For thirty years, Australia’s most powerful construction union has served as a moral punching bag for the nation’s political and media establishment. Every few years another “reckoning” arrives: a Royal Commission, a regulator’s dawn raid, a media exposé discovering organised crime in high-vis. Each time, the outcome is the same. The CFMEU is declared uniquely corrupt, uniquely violent, and uniquely beyond redemption.

Yet for all the drama, the union’s real crime has never been corruption. It has been effectiveness. The CFMEU still works, and in a political culture that fears organised labour, effectiveness is unforgivable.

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The Threat That Cannot Be Named

Construction workers enjoy some of the best wages and conditions in the economy not because the market is generous, but because their union has forced it to be. A CFMEU victory on pay or safety standards ripples outward through other industries, setting benchmarks in both income and courage.

For employers, financiers, and the political class that serves them, this is intolerable. Polite society can manage unions that bargain decorously; it cannot abide one that still shifts the balance of power between labour and capital. Hence the CFMEU is recast as the villain, the necessary monster through which broader worker militancy can be tamed.

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Institutionalised Vilification: The ABCC Experiment

The Australian Building and Construction Commission, born under John Howard in 2005, was never about cleaning up corruption in general. It had a single purpose: to criminalise industrial militancy itself. Its prosecutors pursued workers who halted unsafe jobs and spent hundreds of thousands attacking the union for demanding women’s toilets on sites.

Malcolm Turnbull resurrected the agency in 2016, as a moral crusade, even forcing a double dissolution election to ensure its return. The symbolism was unmistakable. The state would rather risk its own stability than allow builders to retain theirs.

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Royal Commissions as Theatre

Two Royal Commissions, in 2006 and 2014, produced mountains of accusation and virtually no conviction. Still, the headlines wrote themselves: dark forces, union thuggery, criminal infiltration. In a culture of spectacle, innocence no longer matters. The performance of corruption outweighs the proof.

As long as the theatre continues, the moral hierarchy stands. The suited manipulator is “enterprising”; the militant worker is “thuggish.”

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The “Building Bad” Campaign: Journalism as Class Discipline

Nine Entertainment’s 2024 “Building Bad” series perfected this script. Across the Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Financial Review and 60 Minutes, the CFMEU was portrayed as a mafia in hi-vis; linked to bikies, shady figures, and undefined “crime networks.” After months of intense investigation and police cooperation, the story produced more insinuation than evidence. Its purpose was not revelation but confirmation: the CFMEU must be guilty because its existence is too unsettling if innocent.

The manufactured outrage delivered results. Elected CFMEU officials were dismissed en masse, and 80,000 members were placed under state control. Even the government’s High Court submissions admitted the new laws did not depend on any proven criminal allegation. The CFMEU was punished for what it symbolised, not for what it did.

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The Corporate Double Standard

Compare that to proven corporate misconduct: wage theft in supermarkets, cartel behaviour in construction, the banks’ spectacular fraud exposed by their own Royal Commission. No administrators there. No emergency powers. Corporate crime is treated as pathology to be managed; union assertiveness is treated as a disease to be eradicated.

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The Snob’s Lens

Cultural contempt underpins the coverage. Construction workers are “thugs,” “bovver boys,” “standover men.” Aggression that earns a corporate lawyer millions becomes criminality when performed in steel caps instead of cufflinks. The working class is permitted bravery only in myth. In the present tense, it is branded dangerous.

The CFMEU’s insistence on dignity and danger money reads to the polite observer as extortion. That inversion is essential to the ideology. If builders are villains, the bosses can pose as saviours.

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Wages and Envy

The business press loves the “overpaid tradie” narrative. Never mind that construction remains among the most dangerous and physically punishing trades in the country. The gratitude demanded of working people is that they break their bodies quietly and for less. Public outrage over construction wages is moral theatre, designed to remind the workforce that physical labour must never be valued too highly.

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Guilt by Association

Where evidence cannot convict, association will do. Know a dodgy subcontractor? Attend a fundraiser where someone later charged with tax fraud was present? Congratulations. You are proof the union is corrupt. The evidentiary bar sits lower for the CFMEU than for any boardroom in the country. The very existence of a militant construction union demands explanation. It must be rogue, compromised or criminal; never simply effective.

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Labor’s Collaboration

The most humiliating blow landed not from the Coalition but from Labor itself. Anthony Albanese’s government, with quiet assent from parts of the ACTU, rushed through laws allowing administrators to seize control of the union. Murray Watt, an erstwhile foe of the ABCC, became its reincarnation’s instrument. Media outlets applauded Labor’s “resolve.”

That a Labor government would do what Liberal governments once only dreamed of; dissolving a union’s elected leadership without trial, shows just how deeply the party has absorbed the values it was founded to oppose.

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The Long War on Builders

The Builders Labourers Federation was dismantled in 1986 under Hawke, ending the Green Bans and extinguishing one of the most democratic popular movements in Australian history. Their successors in the CFMEU inherited both their militancy and their enemies. This continuity is not conspiracy but class memory. Each generation requires a living example of what happens when labour stands tall.

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The Meaning of Demonisation

Here lies the unspoken logic of the CFMEU’s persecution: power must be punished. A union that can still defy employers in an age of atomised labour contradicts the story modern capitalism tells about itself; that power belongs to consumers, not workers; to markets, not movements. The CFMEU exposes that lie.

In this mythology, “corruption” is not a legal term but an ideological one, applied to any form of worker agency that refuses obedience. Media exposés, Royal Commissions, and emergency laws act as rituals of containment, reassuring the public that hierarchy remains secure.

The vilification of the CFMEU is not a deviation from Australian democracy; it is one of its standard maintenance acts, a cleansing ceremony to remind workers who governs. Yet even under administration, wages remain high and workplace safety remains strong. The fear of the union persists; and that fear is the measure of its success.

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What the Campaign Really Protects

The persecution of the CFMEU has never been about moral failure. It has always been about preserving class order. In a country where most unions have been pacified, the builders still embody the radical idea that labour can dictate terms. That is why they must, again and again, be made to kneel; and why, despite everything, they still refuse.

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