The listening to turns its consideration to investigator Geoffrey Watson SC’s Queensland work relating to CFMEU hostility in the direction of employers.
Watson begins by tying the difficulty of hostilities in the direction of the largely civil construction-focused AWU with what he describes as now not a principle however “precisely what has occurred”.
“I feel the purpose needs to be made and underlined that that is simply emulating [former Victorian CFMEU secretary John] Setka’s efficient marketing campaign down in Victoria,” Watson says of what he views as a acutely aware marketing campaign to push the AWU off civil building websites.
“If you’ve solely acquired one union overlaying all of those areas, they’re given far, far an excessive amount of energy in these negotiations … You can think about the strain that’s positioned on scarce labour sources right here.
“This just isn’t a matter of abuse between unions. It’s a matter of financial significance to the folks of Queensland. I’ll go a step additional and say the folks of Australia, too.
“The reality is, there are huge infrastructure tasks in the mean time, in South Australia. Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland.
“Somebody mentioned to me one thing which I assumed was taking it too far, that they felt that the Queensland department might have been pushed to do it as a result of they feared Setka and his operatives might transfer into Queensland.
“Now, that sounds just a little far-fetched to me, but it surely needs to be mentioned that’s what Setka did with South Australia.”
Watson notes that the constructing companies represented within the Brisbane CBD weren’t the identical as in others across the nation.
“Other big-name builders can see what was occurring, and so they’ve been burnt in Victoria, and also you’ll discover lots of them nonetheless closely represented as main building firms and tasks on the Gold Coast … and have averted the Brisbane CBD building market due to it.”
