Life on the West Island - What’s Sauce for the Goose…

In recent weeks, West Island mass media has been awash with allegations of bullying, corruption and receipt of bribes involving the Construction and General Division of the CFMEU – the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union. Both the government and the opposition in federal parliament voted for legislation to place that division of the union into compulsory external administration for at least three years. Last week, the legislation was signed into law and, acting with exceptional speed, within two days the Attorney General announced the appointment of Mark Irving KC as Administrator of the CFMEU Construction and General Division in each state and territory. Around 300 CFMEU officials were immediately dismissed from their roles.

These actions came after a lurid media outcry about the alleged bully-boy tactics employed by the CFMEU. No charges have been laid and none of the purported offenders have been arrested. This is not to say that the reported improper behaviour by CFMEU officials has not taken place. But it raises two key issues.

Firstly, if bribes have in fact been paid and received, will the parliament or government now take steps to deregister or prosecute those organisations which have allegedly paid illegal bribes (most of whom are reportedly large construction companies)?

Secondly, the action against CFMEU stands in stark contrast to the almost total lack of repercussions for the powerful business organisations shown to have been behaving illegally and/or unethically in recent times. An editorial published this week by online news site Crikey highlights the situation:

Is this a bad time to talk about Qantas, PwC or the big banks? Some people would argue that calling for corporates to face the same treatment that has been meted out to the CFMEU is a clear-cut case of “whataboutism” and a defence of (alleged) union corruption.

We ask the question in light of the CFMEU’s alleged “rife infiltration by bikies and organised criminals, intimidation and allegations of corruption”, uncovered by Nine reporters Nick McKenzie, David Marin-Guzman and Ben Schneiders and published in July.

The union has now been put into administration for at least three years and hundreds of officials have been fired, following legislation passed with Coalition support, which may still face legal challenges.

Perhaps waiting until the dust has settled would be a better time to ask why the government didn’t threaten to legislate the Australian arm of PwC into administration when it was revealed — similarly to the CFMEU, by legally untested media coverage — that it had leaked confidential tax information to enrich itself and its clients?

Then there is the crass behaviour of the Big Four banks, shown by no less than a Royal Commission to be knowingly facilitating the laundering of billions of dollars of proceeds of crime and charging exorbitant fees to dead people, among many other disgraceful actions. Despite the recommendations of the Royal Commission, not a single bank executive or board member has been charged with an offence, and such financial penalties as have been applied are insignificant when set against the multi-billion-dollar profits garnered by the Big Four each year.

Crikey noted that among other damning findings, the 2019 royal commission found that banks had promoted junk insurance policies, failed to verify creditworthiness before granting home loans, and knowingly raised credit card limits for customers with gambling problems.

Then there is the case of huge accounting and consultancy conglomerate PwC, blatantly leaking confidential government information on proposed tax changes to their wealthy clients to enable them to circumvent the contributions they should be making to government revenues and community services. Again, a couple of executives fell on their swords, then normal business was resumed, with PwC maintaining its stranglehold on “consultancy” services to government. Residents of Norfolk Island will be well aware of how the exorbitant fees charged by the large consultancy firms are reported as amounts spent on delivery of services to Island residents, when in fact they have gone straight into the pockets of off-island consultants, some of whom have never set foot in Norfolk Island.

While acknowledging that the allegations against the CFMEU should be investigated, some independent commentators pointed out that “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,” so that similar behaviour by large corporations – and even government itself – required equivalent treatment.

For example, Lydia Shelly, President of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties said that many Australians will no doubt understand just how different some of the treatment of corporate wrongdoing is, in comparison to what’s alleged to have been seen by some of the unions. We haven’t seen any legislation like it in Australia, which threatens the principles of natural justice and procedural fairness. In order to maintain any shred of legitimacy that the Australian government, including the state governments, have with the public, they must be consistent, and that consistency must extend to investigating their own wrongdoing, not just the wrongdoing that is alleged to have occurred in the corporate world. If the government is serious about looking into wrongdoing, they’re in a position to look at their own wrongdoing, specifically the comparable lack of urgency with which governments have acted on issues such as robodebt and veteran suicides.

Eminent barrister Greg Barns agreed that such draconian legislation had never been brought to bear on any corporation, saying that there’s also never been any suggestion of legislating in respect of the banks, specifically. In relation to the new CFMEU laws, when you already have a mechanism in the Federal Court to deal with this, you could only say it’s politics.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that over 100,000 West Island CFMEU members marched in protest this week, calling for the treatment of untested allegations against their union to be treated in equivalent manner to those against big corporations and even the government itself. After all, they claimed, what’s sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander…