Cover-up claim on watchdog ABCC refusal

The building watchdog is refusing access to documents about its dealings with the Master Builders before the 2019 election.

Australian Building and Construction Commission head Stephen McBurney.

The Coalition-appointed building watchdog is refusing access to documents about its dealings with the Master Builders before the 2019 election, sparking union claims of a political cover-up.

After its previous Freedom of Information request revealed Australian Building and Construction Commission head Stephen McBurney held a “strategic” meeting with the Master Builders that discussed the federal election ahead of the 2022 poll, the CFMEU sought details of their dealings in the months before the 2019 election.

In its June 23 FOI request, the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union sought access to any documents showing communications between the ABCC and the Master Builders from June 2018 to May 2019 relating to the recent federal poll.

As well as documents over a five-month period relating to the ABCC’s policy for issuing media releases, the union sought records of any meetings held since December 2016 between the ABCC and the MBA that were identified as a “strategic meeting” or “stakeholder engagement” meeting.

In its written response, the ABCC said it would need to search three separate electronic databases – Pandora, InCase and Alfresco – to respond to the request. After spending an hour running searches of InCase for records that included the term “Master Builder” and “election”, it identified 10 “‘potentially relevant” documents.

The agency identified about 1500 potential results in the Alfresco system that contained the words “MBA” or “Master Builders”, and “these would need to be further filtered to capture only documents relating to the 2019 federal election”.

In relation to records of meetings held between the ABCC and the MBA since 2016 identified as strategic or stakeholder engagement, the ABCC said its searches in Alfresco “returned more than 8800 potential results”.

It said more than 167,000 documents were created in Pandora during this period and it would take an estimated 110 hours to conduct all the searches required to meet the request.

In its letter to the union, the ABCC gave notice of its intention to refuse access to the documents as processing the request in its current extremely broad form would “substantially and unreasonably divert the resources of the ABCC from its other operations”.

CFMEU construction division national secretary Dave Noonan said the ABCC’s position “smacks of a cover up”, and it should make the 10 documents from the InCase database immediately available.

“We are concerned the ABCC is not interested in transparency, particularly given the fact that our last FOI revealed they were conducting secret, strategic meetings with the MBA in the run-up to the 2022 election,” he said.

“It seems likely to us that this was a routine activity of the ABCC to be conducting strategic discussions with the Liberal Party-aligned Master Builders in the run-up to federal elections.

“They certainly did this in 2022, and it’s completely inappropriate for a government agency with serious powers, that presents itself as being politically neutral and independent, to be engaged in strategic meetings with an employer body, particularly one that is actively campaigning for the Liberal Party at the election.”