AARON PATRICK: Inquiry examines whether Queensland police cut a sweetheart deal with lawless CFMEU

In 2022, a top policeman signed an agreement that pretty much handed over responsibility for policing a bitter and sometimes violent union-power struggle sweeping across south-east Queensland to the Office of Industrial Relations, a largely ineffectual agency bizarrely under the control of the state Education Department.

The “memorandum of understanding” stipulated that if the police were ever called to a dispute over union officials trying to get access to building sites — a common flashpoint between the CFMEU and AWU — there were two public servants who would be called before any police officers turned up.

One of those public servants, Helen Burgess, was in charge of all workplace-safety inspectors across the construction industry. She was also the partner of the president of the CFMEU’s Queensland construction division, Royce Kupsch, according to Stacey Schinnerl, the head of the Australians Workers’ Union in Queensland.

The agreement included a clause that said union officials did not need federally issued safety permits to get access to building sites. The clause, which Ms Schinnerl told an inquiry ignored industrial relations law, may have allowed CFMEU organisers who had failed the character test for workplace-entry permits to access to building sites, where they physically confronted AWU organisers in a struggle for control of government construction projects.

“I cannot fathom why this paragraph exists,” Ms Schinnerl told an inquiry today in Brisbane into the CFMEU. “It is entirely misleading and not based on any industrial law.”

Was there a sweetheart deal?

The Queensland Police Service has chosen not to explain either, at least yet. It is watching and waiting as Commissioner Stuart Wood KC allows his inquiry to investigate whether the CFMEU may have secured a sweetheart deal with the police that allowed it conduct a campaign of intimidation against a rival.

A police spokesperson on Thursday referred to a previous comment: “The QPS acknowledges that the Commission of Inquiry into the CFMEU is ongoing and as such, comment would not be appropriate.”

While the police are staying quiet for now, the first woman leader of the 131-year-old union has given detailed, personal and sometimes emotional testimony to the inquiry.

On Thursday she described seeing Police Commissioner Steve Gollschewsk and his deputy, Katarina Carroll, last year to discuss a CFMEU death threat against her and years of anti-AWU harassment. The police response had been so lacklustre that the AWU had almost given up, Ms Schinnerl said, but worried for the safety of her family, she tried one more time.

The meeting began strangely. As Ms Schinnerl tried to sign in at police headquarters, an officer at the reception desk told her to stop writing. She was taken upstairs to Mr Gollschewsk’s office. He said little as the union leader described the devastating impact of having her staff followed, shouted out, threatened and physically prevented from seeing their members.

“I have, at times, felt unsafe in my own home,” Ms Schinnerl said she said during the 30-minute meeting. “I am particularly concerned about the safety and wellbeing of my children and the impact on them.”

Ms Carroll was sympathetic but did not seek further information or do anything in response to the complaint, Ms Schinnerl said.

WATCH THE VIDEO IN THE PLAYER ABOVE.

How union pride went too far

The lack of police action to protect the AWU, which the CFMEU taunted as Australia’s Weakest Union, reinforces evidence from other witnesses who described violent CFMEU activists boasting the police would not get involved in industrial disputes.

Questions asked by Mr Wood and his lawyers suggest the Queensland police force may be among the targets of an inquiry that has initially concentrated on the two men who ran the union until removed from power last year, Michael Ravbar and Jade Ingham. Neither man has had a chance to defend themselves to the inquiry, although are represented by lawyers. The Nightly does not suggest they broke the law.

Appearing in the witness box for the second day, Ms Schinnerl struggled to avoid crying as she described her pride at being a unionist and the harm to her staff from the actions of what she called “the antithesis of unionism”.

“I don’t know where Mr Ingham lives,” she said. “I don’t know where Mr Ravbar lives but I’m reasonably confident that they know where I live, and I can’t explain to you particularly as a parent and a dog mum, how vulnerable that makes me feel.

“Many, many times we have seen certain people from the CFMEU stand up and talk about the importance of safe workplaces and looking after mental health and psychosocial health generally. Yet they have made it on occasion practically impossible for me as an employer to provide a safe workplace to my staff.

“They have revelled in creating unsafe environments for not only my organisers, but my members in their workplaces. So it seems like the only workers that are worthy of protection is everyone except for those associated with the AWU. And that’s an absolute disgusting hypocritical damaging view of the world.”

Ms Schinnerl’s evidence took so long the inquiry was unable to question two other witnesses scheduled for Thursday, the chief executive of a builders’ group, Damian Long, and a manager from Workplace Health and Safety Queensland, Sarina Wise.

Because of a shortage of courtrooms, the witnesses will have to wait until next year.