There’s a bit in the film “Casablanca” where the local police chief, Louis, is ordered to shut down Rick’s Cafe by the Nazis which goes like this:
Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Louis: I’m shocked! Shocked to find out that gambling is going on in here.
Employee (approaching, to Louis): Your winnings, sir.
Louis: Oh, thank you…
For some reason, the recent kerfuffle about the CFMEU remind me of that scene.
As far as I can work it out the narrative seems to be that Labor must have known about the links to bikies and organised crime because, well, didn’t everyone?
Of course, this does beg the question, why didn’t Labor do something about it? Of course it also begs the question, why didn’t the Coalition?
And, of course, the answer is that it pretty much suited Labor to just ignore it and give them some good deals to ensure that projects went ahead with a minimum of disruption and, if the union made a few donations to party, well, isn’t this a win-win situation?
To look too closely at something like this could open up a whole can of worms and before you know where you are, you could be looking at things like developers paying bribes to all sorts of people and you wouldn’t just be looking at links to organised crime, you’d also have to look at some of the disorganised crime that puts money in the pockets of parties that don’t have links to unions and then where would we be.
After all, those people with a long memory may recall that the Royal Commission into the Painters and Dockers led Costigan to discover evidence of the “bottom of the harbour” tax evasion scheme which implicated the sort of fine, upstanding people that were liable to be friends of the Liberal Party, as well as causing some people to make scurrilous accusations against someone that was referred to as the “Goanna”, until goannas objected to being compared to Kerry Packer. Packer denied all charges and told the Commission that he asked to be paid in cash because he liked cash, adding that he had “a squirrel-like mentality”. (In order to protect his anonyminity, the Commission referred to him as Goanna instead of Squirrel because the latter would have made it obvious who they were referring to… Sort of like the current situation where everybody knows but some people are pretending it’s a shock!)
In all fairness, I do have to point out that the Coalition did call a double dissolution in order to establish the ABCC in order to curtail the activities of the CFMEU, even though Bridget Mackenzie is shocked, shocked that there could be corruption going on in Australia. This dedicated body did manage to bring charges against a couple of union officials for having a cup of tea (no seriously!), but the judge ruled that they were allowed to do that even if latte-sipping is considered a crime by those on Sky After Dark. As for successful prosecutions and a cleaning up of the building industry, the ABCC was about as effective as a think tank involving Rowan Dean, Malcolm Roberts and Ralph Babet: there was a lot of noise, but in the end, there’s nothing there!
At to what happens now, who knows? The Albanese government has appointed an administrator and a number of union officials have been removed, which isn’t enough according to Petey Dutton who wants the completely ineffective ABCC returned so he can complain that Labor’s version isn’t as good as the Coalition one which achieved nothing. Dutton has also called for the donations to Labor from CFMEU to be returned… presumably so he can accuse Labor of giving money to an organisation with criminal links.
Whatever, I suspect that this won’t be the main issue for voters by the time the election comes around.
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