- Seasoned journalists from The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Nick McKenzie and Ben Schneiders, have written an important and powerful expose of the criminal-led union the CFMEU (Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union).
- They take us inside the corruption that permeates the CFMEU on all levels. The key players are the violent lowlifes John Setka and Mick Gatto and their links with outlaw bikie gangs and underworld figures. They extracted millions of dollars from building companies by denying them Enterprise Bargaining Agreements (EBAs) unless they complied with their demands.
- For years the journalists have been covering in detail in the newspapers and TV's Sixty Minutes what was happening. But in this book they dig deep and summarise, clarify and link all elements of the picture. I particularly relished their exposure of the pathetic Victorian Labor Party under Jacinta Allen and how she failed dismally as a Minister and Premier by allowing Setka and Gatto and their mates to carry on enriching themselves and the union at taxpayers' expense.
- I underlined heaps of sentences and paragraphs as I read the book. Here are a few examples:
At least a dozen construction companies and their owners had been targeted by fire bombings.
The barrister [Geoffrey Watson] described the union's transformation under Setka's leadership from 'champion of the working class' to an organisation 'that turned to looking after gangsters, standover men, bikies, heroin traffickers, and even killers'.
During the Setka era [2012-2024] the CFMEU was forcing contractors to employ patched bikies, meth abusers, violent standover men, killers, boxers and cage fighters.
The Setka-led Victorian branch of the CFMEU was no longer a trade union, it was a crime syndicate....it had strayed a long way from its mission of holding greedy bosses to account and protecting the pay and conditions of blue-collar workers. Instead, the union had turned to helping select greedy bosses and their gangland mates drop their snouts into a taxpayer dollar-filled trough.
In her final address to Victoria, Allan all but ignored the scandal that had cost her the premiership.
- The book's final para before the Postscript is this however:
When the new Victorian Premier Ben Carroll held his own press conference, however, he didn't prevaricate. The first promise made by Victoria's 50th premier was to call a royal commission into the construction industry.
