EDITORIAL: Faux outrage over CFMEU thuggery an absurd joke
The most absurd part of the allegations of brazen criminality made against construction union the CFMEU in recent days has been the reaction of Labor figures to them.
One by one they lined up to deliver different versions of the same lines.
They were shocked and appalled.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.None had so much of a whiff of knowledge that the union — headed until Friday night by John Setka, a man once described by a judge sentencing him for harassing his ex-wife as having been “nasty” and “misogynistic” — had engaged in anything other than completely legitimate conduct.
Certainly, the allegations of widespread use of stand-over tactics, of parachuting underworld figures and convicted criminals into lucrative roles, of bullying and intimidation, were news to them.
It was a farcical piece of theatre that insults the intelligence of every Australian forced to listen to their faux outrage.
The Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union don’t think laws apply to them. It’s not even an open secret. It’s a simple fact. It’s the most law-breaking union in Australia and its corrupting influence is a cancer on Australian workplaces, business and government.
In the handful of years the construction industry watchdog the Australian Building and Construction Commission was most recently operating — in between its re-establishment by the Coalition in 2016 and abolition by Labor in 2022 — it issued the CFMEU more than than $16 million in fines for its law-breaking behaviour.
Those fines did little to dissuade the union’s lawlessness, with Setka once boasting the union had “big pots of gold” to pay off fines which were the unavoidable price of its militancy.
It makes the wide-eyed astonishment from Labor politicians, as well as their vows to enforce a zero tolerance approach to thuggery, all the more ridiculous.
Some of the outrage is no doubt born from a kernel of authenticity.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has made no secret of his personal loathing of Setka, who he had ejected from the Labor Party in 2019 over domestic violence allegations and disparaging comments he made about anti-violence campaigner Rosie Batty.
But that distaste hasn’t been enough to convince Labor to stop taking the union’s money, until now.
In the lead up to the 2022 election, the CFMEU donated $4.3 million to the party across State and Federal levels.
Some State Labor leaders, including Queensland’s Steven Miles and Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan — on whose Big Build infrastructure program many of the corruption allegations are centred — have now said they won’t accept further donations from the union.
But the CFMEU has already got most of what it wanted anyway. The abolition of the ABCC. Draconian same job, same pay industrial relations reform.
This is what happens when governments are beholden to radical unions, whose first loyalty is not to the workers they purport to represent, but their own underhanded agendas.
