CFMEU action is a tale of two very different Labor governments

Call it a tale of two cities, or rather of two state Labor governments. The Minns government has utterly shown up Victorian Labor in its reaction to a mega-rorting scandal on an equally mega infrastructure project.

Some brief history first. As part of this masthead’s Building Bad series exposing corruption, organised crime and worker exploitation in Australia’s building industry, we published revelations that international construction giant Webuild was accused of covering up a worker exploitation scandal and concealing evidence of unlawful conduct on its Sydney airport train project.

While the alleged wrongdoing was being committed by Webuild’s sub-contractors, the giant Italian firm’s primary sin was not doing enough to detect it and clean it up.

In response, the NSW government commissioned top silk Max Kimber, SC, to examine both the sub-contractors’ alleged wrongdoing and associated claims of Webuild’s indifference.

Kimber didn’t have the power to force people to answer questions and faced resistance from some of the sub-contractors, but he also conducted extensive interviews with project insiders and reviewed a vast correspondence trove.

In other words, he did a thorough job, finding suspected criminal and civil breaches of the law.

This is the first major difference between the approaches of NSW and Victoria. Instead of getting a senior barrister to do some real forensic digging, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan responded to the Building Bad revelations about the corruption infesting her major projects by commissioning a retired public servant to conduct a whitewash.

That is not to blame the author, given they were constrained by limited terms of reference.

So eager was the Allan government to paper over the sins in its $100 billion Big Build program, that when the CFMEU commissioned another senior barrister, Geoffrey Watson, SC, to probe wrongdoing on Victorian government projects and he duly claimed to have found a $15 billion mega-rort, the government dismissed him as a crank.

It is true both the NSW and Victorian governments have also called in the police.

A major difference in NSW’s approach is that, upon receiving the Kimber Inquiry report, the Minns government has called in multiple specialist anti-corruption or counter-organised crime agencies with coercive powers, including the NSW Crime Commission, the NSW ICAC and the National Anti-Corruption Commission.

In contrast, the Allan government looked to Victoria’s much weaker anti-corruption agency, which promptly announced it didn’t have the power to investigate.

Wrongdoing on big taxpayer-funded projects cannot merely be left to state police. Despite their best efforts, cops do not have the power or ability to expose the vast misbehaviour inherent in many rorts at the heart of the Building Bad scandal.

That is precisely why NSW hired Kimber, why the CFMEU administrator engaged Watson and why the Minns government and Watson have both called for further inquiries to be conducted by specialist agencies armed with coercive powers not wielded by police.

The third striking difference in the approach between NSW and Victoria is that the Minns government is using the Kimber Inquiry to deliver Webuild’s a clear message: clean up your act or forget about ever getting the $2 billion-plus you claim you are owed by the state.

There is political risk in this, given Webuild has the power to go slow on its major projects, inflicting political pain along the way.

It stands in stark contrast to Victoria’s repeated decisions to keep paying tier one companies as part of “cost-plus” contracts, even though they, like Webuild, are accused of hosting rorting and wrongdoing on government sites.

While Webuild is getting whacked over its handling of the Western Sydney airport train terminal project, its similarly dire project oversight (albeit as part of a consortium) on Victoria’s North East Link has led to no such repercussions.

So why the difference in the two approaches? The most obvious answer is that while the Minns government inherited Webuild and the train terminal project from its Coalition predecessor and wasn’t in power when the NSW branch of the CFMEU turned really rotten, Allan was the minister responsible for the Big Build during the height of its rot.

But that’s just a theory. We will never know if Allan was indeed responsible for some of the wrongdoing (or the cost of it) on Victoria’s mega infrastructure scheme without a proper forensic inquiry. And, of course, Allan refuses to hold one.

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