Union witch-hunt continues to unravel as major players exposed

It’s more than a year after the $26 million, 21 month-long trade union royal commission handed down its report, and the gloss has well and truly come off two of the commission’s star anti-union witnesses.

Key witness and Class 1 Form company boss Elias Taleb has been fined $30,000 after a judge found that he had underpaid a former employee over a three year period. Taleb, an eager participant in the royal commission union witch-hunt, declined to appear at the recent court proceedings where it was his company’s practices under scrutiny.

The bosses of ACT construction company, Capital Hydraulics and Drains were also witnesses at the commission. For the benefit of the commissioner, Joe Lo Re and Nikki Lo Re recounted their tale of being bullied to sign an enterprise agreement with the CFMEU that included income protection and redundancy entitlements for their workers.

Explaining how they always had their workers’ best interests at heart, the Lo Re’s told the commission that “there’s nothing more important than paying your staff”. Their company collapsed in April owing hundreds of thousands to its employees. The CFMEU is calling for an audit of Capital Hydraulics, which also owes millions to the tax office.

The royal commission’s police task-force has been having a difficult time of late too, despite receiving a $21 million funding boost late last year. Its very public 2015 raid of the ACT CFMEU office has been found to have been “unlawful”, and the federal court has also criticised the “unreasonable” conduct of the police while raiding the CFMEU’s Brisbane office. Canberra CFMEU organiser Johhny Lomax is suing police over his high-profile arrest on a charge of blackmail. The case against Lomax was dismissed when police prosecutors presented no evidence to the court. Charges have been dismissed or dropped in at least seven other cases pursued by the royal commission task-force in recent months.

Then there’s the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), the anti-union goon squad that all the royal commission beat-ups were supposed to justify. In March, federal court justice Tony North criticised the “terrible waste of everybody’s time” that was the $100,000 dollar ABCC case against two CFMEU officials for, in justice North’s words, “having a cup of tea with a mate”.

North said it was “astounding” that ABCC commissioner Nigel Hadgkiss had briefed barristers, gone through two years of submissions and conducted hearings with dozens of witnesses over “such a minuscule, insignificant affair”. North said that, “This is all external forces that are beating up what’s just a really ordinary situation that amounts to virtually nothing”.

Unfortunately the anti-union witch hunts of the ABCC and the royal commission police task-force don’t just waste time and money. They are an attempt to hobble one of the most active unions in the country, and intimidate union members out of standing up for their rights.

The concerted campaign against the construction union makes it easier for bosses to flout the law and cut corners – which can have fatal consequences. In the year the commission was established, 29 workers were killed in the construction industry. While the royal commission was holding its hearings in Canberra in 2015, Work Safe Australia released a report that revealed that Canberra construction sites are the most dangerous in the country.

Speaking to the media after another recent ABCC case against the construction union was dismissed, ACT CFMEU secretary Dean Hall said, “We will never stop standing up for safety and the community, no matter how hard the government want to send their secret police after us”.