One law for the CFMEU, another for construction bosses

“Unlawful conduct on building sites around Australia is holding back our economy”, according to Malcolm Turnbull. And what a surprise, the prime minister says that it’s unions that are to blame.

Turnbull’s tosh about the importance of the rule of law is blatant hypocrisy. While there is plenty of unlawful conduct in the building industry, the criminals are on the boss’s side.

The Liberal government is expected to force a double dissolution election over its legislation to reinstate the Australian Building and Construction Commission, a body which has no purpose other than to attack trade unions and their members.

But the government and its regulators look the other way when construction workers are dudded out of wages and entitlements by unscrupulous employers. Right now, more than 50, mostly migrant, workers have gone without pay for more than two months after the subcontractor they worked for went into liquidation. They had been working on the Bendigo Hospital job, which is run by Lend Lease, one of Australia’s largest construction companies.

Many are owed more than $10,000. Lend Lease has taken no action to secure their wages. The company has kept the job running. The federal government has said nothing.

Instead, while these workers are struggling to pay mortgages and put food on the table, Malcolm Turnbull and employment minister Michaelia Cash were spotted sitting down for coffee with Lend Lease management at its Barangaroo site in Sydney. “I bet you they weren’t talking about how to get all these workers paid”, said John Setka, secretary of the Victorian CFMEU at a rally outside Lend Lease’s Melbourne offices.

Lend Lease is a known criminal enterprise. In 2012, its US arm was forced to pay $US54.2 million in penalties and restitution after the FBI uncovered what it called “a systematic pattern of audacious fraud”. Turns out the company, for years, had been falsely inflating the cost of works and overbilling clients, including on the job to build the September 11 memorial.

Just a year later, Leighton Holdings, another of Australia’s largest construction companies, was exposed in a joint Fairfax and Huffington Post investigation as being at the centre of a major bribery scandal in the oil industry. Leaked documents revealed that Leighton’s offshore company paid millions of dollars in bribes to influence Iraqi government officials to award the company lucrative oilfield contracts.

Will Turnbull’s ABCC look into the corrupt property developers and builders that give so generously to the Liberal Party? Will it investigate the unpaid wages of the plasterers on the Bendigo Hospital job? Not likely. Instead it will go after the only people who are fighting to get these workers what they’re owed, the CFMEU.