It’s becoming a Coalition tradition to launch a Royal Commission into unions (especially building unions). John Howard launched the Cole Commission in 2003 and ten years on we’re going to do it again:
Wads of cash, a hot rod and free air travel have emerged as the latest kickbacks given to union officials and company managers, as the federal government is set to announce a royal commission into union corruption on Monday.
Amid growing political despair at police and regulatory failings to tackle building industry corruption, Fairfax Media can also reveal that:
• The kickback scandal has spread to a second building union, with former plumbing union national president Tony Murphy implicated in a kickbacks for contracts racket.
• Convicted terrorist Khaled Sharrouf has been linked to the Sydney gangland violence that erupted over attempts by criminals to collect a disputed $9 million construction industry debt from Harry Triguboff.
• A building company owner has alleged he was encouraged by a senior Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union official to become a major sponsor of the South Sydney Rabbitohs in return for ‘‘beneficial’’ backing by the union for job tenders.
• The CFMEU is seeking to urgently interview building union whistleblower Brian Fitzpatrick about his claims he received a death threat from a colleague after he fought against the union’s support of a crime figure.
Fairfax Media can also reveal that building union organiser, Terry Kesby, wrote to NSW CFMEU last September warning them that Mr Fitzpatrick’s whistleblowing had prompted a campaign to “assassinate” Mr Fitzpatrick’s character and force him out of the union. “If a rope was available, he [Mr Fitzpatrick] would have been strung up over the tree in the car park,” Mr Kesby warned. On Friday, the CFMEU asked Mr Fitzpatrick to be interviewed as part of an internal union corruption probe being run by barrister Tony Slevin.
I welcome this. In principle I support trade unions as a bulwark against the increasingly global reach of capital and rent-seeking corporations, especially in over-consolidated Australia. But a good clean out every so often is a good thing and the unions have had a free ride under Labor for six years and a mining boom for ten years in which to get thoroughly complacent and dodgy so it’s a good time for a stiff-bristled broom.
It’s good timing in terms of our macroeconomic challenge of restoring national competitiveness as well.
One word of advice for the Abbott Government. As I’ve said before, rather than frame this as a sop to its own constituents, it should embrace the rhetoric of the post-mining boom economic adjustment. Cleaning up the unions is surely a more attractive prospect across the polity as a national interest priority than it is as a Liberal Party witch hunt. The “end of the age of entitlement” stuff might be able to carry it but that still hangs on Liberal Party doctrine not the pressing self-interest of the nation.
