Tim Gooden and Sue Bull, who are members of the Construction Forestry Mining Employees Union in Victoria, described the royal commission into the union set up by Premier Ben Carroll as a “farce”.
Together with Maritime Union of Australia member Ross Smith, they are standing for Socialist Alliance for the Western Victoria Region in the November 28 election.
After the first public hearing day of the Royal Commission into the Integrity of Major Public and Civil Infrastructure Construction Projects in Victoria on September 23 — which lasted a whole hour and fifty minutes — they said it “smacks of a show trial”. It broke for a long lunch and then adjourned. It now won’t reconvene for some time.
As Gooden, a former union official, shop steward and construction worker commented to Green Left: “Can you imagine the outcry if construction workers turned up at 10am for work, nicked off to the pub at lunchtime and then disappeared for several weeks? Meanwhile, according to the establishment media, CFMEU members are supposedly all on the take, as well as being ‘thugs’.”
Bull, a health and safety trainer in the construction industry for many years, told GL: “If yesterday’s hearing is any indication, this commission will spend $50 million over 12 months to unearth more rumour and innuendo. “Chris Young KC, Council assisting the commission, has already claimed that ex-CFMEU officials forced contractors to install bikies on Big Build sites and pay them $50,000 a week for doing nothing.”
Gooden said it was “not possible” for a construction worker on an industrial agreement to receive that much money in a week. “Someone is lying and it is not the construction workers. Lies have been peddled by people who want to destroy the most successful and safest construction union in the world.”
Gooden also suggested the commission should prosecute people who perpetrate the lies. “Geoffrey Watson KC publicly claimed the CFMEU and crime gangs took $15 billion but he could not explain how he came to the figure, or where that money went.”
Bull said that the public was informed yesterday that that some of the hearings will be, and had already been done, in secret. “It appears that the bosses will be interviewed in private to protect ‘sensitive information’. However, union officials will be grilled in public hearings. This, of course, intensifies the anti-union propaganda that CFMEU members are unlawful.”
Gooden believes if the commission wants to taken seriously, it should not conduct secret hearings.
He said that if Socialist Alliance is elected in November, it will seek to either end the farcical commission, which will only have concluded its first round of hearings, or amend its terms of reference “to investigate employers price gouging and their actions in putting workers lives at risk”.
Bull said the huge sums of taxpayer money going to the commission would be better spent on building public housing that is so urgently needed across the state.
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