Imagine Sarah, nurse at St Vincents, on the Number 96 tram, Melbourne
dusk bruising purple outside the windows. Twelve hours done. Her navy
scrubs are faded and soft, worn to the shape of her, the way a
soldier’s fatigues eventually become a second skin. She doesn’t look
like someone the Herald Sun would write about. She looks like someone
the Herald Sun will never notice.

Her ANMF dues ping on her phone. Her union protects her penalty rates
keeping AGL’s gouging and Woolies’ profiteering at bay; pay rates hard
won by CFMEU muscle. By establishing a high benchmark for wage growth
in the private sector, CFMEU wins create the necessary industrial
pressure and public expectation for the government to raise the
‘floor’ for essential public workers like nurses, preventing their pay
from being further devalued, relative to the broader economy.

Tonight Sarah’s feed crackles like a live wire: a union steals 15
billion. It’s the mother of all beat-ups but everyone believes it. Our
ritual pre-election anti-union, Orwellian hate session has been
unleashed. It’s lurid, CFMEU carnage wall to wall; bikie tattoos
flashing under courtroom fluorescents, eskies bloated with sweat-slick
cash, Geoffrey Watson’s silver-haired-silvertail barrister scalpel
busy recasting hi-vis sons, fathers, brothers and family providers as
Victoria’s untouchable gangland dons.

Sarah swipes past the bot swarms to her brother’s repost. He’s a
sparkie, ink-smudged forearms from blueprint huddles, free-riding
CFMEU site rates that quietly hoist the floor for the whole industry.
He’s not sure what to think any more. Neither is she. Which is
precisely the point.

This isn’t a cleanup. It’s a setup.

________________________________

Follow the Election Calendar

Let’s be clear about what we are seeing. Victoria faces a state
election. The Liberals, reduced to a rump of niche grievances, culture
war cabals, religious factions pitting Mormon against Evangelicals and
a shadow front bench whose deepest ideological commitment is to get
Religious Instruction back in schools, (-to pray for negative
gearing?), is in a mad panic to find its own pulse.

Union-bashing has always been the defibrillator of choice for a
Victorian Liberal Party with nothing else to offer. The CFMEU inquiry,
timed and amplified with the precision of a Murdoch press campaign, is
not about corruption. It is primarily about politics. It is about
breathing life into a corpse while picking the pockets of the people
who built this state with their hands.

The tell is in what the inquiry doesn’t investigate. Developers whose
brown-paper trails dissolve into footnotes, shrugged away as the cost
of doing business. Lendlease scaffold deaths that produced fines and
moved on. Geoffrey Watson,engaged by the government-appointed
administrator to deliver a specific script, has performed his gig with
the relish of a man who knows his audience.

Cash rorts in cabinet chillers. Bikie ink under strip-lights.
Site-cabin banter sour with VB breath. It’s lurid, it’s vivid, and it
has the approximate relationship to a balanced assessment of
Victoria’s construction industry that a Twitter pile-on has to a
coronial inquest.

The ‘$15 billion theft’ figure ballooning through every Murdoch
masthead is a single barrister’s fevered back-of-envelope calculation
— Watson’s own report calls it ‘rough but conservative’ — based on
anonymous industry insiders estimating a 15% overrun across Victoria’s
entire $100 billion Big
Build pipeline. Coincidentally, it also happens to be roughly what the
Melbourne Metro Tunnel cost to build. Neither figure has been audited
or tested in any court. This demands full scrutiny. Now.

________________________________

The Context Nobody’s Running

Behind the political performance theatre? Since 2021 homelessness has
surged 25 percent. More than 140,000 Australians are couch-surfing,
car-dwelling or sleeping rough tonight. Rents are consuming 50 percent
of median incomes in major cities. Nurses like Sarah are bunking in
share houses. Sparkies are dossing down on sites. Meanwhile Tony
Burke, Minister for Home Affairs, a powerful figure in this Labor
government, owns four investment properties in Tasmania and Victoria,
each quietly yielding returns that negative gearing and capital gains
tax discounts were specifically designed to protect.

Michelle Rowland (Minister for Communications), owns five properties,
including several held within a private trust. Senator, Deborah
O’Neill has at least five; a home in Copacabana (the same coastal
suburb as the PM) and several investment properties across Queensland,
Tasmania, and the ACT.

The team at the top of Labor preaches housing affordability while
banking personally on its absence.

On the other hand, The CFMEU built the hospitals Sarah staffs. Its
pattern bargaining dragged EBA rates upward across the whole sector.
Non-union sparkies like Sarah’s brother banked the lift without paying
the dues. Raze the union and you don’t clean up the industry. You hand
developers a gift-wrapped, defenceless workforce and call it
accountability.

________________________________

The Long Betrayal: From Glen Iris to the Royal Commission

Australian workers have been here before. The template was cut not in
some distant era of flat caps and gas lamps but in a small
confectionery factory on Malvern Road, Glen Iris, in 1985.

Dollar Sweets employed 27 people. When fifteen of them voted down a
no-strike agreement, owner Fred Stauder sacked the lot of them on the
spot and replaced them with non-union labour. The sacked workers
mounted a round-the-clock picket that held for 143 days, through
Melbourne’s winter, through intimidation, through the studied silence
of the ACTU, which was too busy protecting the Hawke-Keating Accord to
show solidarity with fifteen confectionery workers in a suburban
factory.

Into the vacuum sidles a flash young barrister named Peter Costello,
his brief bankrolled by the Victorian Chamber of Commerce. Wily
Costello takes the union to the Victorian Supreme Court on common law
grounds, not the industrial tribunal where workers had hard-won
protections, but the Supreme Court where none of those protections
applied.

Justice Murphy describes the picketers as “stupid and nihilistic” and
issues the injunction. The picket ends the next day. In 1988 the union
paid $175,000 in damages.

Ever the showboat, Costello later brags that Dollar Sweets “rewrote
the manual on what are the acceptable limits of industrial action by
unions” and had “ended the long period of practical immunity from the
common law which unions had enjoyed.”

It did a shed-load more than that. It showed the New Right the
template: bypass the industrial system, weaponise the common law,
finance the campaign through employer associations and chambers of
commerce, and use a small, isolated dispute as a test case for
destroying the movement as a whole.

The same year Costello co-founded the H.R. Nicholls Society, dedicated
to the deregulation of the labour market and the abolition of the
minimum wage. Four years later he was installed in the safe Liberal
seat of Higgins by right-wing powerbrokers who ousted the sitting
member to make room for him.

Dollar Sweets was not just a case. It was a career launch, a political
manifesto and a declaration of war, all conducted over the heads of
fifteen workers on a Glen Iris footpath, who simply wanted a 36-hour
week.

Geoffrey Watson is writing the next chapter of the same story. Where
Costello had a picket line and a Supreme Court writ, Watson has a
royal commission, a Murdoch megaphone and a national broadcaster that
follows Murdoch’s framing. The mechanics differ. The purpose is
identical.

In 1969 Qantas pilots struck, cockpits cold and silent for ten days.
The 1970s roared: Jack Mundey’s Builders Labourers levered green bans
that halted bulldozers on The Rocks’ cobbled cliffs, saving what
developers would have demolished for car parks. In 1998 Patrick
Stevedores sacked 1,400 waterside workers at Webb Dock at midnight,
lockers padlocked, cranes frozen against the dawn’s brackish, salt
haze, in a plot starring Peter Reith and a Dubai-registered mob
training scab labour.

Global solidarity from London to Los Angeles forced a climbdown. Each
of these moments represented workers discovering and deploying their
collective power. Each was followed, with the precision of a
counter-offensive, by a new legal, legislative or judicial mechanism
to ensure it could never happen again.

The Hawke-Keating Accords traded strike thunder for social wage
whispers that evaporated like dew. Howard’s Workplace Relations Act
and WorkChoices banned pattern bargaining and killed secondary
boycotts under crippling fines. Rudd’s Fair Work Act gave back with
one hand and padlocked with the other: seven days’ notice for
industrial action, mandatory ballots, good faith bargaining provisions
that courts have weaponised ever since. Union density collapsed from
50 percent in the 1980s to 12 percent today. Construction clung to
around 40 percent because the CFMEU fought for it. Past tense.

________________________________

The Media Machine and the Fog It Makes

Nobody reads the Herald Sun for context. Its print circulation, once
more than half a million, wheezes along at 150,000 weekdays, in some
estimates. Its true spiritual home is the grease-spotted wrap for
Friday’s flake and chips. Easy on the chicken salt, please. Its real
operation is digital and emotional: front-page outrage designed to
trigger, to feed the dopamine loop that keeps eyes on screens and
minds away from the actual architecture of power. The algorithm
doesn’t care about the ludicrously high $15 billion figure’s
provenance. It cares that the number makes you angry before your
coffee.

In an attention economy, outrage is the product. Workers are the raw
material, harvested, processed and sold back to themselves as the
problem.

It’s the new divide and conquer. All your mates online, liking and
sharing the outrage, but no one on the picket line.

________________________________

The Bottom Line

The CFMEU is no communion of saints. Rogues have rogued.
Accountability matters. But accountability that falls exclusively on
unions while developers write off brown envelopes as legal fees, while
scaffold deaths produce shrugs, while a Labor Cabinet collects
investment property rents and calls himself a workers’ friend: that is
not accountability. It is class warfare in a barrister’s wig. It was
class warfare in Peter Costello’s wig in Glen Iris in 1985. The wig
changes. The brief doesn’t.

Sarah feels it in her bones on the Number 96, even if she can’t yet
name it. Her brother feels it at the blueprint huddle, even as he
scrolls past the outrage and wonders vaguely whether the union blokes
had it coming. They are being set up. Again. In an election year.
While the dogs bark and the caravan, loaded with developers’
contracts, Liberal Party talking points, Murdoch’s digital revenue and
the ghost of Peter Costello’s Supreme Court brief, rolls quietly on.

The question is not whether the CFMEU needs reform. The question is
who benefits from its destruction. Follow that thread, and the setup
becomes unmistakable. It always has been.