Imagine Sarah, nurse at St Vincents, on the Number 96 tram, Melbourne dusk bruising purple outside the windows. Twelve hours done. Her navy scrubs are faded and soft, worn to the shape of her, the way a soldier’s fatigues eventually become a second skin. She doesn’t look like someone the Herald Sun would write about. She looks like someone the Herald Sun will never notice.
Her ANMF dues ping on her phone. Her union protects her penalty rates keeping AGL’s gouging and Woolies’ profiteering at bay; pay rates hard won by CFMEU muscle. By establishing a high benchmark for wage growth in the private sector, CFMEU wins create the necessary industrial pressure and public expectation for the government to raise the ‘floor’ for essential public workers like nurses, preventing their pay from being further devalued, relative to the broader economy.
Tonight Sarah’s feed crackles like a live wire: a union steals 15 billion. It’s the mother of all beat-ups but everyone believes it. Our ritual pre-election anti-union, Orwellian hate session has been unleashed. It’s lurid, CFMEU carnage wall to wall; bikie tattoos flashing under courtroom fluorescents, eskies bloated with sweat-slick cash, Geoffrey Watson’s silver-haired-silvertail barrister scalpel busy recasting hi-vis sons, fathers, brothers and family providers as Victoria’s untouchable gangland dons.
Sarah swipes past the bot swarms to her brother’s repost. He’s a sparkie, ink-smudged forearms from blueprint huddles, free-riding CFMEU site rates that quietly hoist the floor for the whole industry. He’s not sure what to think any more. Neither is she. Which is precisely the point.
This isn’t a cleanup. It’s a setup.
Follow the Election Calendar
Let’s be clear about what we are seeing. Victoria faces a state election. The Liberals, reduced to a rump of niche grievances, culture war cabals, religious factions pitting Mormon against Evangelicals and a shadow front bench whose deepest ideological commitment is to get Religious Instruction back in schools, (-to pray for negative gearing?), is in a mad panic to find its own pulse.
Union-bashing has always been the defibrillator of choice for a Victorian Liberal Party with nothing else to offer. The CFMEU inquiry, timed and amplified with the precision of a Murdoch press campaign, is not about corruption. It is primarily about politics. It is about breathing life into a corpse while picking the pockets of the people who built this state with their hands.
The tell is in what the inquiry doesn’t investigate. Developers whose brown-paper trails dissolve into footnotes, shrugged away as the cost of doing business. Lendlease scaffold deaths that produced fines and moved on. Geoffrey Watson,engaged by the government-appointed administrator to deliver a specific script, has performed his gig with the relish of a man who knows his audience.
Cash rorts in cabinet chillers. Bikie ink under strip-lights. Site-cabin banter sour with VB breath. It’s lurid, it’s vivid, and it has the approximate relationship to a balanced assessment of Victoria’s construction industry that a Twitter pile-on has to a coronial inquest.
The ‘$15 billion theft’ figure ballooning through every Murdoch masthead is a single barrister’s fevered back-of-envelope calculation — Watson’s own report calls it ‘rough but conservative’ — based on anonymous industry insiders estimating a 15% overrun across Victoria’s entire $100 billion Big
Build pipeline. Coincidentally, it also happens to be roughly what the Melbourne Metro Tunnel cost to build. Neither figure has been audited or tested in any court. This demands full scrutiny. Now.
The Context Nobody’s Running
Behind the political performance theatre? Since 2021 homelessness has surged 25 percent. More than 140,000 Australians are couch-surfing, car-dwelling or sleeping rough tonight. Rents are consuming 50 percent of median incomes in major cities. Nurses like Sarah are bunking in share houses. Sparkies are dossing down on sites. Meanwhile Tony Burke, Minister for Home Affairs, a powerful figure in this Labor government, owns four investment properties in Tasmania and Victoria, each quietly yielding returns that negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts were specifically designed to protect.
Michelle Rowland (Attorney General), owns five properties, including several held within a private trust. Senator, Deborah O’Neill has at least five; a home in Copacabana (the same coastal suburb as the PM) and several investment properties across Queensland, Tasmania, and the ACT.
The team at the top of Labor preaches housing affordability while banking personally on its absence.
On the other hand, The CFMEU built the hospitals Sarah staffs. Its pattern bargaining dragged EBA rates upward across the whole sector. Non-union sparkies like Sarah’s brother banked the lift without paying the dues. Raze the union and you don’t clean up the industry. You hand developers a gift-wrapped, defenceless workforce and call it accountability.
The Long Betrayal: From Glen Iris to the Royal Commission
Australian workers have been here before. The template was cut not in some distant era of flat caps and gas lamps but in a small confectionery factory on Malvern Road, Glen Iris, in 1985.
Dollar Sweets employed 27 people. When fifteen of them voted down a no-strike agreement, owner Fred Stauder sacked the lot of them on the spot and replaced them with non-union labour. The sacked workers mounted a round-the-clock picket that held for 143 days, through Melbourne’s winter, through intimidation, through the studied silence of the ACTU, which was too busy protecting the Hawke-Keating Accord to show solidarity with fifteen confectionery workers in a suburban factory.
Into the vacuum sidles a flash young barrister named Peter Costello, his brief bankrolled by the Victorian Chamber of Commerce. Wily Costello takes the union to the Victorian Supreme Court on common law grounds, not the industrial tribunal where workers had hard-won protections, but the Supreme Court where none of those protections applied.
Justice Murphy describes the picketers as “stupid and nihilistic” and issues the injunction. The picket ends the next day. In 1988 the union paid $175,000 in damages.
Ever the showboat, Costello later brags that Dollar Sweets “rewrote the manual on what are the acceptable limits of industrial action by unions” and had “ended the long period of practical immunity from the common law which unions had enjoyed.”
It did a shed-load more than that. It showed the New Right the template: bypass the industrial system, weaponise the common law, finance the campaign through employer associations and chambers of commerce, and use a small, isolated dispute as a test case for destroying the movement as a whole.
The same year Costello co-founded the H.R. Nicholls Society, dedicated to the deregulation of the labour market and the abolition of the minimum wage. Four years later he was installed in the safe Liberal seat of Higgins by right-wing powerbrokers who ousted the sitting member to make room for him.
Dollar Sweets was not just a case. It was a career launch, a political manifesto and a declaration of war, all conducted over the heads of fifteen workers on a Glen Iris footpath, who simply wanted a 36-hour week.
Geoffrey Watson is writing the next chapter of the same story. Where Costello had a picket line and a Supreme Court writ, Watson has a royal commission, a Murdoch megaphone and a national broadcaster that follows Murdoch’s framing. The mechanics differ. The purpose is identical.
In 1969 Qantas pilots struck, cockpits cold and silent for ten days. The 1970s roared: Jack Mundey’s Builders Labourers levered green bans that halted bulldozers on The Rocks’ cobbled cliffs, saving what developers would have demolished for car parks. In 1998 Patrick Stevedores sacked 1,400 waterside workers at Webb Dock at midnight, lockers padlocked, cranes frozen against the dawn’s brackish, salt haze, in a plot starring Peter Reith and a Dubai-registered mob training scab labour.
Global solidarity from London to Los Angeles forced a climbdown. Each of these moments represented workers discovering and deploying their collective power. Each was followed, with the precision of a counter-offensive, by a new legal, legislative or judicial mechanism to ensure it could never happen again.
The Hawke-Keating Accords traded strike thunder for social wage whispers that evaporated like dew. Howard’s Workplace Relations Act and WorkChoices banned pattern bargaining and killed secondary boycotts under crippling fines. Rudd’s Fair Work Act gave back with one hand and padlocked with the other: seven days’ notice for industrial action, mandatory ballots, good faith bargaining provisions that courts have weaponised ever since. Union density collapsed from 50 percent in the 1980s to 12 percent today. Construction clung to around 40 percent because the CFMEU fought for it. Past tense.
The Media Machine and the Fog It Makes
Nobody reads the Herald Sun for context. Its print circulation, once more than half a million, wheezes along at 150,000 weekdays, in some estimates. Its true spiritual home is the grease-spotted wrap for Friday’s flake and chips. Easy on the chicken salt, please. Its real operation is digital and emotional: front-page outrage designed to trigger, to feed the dopamine loop that keeps eyes on screens and minds away from the actual architecture of power. The algorithm doesn’t care about the ludicrously high $15 billion figure’s provenance. It cares that the number makes you angry before your coffee.
In an attention economy, outrage is the product. Workers are the raw material, harvested, processed and sold back to themselves as the problem.
It’s the new divide and conquer. All your mates online, liking and sharing the outrage, but no one on the picket line.
The Bottom Line
The CFMEU is no communion of saints. Rogues have rogued. Accountability matters. But accountability that falls exclusively on unions while developers write off brown envelopes as legal fees, while scaffold deaths produce shrugs, while a Labor Cabinet collects investment property rents and calls himself a workers’ friend: that is not accountability. It is class warfare in a barrister’s wig. It was class warfare in Peter Costello’s wig in Glen Iris in 1985. The wig changes. The brief doesn’t.
Sarah feels it in her bones on the Number 96, even if she can’t yet name it. Her brother feels it at the blueprint huddle, even as he scrolls past the outrage and wonders vaguely whether the union blokes had it coming. They are being set up. Again. In an election year. While the dogs bark and the caravan, loaded with developers’ contracts, Liberal Party talking points, Murdoch’s digital revenue and the ghost of Peter Costello’s Supreme Court brief, rolls quietly on.
The question is not whether the CFMEU needs reform. The question is who benefits from its destruction. Follow that thread, and the setup becomes unmistakable. It always has been.
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
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Great article.
Two base standards for a healthy society:
Without a public health system you have no civilisation.
Without an active union movement you have no civilisation.
David, I take it that you’ve read the CFMEU report published by the Qld government? ROTTING FROM THE TOP. You write ‘Rogues have rogued.’ Not taking issue with the rest of your essay, but that report paints a pretty damning picture of the rot & criminality within that union.
As noted,barrister Geoffrey Watson SC, alleged without evidence that the CFMEU added an estimated $15 billion in costs to major construction projects in Victoria.
This figure, which emerged from redacted sections of the “Rotting from the Top” report submitted to a ‘Queensland’ inquiry has been adopted by the media as being factual but surely, we need more than ‘back of the envelope’ assertions before we take these numbers as being in any way credible?
When you see only a militant or corrupt union, the thing escaping your gaze is the militant or corrupt industry behind it.
Corruption is a two-way street.
But too often today we see militant industries that have eliminated a union presence.
Do those industries, once free from unionism, become benign, treating their workforce like family?
No way.
They turn the screws.
When Geoffrey Watson SC found $15 billion of possible corruption in on Victoria’s “Big Build” this isn’t a political or media beat-up.
Watson was appointed by Mark Irving KC, the administrator of the shady/corrupt/bikie gang linked CFMEU.
In any event, Watson may have overestimated the figure, it might only be single figue billions.
Does that make it a more tolerable and ethical use of taxpayers cash?
• Bearing down and eliminating corruption (particularly on publicly funded projects) isn’t a union bashing or a beat up. Why shouldn’t the public be entitled to transparency and absolutely lawful behaviour on publicly funded projects?
• The evidence of unlawful behaviour in the CFMEU is widespread, as is their use of standover tactics. Even other unions are on the record on the question.
• When independent government agencies have previously identified evidence of corruption, let’s not not be so deluded as to believe this is a surprise or isolated or partisan.
• When underworld figure (and construction industry employer) Mick Gatto comes to the defence of the CFMEU and the government, the anxiety antennae should be raised
• When we complain about the cost of housing, let’s not ignore that Victoria’s Big Build has helped create a building and construction labour shortage. Big Build also contributes to the increased demand for construction equipment and materials.
• Note also that labour costs are between a third and a half of the cost of domestic building. It is short sighted to complain about housing costs and shortage, while ignoring a direct contributor to the cost and shortage.
• Let’s also not ignore the increased capitation fees affiliated unions pay to the ALP as a direct result of the increased employment on publicly funded projects. Nor the political donations and opportunities for shady employers and political mates.
• The timing of the most recent examples of criminality coincide with the abolition of the ABCC. An expedient and partisan decision by the federal government, with the support of some poorly informed or wilfully ignorant cross benches
• Go after unions, employers, contractors, politicians…the lot. But only the most blinkered would ignore, contextualise or excuse it. Or try to equate it with nursing pay and conditions
Canguro, it’s heart-breaking to see the extent to which the ruling elite, governments and their press barons will go to when workers dare to challenge their power. There’s a full article in the pipeline on the demonisation and vilification of workers, but here are three elements of my thinking:
Prejudice and scapegoating
The narrative isolates the CFMEU as a special zone of corruption and criminality, despite the well‑documented pattern that commissions and regulators routinely under‑scrutinise comparable behaviour in big business, such as price‑fixing or cartel conduct by major corporations.
By implying that a single union branch has “cost taxpayers approximately $15 billion” and funnelled vast sums to organised crime, the report extrapolates from opaque calculations that the Victorian attorney‑general and police minister have publicly challenged as unfounded or wildly overstated.
The union is cast as the main vector of corruption on “Big Build” projects, while the role of governments, contractors and major developers is backgrounded, producing a convenient scapegoat that diverts attention from systemic state–capital collusion.
Libel and the politics of class power
Sections of the report that assert knowledge, complicity or wilful blindness by political actors and union officials have already been attacked by senior law officers as lacking evidentiary foundation, which goes directly to the line between robust criticism and defamatory allegation.
The tone repeatedly blurs the legal and the moral: colourful language, sweeping generalisations and guilt by association are used in place of careful distinctions between proven conduct, allegation, and cultural stereotype, which is exactly how libel operates in political discourse even when it skirts the edge of defamation law.
Historically, “anti‑corruption” commissions and special inquiries have been used as class instruments against militant unions; they devote enormous resources to policing industrial tactics while systemic corporate misconduct is normalised or ignored, reflecting what Marxist analysts call the “covert dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.”
Why a union like the CFMEU attracts this treatment
The CFMEU’s capacity to halt or delay multi‑billion‑dollar projects, push up wages, and insist on site safety directly impinges on profit rates in construction and resources, making it one of the few remaining organised centres of working‑class power in Australia.
Because it challenges managerial prerogative on the job and occasionally clashes with state agencies and courts, it becomes a symbolic enemy for business councils, conservative politicians and parts of the legal establishment, who repeatedly call for royal commissions and tougher controls whenever its power becomes visible.
In that context, a report like “Rotting from the Top” does ideological work: it invites the public to see union power not as a counterweight to entrenched privilege but as criminal pathology, thus defending the premise that real power properly belongs with an elite of politicians, senior bureaucrats and corporate executives, not with workers and their organisations.
AC, “Can you provide actual justification for your claim that there was AMNF reliance on the pay and conditions applicable in the construction industry? “
Of course: Victoria 2024: The 28.4% — The Biggest in a Generation. The most spectacular recent example is the Victorian nurses’ settlement of mid-2024. Victorian public sector nurses and midwives voted to endorse a government offer for a 28.4 per cent (compounded) wage increase by November 2027 and more than 70 improvements to allowances, penalties and terms and conditions. On the Record After 51 days of protected industrial action — nurses who had initially rejected a 12.55% offer and walked back to the table — the result was genuinely historic.The Victorian angle here is crucial. Victoria had been the state where the CFMEU commanded the most power, and where construction wages were highest and EBA conditions most generous. The political climate created by years of aggressive CFMEU bargaining on the Big Build projects normalised wage settlements well above the public sector cap. When nurses took industrial action with similar resolve, the Andrews and then Allan government could hardly argue that 5% per year was fiscally impossible while construction sites were settling at the same figures. Victorian nurses recently settled for 28.4% over four years, University of Sydney and the settlement directly leveraged the Fair Work Commission’s aged care work value case — itself a recognition that female-dominated caring sectors had been systematically undervalued relative to male-dominated trade sectors.The comparison was made explicit: the nursing workforce (89% female) had watched the construction workforce (overwhelmingly male) command premium wages for decades. The 28.4% was in part a correction of that historical distortion — but it was a correction that became possible partly because the construction sector had established that large four-year multi-percentage EBAs were politically and economically achievable.
An odd omission in the CFMEU media coverage is that one of the very first things Albanese did as leader of the Labor party, was to kick Setka out. Nobody else was prepared to take Setka on – not Shorten or the Coalition.
I found it fascinating to witness how the right wing media took Setka’s side against Albo. I was unsure if it was because they hoped to get some traction against Albo, or because Setka was somehow important to them.
Excellent article!
“The CFMEU is no communion of saints. Rogues have rogued. Accountability matters. But accountability that falls exclusively on unions while developers write off brown envelopes as legal fees, while scaffold deaths produce shrugs, while a Labor Cabinet collects investment property rents and calls himself a workers’ friend: that is not accountability. It is class warfare in a barrister’s wig.”
Absolutely, however that does not make jurisprudence any saint either! Noli me tangere seems to have been adopted wholesale in this haughty environment.
Walter Sofronoff KC ring any bells? Watson is questionable IMHO, paid spokesperson for Liberals and the slimier they are they all collect gongs?
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/law-crime/2026/02/21/geoffrey-watson-the-cfmeu-and-the-wrath-the-victorian-government
It’s going to be some popcorn show.
David, I said…
Can you provide actual justification for your claim that there was AMNF reliance on the pay and conditions applicable in the construction industry? Or that they specifically used rates in the construction industry as a justification for an increase based on gender equality?
My understanding is that their claim and negotiating strategy was far broader, and provided analysis of many demographic and gender factors.
I’m not aware that of any particular reference to the construction industry.
You’ve referenced Sydney University, perhaps there’s a sentence or two missing.
In any event, assertions and opinions aren’t evidence and aren’t cause and effect.
Nurses have had a strong sense of self worth for decades. They learnt this in the 1980s, without assistance from the CFMEU.
They have engaged in industrial action to improve their careers, pay rates and nurse patient ratios without reference to the construction industry.
There is a strong sense (and there has been for decades) that they are underpaid, because the workforce is overwhelmingly female.
They have been held back by their ethic of “putting patients first”.
FWA gender equality principles aren’t a matter of “look at those blokes”
Unlike many of the officials of the CFMEU, AMNF is up front, transparent and take responsibility for their actions.
So can you quote some ANMF statements or submissions that were crucial to their gender equality case at FWA or their negotiations with the state government, which relied on construction industry outcomes?
I think you’re downplaying the complexity and comprehensive nature of their submissions.
I also think suggesting the (female dominated) AMNF basically piggybacked on the (male dominated) CFMEU is bordering on latent sexism and isn’t respectful of the effort put into their comprehensive case and their campaign.
Uhm ….. Dollar Sweets and Peter Costello ….. a small bit of karma struck after this event. Costello’s father-in-law was Peter King then MP for Wentworth. King was displaced by an acrimonious election defeat by Malcolm Turnbull, short term Prime Minister after Toxic RAbbott who was deposed by Scummo of the Five Secret Ministries.
Costello hung about the Canberra Parliament like an overpaid bad smell to provide as much frustration as possible for Turnbull. When he finally retired, Costello was almost unemployable in corporate Australia, possibly because his ”financial acumen” sold off for the Australian Gold Stock for a mere about $200 per troy ounce, against a recent $5,000 per troy ounce. Would you employ such lack of imagination & talent??
The brother of Peter Costello, is Tim Costello, avid agitator against the national gambling industry. A good bloke.
@ Steve: Agreed.
@ David Tyler: I look forward to your forth coming article with some anticipation.
I refuse to reply to AC ….. a troll for the LIARBRAL$
Memory, Cocky.., I played in a small group for Pater Costello’s engagement, Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, and there he was, shining confident succesful barrister narcissism, along with cadaverous inhuman Peter Coleman. Money, vanity, pose and scheming dominated…
@ Phil Pryor: Thank you for the edit.
The correct MP for Wentworth was Peter Coleman who was replaced by Malcolm Turnbull after a very acrimonious election.