Peak fun tonight with the incredible finalists in the RLB Innovation and Excellence Awards on at the ICC. Thanks to RLB and our sparkling judges. Cannot. Wait.
Enjoyed Monday’s opening panel at the Australian Financial Review Property Summit – where we got into the serious investment and cost factors facing the sector… one of which is below…
Cop on the beat needed for broken union
I’ve said it before. Most unions, and most businesses, respect the law.
The construction division of the Construction Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU) neither obeys or respects the law. As I said at the AFR summit it is a ‘toxic machine’ whose leadership needs a permanent culture change of which administration should just be the beginning.
Elements of the construction division convey toxic contempt for individuals, organisations and elected representatives that call them out. Tens of millions of dollars in court fines prove it beyond doubt.
But union leadership is distinct from normal members. Take Victoria.
Union members have been unable to escape John Setka’s authoritarian vision for the Victorian CFMEU for the past twelve years. Setka had some 40 convictions including assaulting police on becoming secretary in 2012.
It took the courageous intervention by Nine journalists to end the ‘second chances’ world record gifted Setka by the weakness of politicians and an industrial relations system geared to fail individual and organisational victims of union intimidation.
How did anyone think this was going to end? Are construction division actions justified because members are better paid than law-abiding unions? What signal to stakeholders who routinely experience ‘physical fear’ or to the rest of society who don’t regularly break the law?
We see the tip of the toxic iceberg in the coercive language and aggression toward contractors, businesses, other unions, police, and politicians permanently recorded in many judgements against the CFMEU over twenty years.
The refrain from some in the labour movement and parliaments also moves through repetitive cycles.
You will recognise the excuses. Political excuses that directly enable the contemptuous, law-breaking menace machine that is the construction union.
From ‘construction is a tough game’, ‘they are rough but doing it for safety’, ‘he’s just fighting for his members’, ‘you’ve got to admit they do well for their people’, ‘some laws should be broken’, through ‘I’m shocked,’ ‘prove it’, ‘takes two to tango’, ‘bosses are bad too’, to ‘people should refer these matters to police’, ‘I’ve referred these matters to police’, and finishing with ‘that’s in the past now’, and – finally – ‘everyone deserves a second chance’.
And as for the view that the businesses, or equally other unions, and individuals subject to the construction division’s coercive monopoly, can stand up to the menace machine as some parliamentarians and journalists still seem to believe. Give. Me. A. Break.
If you think that, you have no real experience of the way the construction division attacks and threatens individuals and then whole supply chains of largely unrelated business and union partners.
This is a fog of war in which law-abiding people, who are not geared up for a lifetime conflict, are inevitably failed over years by the gaps between our inadequate industrial relations system, shy police and expensive court redress. If they survive that long.
It requires both major parties to act and will be years in the solving.
We need a new national body with the right powers and accountability to fairly police the threat-filled no-go, police-free zone of Australian life.
The broad reforms proposed by the Master Builders of Australia (MBA) fit the bill. This is the first and only step for now.
Broader than the ABCC. Not with unlimited freedom from judicial review. Not run to embarrass political leaders of the day.
Partisan outcomes have failed to stop this law-breaking machine. They are not in the interests of any construction business large or small and equally will not save home buyers or consumers a cent.
If Minister Watt can manage this reckoning and engage with the framework put forward by the MBA, Nine’s investigation into the construction division may well benefit the union movement, the ALP and the country.
Failure will mean Australians continue to pay a very high price for a union leadership long past respect for the rule of law and the rest of us.
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Next week: Federal red tape on the march