Queensland workplace safety inspectors were given unlawful directions to write stop-work notices in response to CFMEU complaints that appeared to target companies that were out of favour with the union, an inquiry has heard.
The commission of inquiry has returned this week for another three-day block focusing on the “regulatory capture” – a form of institutional corruption – of Workplace Health and Safety Queensland by the CFMEU under the former Labor government.
“I believed we were forming an alliance, basically, with the CFMEU to follow their agenda,” operations manager Deborah Dargan told the hearing. “What we were doing, the principal contractors we were targeting, it just wasn’t right. It wasn’t proper, and we shouldn’t have been doing it.”
The Crisafulli government launched the $19.7 million probe last year after reporting by this masthead and 60 Minutes into criminality, corruption and misconduct in the union and construction sector nationwide.
After opening remarks from senior counsel assisting the inquiry Patrick Wheelahan on Tuesday, Wednesday’s hearing was dominated by evidence from two current and former regulator staff about their experiences around this time.
First in the witness stand was former principal inspector Dargan, who detailed a culture under former construction compliance and field services director Helen Burgess in which CFMEU complaints were prioritised.
The inquiry previously heard Burgess was in a close personal relationship with former CFMEU state president Royce Kupsch, and is the subject of ongoing Crime and Corruption Commission investigations.
Asked what the inquiry would find should it seek records of the jobs that inspectors were sent out to deal with, Dargan said she believed they would show a “targeting of certain principal contractors, and you would see that there was some … interest, other than safety, that it was in relation to”.
Asked to elaborate, Dargan said it was the companies’ “lack of an enterprise bargaining agreement with the CFMEU, and their employment of certain subcontractors that weren’t favoured by the CFMEU”. She said the union would seek to disrupt work until the subcontractors were removed.
She said she believed the CFMEU would have a preferred provider, or a preferred person “they’d want to get into that company”, and she named major contractor BMD as one that was negatively targeted.
Dargan said while the pressure from CFMEU officials was difficult, the internal culture fostered under Burgess and operations managers under her to ensure things went the CFMEU’s way was of more concern.
For Dargan, this culminated in an internal investigation into her by one operations manager, Mark Houston. She ended up taking three months off work, with a psychologist telling her she was suffering from anxiety and depression as a result of “moral injury”.
Retired principal inspector Noel Hayes, who began his evidence on Wednesday afternoon, described similar pressures from senior staff, including Burgess, who was supported in her role by her boss – executive director Marc Dennett.
The safety office went from dealing mostly with complaints from builders, to mostly “generic” complaints from the CFMEU seeking prohibition notices to stop work until an issue was fixed, rather than improvement notices, which were less onerous.
“We were forced to write the notices … where before we had a bit of discretion with how we wrote notices and how we dealt with people,” Hayes said, adding he believed this was about slowing down the progress of jobs and placing financial pressure on builders.
“They [senior safety office staff] had a job to look after us, and they didn’t do it, they let us down.”
Hayes said Burgess once told him the reason he was unsuccessful in being promoted to a more senior role – one in which he was already acting – was that he was “too much of a stickler for the regulations”.
After what he described as a higher-than-usual turnover of inspectors in the years before he retired, Hayes said he wrote an email to then deputy director-general of the Office of Industrial Relations Craig Allen as a “cry for help” in 2020.
Pressed by Commissioner Stuart Wood, Hayes said he never received a response – or even an acknowledgment of his email – from Allen or any of his juniors.
After retiring in 2021, Hayes wrote a submission to a Crime and Corruption Commission report signed by 14 current or former inspectors.
The inquiry continues on Thursday.
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