In 2005, the Howard government established the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC): a construction industry watchdog set up expressly to combat lawlessness in the building industry. As soon as Labor got into government, they scrapped the watchdog at the behest of their union whip-crackers.
How’s that working out for the construction industry?
A campaign of firebombings and intimidation has erupted in Victoria’s construction sector as underworld players seek to control pockets of an industry supposedly being cleaned up by Labor state and federal government reforms.
The campaign intensified over recent weeks, with equipment on a Victorian-government backed social housing site torched on Sunday night and the family homes of major construction company directors separately targeted in attacks involving arson or violent confrontation.
It’s only a matter of time before somebody is killed.
In each of the three night-time attacks targeting construction company directors, official sources, speaking anonymously due to fear of repercussions, said family members, including children, of the directors were at home.
Unsurprisingly, the violent lawlessness is worst in Victoria, the most ‘Labor’ state in Australia. With the construction watchdog shut down by Labor, the only recourse for those targeted by the criminal and corrupt in Victoria’s building industry is Victoria Police.
Which is a punchline all by itself.
Victoria Police are yet to lay a single charge in the building industry wars. Despite, in one case, an investigation that’s so far run for seven years without resolution. Unsurprisingly, victims are reluctant to even become police complainants and thereby expose their families to more threats. Nor is anyone in Victoria willing to become a police informer, since the Lawyer X scandal (in which a prominent gangland lawyer was exposed as, simultaneously, a police informer).
The all-too-predictable result is that the construction industry on Labor’s watch is a wild west of rampant criminality.
A construction company’s headquarters has been firebombed in the early hours of Tuesday, as a campaign of arson and intimidation continues to erupt in Victoria’s building industry.
The company, El Dorado Contractors, based in Melbourne’s west, has now been firebombed twice in a fortnight, but Tuesday’s latest attack has done more damage than the first.
Vic Police have belatedly begun to assemble a dedicated investigative team, the Operation Hawk taskforce. Rather than backing down, the criminals and thugs operating with impunity in the building unions are stepping up their violent campaign. Since September 2023, there are known to have been at least 11 firebombings, although the true number is believed to be higher due to victims being reluctant to report attacks to police.
A firebombing about a fortnight ago was directed at a subcontractor on the site of a $35 million state government-backed social housing development in the Geelong suburb of Newtown. That subcontractor was El Dorado, the firm targeted again on Tuesday morning.
There was another arson attack earlier this month at a site in Footscray managed by major building company Hickory.
In November, nationwide demolition giant Delta had two of its earthmoving rigs – worth up to an estimated $2 million each – torched on a major Docklands worksite.
The attacks have shocked the state’s construction sector, with insiders questioning whether the government, CFMEU administrators and authorities have the capacity to combat those behind them.
Or even if Labor governments have the will to combat their biggest paymasters. The notorious Construction Forestry Maritime Employees Union was Victorian Labor’s single biggest donor in the lead-up to the state’s 2022 election.
