Australian Workers’ Union leader warned she wasn’t safe at building site after CFMEU threats

One of Queensland’s most senior union leaders was warned it was not safe for her on a building site because the CFMEU was waging a violent campaign to take control of the project and squeeze out her union.

Australian Workers’ Union secretary Stacey Schinnerl was one of several women targeted by the rival Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union when it tried to expand its influence across the state, Queensland Council of Unions head Jacqueline King told an inquiry into the CFMEU Tuesday.

A large construction company that had an agreement with the AWU, BMD Group, tried several times to get the police to intervene when CFMEU officials turned up at BMD building sites, Ms King said in a written statement to the inquiry.

The police refused to get involved because they said it was a matter for the State workplace safety regulator, which the CFMEU had also targeted with a campaign of intimidation against a senior female manager, according to Ms King.

“Ms Schinnerl also told me she had been informed by BMD senior management that they could no longer protect or provide safety to her as the union state secretary to come on to site because they could not control the violence or escalation of incidents that might occur in the future involving the CFMEU,” Ms King said.

“I recall Ms Schinnerl had been quite upset about that, because the AWU had an enterprise agreement with BMD and she couldn’t access the site with her legal right-of-entry permit.”

Turned against

Ms Schinnerl is due to give evidence on Wednesday. Her appearance and Ms King’s at an inquiry initiated by the State Liberal-National government suggests the State’s top union leaders have turned against the previous leaders of the construction division of the CFMEU, which was placed under the control of an independent lawyer by the federal Labor government last year.

Ms King told the inquiry today the union targeted Kim Bancroft, the deputy director general of the Office of Industrial Relations, who had a been hired from the private sector to improve the safety of building sites.

“The union had a view that they wanted to be able to control her when she went into that job,” Ms King said Tuesday morning. “She became almost a captured pawn of just their issues. She was at the union office several times a week, which was unusual.

“When she pulled back from that, the union then adopted what appeared to be a campaign of directly targeting Ms Bancroft. They were texting, emailing and sending phone calls ... and demanding she respond to every compliance mater that the union had within a 24-hour period or else she would be responsible for people dying on work sites.

“She couldn’t do her day-to-day job while that was occurring.”

Ms Bancroft resigned within 12 months of being appointed.

The CFMEU’s previous leaders, Michael Ravbar and Jade Ingham, have not had a chance to respond to any of the allegations in the inquiry although may be called as witnesses next year.

The Nightly does not suggest any wrongdoing on Mr Ravbar or Ms Ingham’s part, only that they may be called as witnesses during the inquiry.

Intimidation and violence

So far the inquiry has focused on conflict between the CFMEU and the AWU, which represented many of the workers on large government building sites in Queensland, including railways, train stations and freeways. The inquiry heard the CFMEU wanted to expand from buildings into civil construction and used intimidation and violence to take over sites from the AWU.

In 2023, about a dozen CFMEU members known as the “Youth Crew” surrounded an AWU car and chanted “scab, scab, scab”. AWU officials were followed through traffic by men on motorcycles and Ms Schinnerl was verbally abused in front of her young son at a May Day family picnic, the inquiry was told.

In her written statement, which was admitted into evidence at the inquiry under commissioner Stuart Wood KC, Ms King said BMD told her groups of between 30 to 35 men wearing CFMEU clothing gathered daily at the Centenary Bridge project in suburban Brisbane and blocked access to AWU officials.

“They also told me that they had hired a private investigator to investigate who the people were, and that they had been advised that the guys on the picket line were Croatians, most likely associated with John Setka’s crew from Melbourne, and that some may have had some connections with bikies,” she said in the statement.

“BMD also told me that the investigator had found three trackers on BMD vehicles and that they had concerns for the safety of some of their crew and for the security of the site.”

Mr Setka is a former Victoria CFMEU leader who was charged this month with threatening the union’s government-appointed administrator, Mark Irving KC.