‘Dictator Dan’ may be mercifully gone, but the stink of corruption in Victoria is only getting worse. Move over Jacinda and Cuddles, now we’ve got politicians who really love bikies and crims. Paying drug-dealing gangs to run drug rehab programmes is small potatoes. Call it a circular business model. In Victoria, gangs make big bank from multibillion-dollar government programmes for doing nothing at all.
Tommy Bent can finally rest easy: he’ll no longer be remembered as Victoria’s Most Corrupt Premier, that’s for sure. And Brian Burke and WA Inc? Rank amateurs. Even Joh Bjelke-Petersen must be laughing in his grave.
The accusation that Victorian Labor has in effect run a protection racket comes amid new revelations of wrongdoing including the employment of “baseball bat-wielding violent people” on the Big Build, where women have been bashed and then black-banned after they complained.
A major investigation by this masthead and 60 Minutes has also uncovered how gangland and bikie-linked figures are receiving large payments from companies on publicly funded projects looking to gain favour with union insiders, leaving state and federal taxpayers in effect underwriting payments to the underworld.
Some of the firms making the suspect and often recurring payments of between $30,000 and $600,000 also operate in NSW, Queensland and South Australia.
One of the Albanese government’s first acts in government was to abolish the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC). In fact, it was Labor’s second go at getting rid of a construction industry watchdog, after the first incarnation of the ABCC was abolished by the Rudd-Gillard government.
Now we know why Labor are so keen to stop anyone looking into union corruption.
The claims that the Allan government’s response to the problems in Victoria’s construction sector amounts to a cover-up are made by Geoffrey Watson, SC, the corruption-busting barrister who CFMEU administrator Mark Irving, KC, appointed to probe wrongdoing in the sector.
Premier Jacinta Allan, who has held senior infrastructure delivery portfolios for over a decade, including Minister for Transport and Industry, is relying on the Sgt Schulz defence. She knows, she claims, nuzzink.
Watson said the state government undoubtedly knew of the corrupting of its Big Build.
“Senior people in the bureaucracy know about it, because I’ve received information suggesting that they were directly told about it,” he said. “Now, it seems to me that they wouldn’t have been doing their job properly if they were not communicating that with the relevant ministers” […]
He pointed out that gangland figures appeared so unconcerned by the government’s response they were still profiting from taxpayer projects.
The beneficiaries of Victorian taxpayers’ money include some very famous ‘colourful’ names.
The Comanchero bikie gang is standing over building firms in Melbourne in concert with a Big Build subcontractor, according to multiple union and building industry sources who requested anonymity.
The same Big Build subcontractor not only pays Comanchero senior leaders but has separately been paying [Mick Gatto], helping to bolster support from the CFMEU and strike deals with union officials and competitors […]
Former senior police officer Peter De Santo said his warnings about bikie infiltration in the building sector to Victorian government officials were seemingly ignored. That inaction had then turned Victoria’s Big Build into an underworld “honey pot.”
The corruption – or at least, full knowledge of it – allegedly goes all the way to the top in Victoria.
Allan […] was the minister overseeing the Big Build before replacing Daniel Andrews as premier. She also held various transport and infrastructure portfolios as a senior minister in the Victorian government since 2014.
Watson’s public intervention, along with new information uncovered by this masthead, will also reverberate through the federal election campaign given it suggests the Albanese government’s response to the Building Bad scandal is not working as planned.
Given Labor’s utter dependency on unions for money and, for want of a better term, ‘talent’, the stench of Victorian corruption is reaching all the way to Canberra. After all, Anthony Albanese was famously close to Allan’s former boss, Daniel Andrews.
On Friday, Albanese defended his government’s record on the CFMEU.
“We have intervened to knock off the incorrect practices that were taking place by the CFMEU,” he told reporters in Western Australia. “Unions, like employers, should all obey the law and should behave civilly.”
Watson said the evidence indicating taxpayers have been part-funding a money trail leading from the Big Build to the underworld, and ongoing criminal problems in the building sector in NSW, highlighted the inadequacy of government interventions.
“Political solutions haven’t been put in place. Nobody’s done anything to try and stop it. Now we are here with the administration in place and we’re trying to pick up some pieces,” he said, noting that the unresolved High Court challenge mounted against the administration by some building unions had left suspected corrupt CFMEU officials in positions of influence.
In the meantime, it’s a gravy train of taxpayer money for nothing for bikie gangs.
Earlier this month, this masthead revealed how the state’s $13 billion Metro Tunnel site had hosted a ghost shifts scheme, under which workers from a CFMEU-backed labour-hire firm linked to notorious gangland figure Toby Mitchell were paid up to $10,000 a week for hours they never actually worked […]
The CFMEU’s new leadership, led by Mark Irving, KC, and national secretary Zach Smith, warned union colleagues this month that the Metro Tunnel rorts could cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars […]
Geoffrey Watson said his ongoing investigations had uncovered how bikies and their associates had separately infected multiple other sites through a system of taxpayer-funded nepotism.
“It was exponential so that there were, well, not dozens, hundreds of them [bikie associates, friends and relatives] on building sites,” he said.
During the Gold Rush years, Melbourne was notorious as ‘the City of Dreadful Stinks’. Its new, criminal gold rush shows that not much has changed. Unions entangled with violent bikie gangs and criminal underworld kingpins: ‘extremely violent criminal[s] with a bad record’, including manslaughter. Brown paper bags filled with cash.
Melbourne is still the City of Dreadful Stinks.
