Anthony Albanese and ACTU act on CFMEU

CFMEU branches in five states will be placed in administration until they are cleaned up.

Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke in Canberra on Wednesday. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

CFMEU branches in five states will be placed under the control of an external administrator, with the power to sack officials and delegates, as the ALP and the ACTU suspends ties with the union’s rogue construction division and a federal investigation is ordered into workplace deals struck on Victoria’s Big Build projects.

After the federal government warned it would legislate if the Construction Forestry and Maritime Employees Union opposed the Federal Court appointment of an administrator, the union’s Queensland branch said it was considering opposing the move in court, accusing Anthony Albanese of opening the “gates to hell” to thousands of workers and scrambling to “shield the big end of town and his Labor mates from scrutiny about links to the criminal underworld”.

Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke said the administrator would have the capacity to terminate CFMEU employees and delegates, a power backed by ACTU secretary Sally McManus, who urged the union’s leadership to cooperate with the administrator to clean up the union.

Mr Burke said he had also asked the Fair Work Ombudsman to probe all Victorian CFMEU enterprise agreements on Victorian “Big Build” projects; written to the Australian Federal Police seeking an investigation into the serious allegation of wrongdoing; and pledged to use the government’s procurement powers to ensure that enterprise agreements on government-funded projects were genuinely agreed.

The ALP national executive will meet on Thursday to suspend the CFMEU construction division’s affiliation with the Labor Party and stop donations and affiliation fees from the branches to be placed under administration.

Peter Dutton accused the Prime Minister of the “weakest possible response” to the allegations, saying the ongoing scandal would “turn out to be the biggest defrauding of the Australian taxpayer in our country’s history”.

Mr Albanese said the government had taken action because it wanted the “corruption to stop, and inappropriate activity to stop”.

“Now to have a corrupt union official, you need a corrupt boss as well.

“You need someone paying the money and so we want that to stop and to be weeded out, whether it be in unions or business, wherever it is. It needs to be stamped out, and that’s what we’re determined to do,” he said.

Business Council of Australia chief executive Bran Black said appointing an external administrator did not provide the trans­parency and accountability needed to properly stamp out the alleged systemic corruption and criminal conduct, and a federal judicial inquiry was needed.

Describing the alleged conduct of the CFMEU’s construction division as abhorrent and intolerable, Mr Burke said he would intervene in support of a Federal Court application by Fair Work Commission general manager Murray Furlong to have an administrator appointed to take control of the CFMEU’s branches in Queensland, NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia.

Mr Burke said appointing an administrator was the toughest action that could be taken under the Fair Work Act as deregistration, supported by the Coalition, would still leave the union able to bargain but with no layer of regulation or additional oversight that applied to registered organisations.

“It would be a gift to the worst elements,” he said.

Following a meeting of the ACTU executive that lasted almost three hours and heard representations from the union’s national secretary, Zach Smith, and the union’s national president, Paddy Crumlin, Ms McManus said union leaders had decided to suspend the CFMEU’s construction division from the ACTU until such time as officials could demonstrate it was a well-functioning clean union, free of any criminal elements.

The executive urged the CFMEU leadership to support the appointment of the administrator and co-operate with them “to rid the union of any criminal elements and behaviours that do not align with union values”.

Mr Smith, active across the media in recent days, refused to comment on Wednesday about the ACTU executive decision or the government announcement.

The union’s Queensland secretary, Michael Ravbar, said the union had repeatedly stated it would co-operate with any criminal investigation “as we know the real crooks in this industry are civil contractors and their cronies”.

“The sad reality is that it’s the major civil companies that have brought the unsavoury elements on government-funded projects, and yet Albanese knows that a thorough investigation will put Labor governments in a world of pain,” he said.