Bashing unions ain’t cheap
While I’m on the subject of industrial relations, I notice Kevin Andrews is trumpeting the success of a Building Industry Taskforce prosecution that won a whopping $6000 from construction company Barclay Mowlem. An outstanding result, to be sure, but what else has the BIT been up to?
Andrew Ferguson provided a neat overview of its performance in the most recent issue of the NSW Labor Left’s Challenge magazine:
The Building Industry Taskforce has been eagerly seeking prosecutions to justify the more than $13 million of taxpayer money that it has swallowed up thus far. Yet a recent series of judgments have declared their cases “hopeless”, “undemocratic” and “authoritarian.”
In February … Justice Wilcox [of the Federal Court] said, “Even on the view of the facts propounded by the applicants, their case was hopeless. It was instituted without reasonable cause.”
[...]
In another case before the Federal Court, Justice Marshall rejected the Taskforce’s request to access the bank records of Multiplex employees suspected of receiving strike pay because of the Taskforce’s refusal to indicate why they wished to receive the information.
Justice Marshall stated that not only was such an action “foreign to the workplace relations of civilised societies”, but to allow such an action was “tantamount to saying that an inspector may target an employer or employee or any other person, and fish through that person’s records to see what may be extracted for some still further unstated purpose.”
And finally, my favourite example:
In a third case before the NSW District Court, a taskforce inspector was criticised for giving evidence and then returning to reverse his statements, seeking to match them up with the evidence provided by another witness.
Judge Allan Hughes said the “most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen in six years on the bench was a person giving evidence under oath, sitting the whole day through the evidence of another witness and then coming back wishing to make his evidence match that of the second witness.
“How could I accept his word? I mean, was he right the first time or was he right the second time?”
In the last case, Hughes J found that the CFMEU had not filed some paperwork in accordance with the Workplace Relations Act, and fined them $2000. But at the same time he dismissed 35 other charges. Farcically, Kevin Andrews considers this to be one of “10 successful prosecutions.”
Pressing hopeless prosecutions, breaching employees’ privacy, and making up evidence in court? That’s what $13 million of taxpayers’ money buys — it’ll take a hell of a lot more than ten $6000 fines to justify that expense.
Update: For the benefit of international readers, I should explain that the Cole Royal Commission was set up by the Howard Government to smash the unions in the building and construction industry. The Building Industry Taskforce was established to follow up the Commission’s findings.
