going public about his claims in an expose on the ABC’s 7.30 alongside fellow whistleblower Brian (Jock) Miller in late 2014.

Last year, Quirk and Miller won a lengthy court battle against the union for unfair dismissal – a case Quirk’s solicitor, Chris McArdle, says would have cost the union more than $1m in legal fees to defend.

The settlement barely covered their own expenses.

Prior to the union being put into administration, the CFMEU had indicated it was considering taking the judgment to the High Court to try to have it overturned.

Quirk has sought to now raise the 2014 meeting with Albanese because of what he claims is a blanket of denial by the parliamentary and organisational wing of the ALP that they hadn’t been aware of the allegations of criminal links to the union back then.

He sees more than echoes of the recent referral by Labor’s then industrial relations minister Tony Burke, in July this year, of similar allegations to the AFP in the wake of more recent allegations of corruption and criminal associations.

“The Prime Minister is presenting himself as the tough guy cleaning up the mess that he says he has only recently found out about,” Quirk says. “What is being said about this on building sites would be as unprintable as it is accurate.

“The truth is Anthony Albanese, along with senior CFMEU and ACTU leaders, have known about this wrongdoing for at least a decade. I know, because I told them.”

It is understood the minister’s office had a protocol of passing on any complaint or allegation of such a nature to the relevant ­authority.

Despite being armed with multiple warnings, court cases and a royal commission alleging the union’s links to criminality in the construction industry, Quirk says little was done to clean it up until now. He has been vindicated not only through the courts but by the federal government’s decision to force the union into administration. He is sceptical about what this will achieve to stamp out what has been allowed to run rampant for years.

His battle has also come at a high price. It has cost him his marriage and home.

Quirk says he had first gone to Albanese in 2014 because he had known him through the NSW union movement and his earlier involvement with the Young Labor’s left-wing faction, of which Albanese was a key figure. He was also Quirk’s local federal member.

In notes provided to The Australian by Quirk, recollecting the events that led to him blowing the whistle, he claims his efforts to get the Labor Party to take notice were ignored. “I tried to get this dealt with internally, I tried to get support from the ‘political wing’ of the labour movement,” he says.

“But when this all came to nought, me and my colleague Jock Miller told our story to the public on ABC’s 7.30 program.

“What really spooked me and Jock Miller, and added to us going public back in 2014, was the fact that supposedly internal investi­gations into malfeasance were leaking like a sieve to organised crime figures.

“When I first raised corruption with national construction division secretary David Noonan, he expressed his alarm over the issues raised and his concern for the safety of my family and myself. He then rang the leadership of the NSW branch to inform them exact­ly what I had told him.

“This also quickly leaked to organised crime figures.”

Much of these allegations are contained in 2015 Federal Court affidavits … all but the details of the 2014 meeting in Albanese’s office.

“It was in this context that I formally complained to CFMEU nat­ional secretary Michael O’Connor that everything being said in this internal inquiry he was running was being leaked to underworld figures,” Quirk says.

“(The failure) to address the issue led me to attend Marrickville Police Station to create an incident report, given concerns I had for my personal safety. I followed this up with a visit to the office of my local member, Anthony Albanese.

“I handed him my original letter of complaint to Mr O’Connor, which clearly indicated a detailed knowledge of organised crime and its influence in the NSW branch.

“So as far back as February 2014, Mr Albanese knew exactly what was going on.

“As it stands, the legislation to deal with the CFMEU, like much from this government, has been made on the fly, the quickest political fix at hand.”

One senior CFMEU official told The Australian of Quirk’s claims, that in hindsight it now seemed apparent that what he was raising at the time was valid.

Quirk says the Slevin inquiry initiated by the CFMEU in 2014 failed to go far enough into his claims to validate the links. The problem for the CFMEU leadership, it would protest, was a lack of evidence at the time.

The Heydon royal commission taskforce, initiated by Tony Abbott, would appear equally deficient on reflection.

“He has every reason to feel vindicated, every reason,” one current CFMEU official told The Australian, of Quirk now.

McArdle told The Australian Quirk’s case was well known and it was a mystery as to how anyone in the labour movement could claim they weren’t aware of the allegations about the CFMEU’s long-held links to the criminal world.

“This case was notorious, it was highly publicised, it’s been reported in all of the law journals, and now we have the group we know as the Labor lawyers who say they didn’t know anything about it,” Mr McArdle says. “This was a matter of common knowledge in industrial circles. “Why is it only now that they have been disaffiliated from the Labor Party and an administrator appointed.”

The Prime Minster’s office did not dispute Quirk’s version of the meeting. A spokesperson for Albanese said: “The Albanese Labor government has taken decisive action. The Prime Minister expelled John Setka from the Labor Party.

“We have put the construction division of the CFMEU into administration. We are cleaning up the industry. There’s no place for corruption or intimidation in the building industry from unions or employers.”