One moment of sound and fury caught on video speaks to a much bigger job ahead on CFMEU

The secretly filmed confrontation is a short study of sound and fury. The video shows two CFMEU officials on one of Labor’s signature Big Build projects flexing their power without any sense of inhibition.

The filmed confrontation on a Monash Freeway upgrade site runs for only a few minutes, but clearly shows how the union exerted its violence-laced power and control over major taxpayer-funded sites across Victoria.

It captures the essence of a corruption scandal dogging the Allan government and which was, this week, identified as a top priority for new opposition leader Jess Wilson in trying to contain the billion-dollar blowouts on construction that have further stretched the state’s weak finances.

Until this week, when the administrator of the CFMEU finally purged its Victorian ranks of the two men on the video, it had been a major problem for the most powerful union branch in Australia.

Unaware he is being recorded during the 2023 confrontation with a small building firm, organiser Gerry McCrudden boasts that it was the CFMEU rather than state Labor’s private contractor partners that would decide how lucrative subcontracts were doled out to build the state’s new or improved roads and rail lines.

“We’ve got them all”, the official says of the union’s ability to control state Labor’s Big Build contractors, before telling the owners of a small firm “youse won’t be coming in” to the Big Build.

Alongside McCrudden, union organiser Joel Shackleton chimes in with violent threats – “I’ll f---ing take your soul and rip your f---ing head off” – that have landed him in court facing threat to kill charges. He has signalled he will fight the charges. Both men also face court action from the industrial relations watchdog over the incident.

On Friday, this masthead confirmed that Shackleton and McCrudden are among a group of organisers forced out of the CFMEU by union boss Zach Smith after unrelenting revelations by this masthead that the union’s Victorian branch remained in the grip of powerful union figures suspected of unlawful or improper behaviour.

The pair’s departure, along with up to a dozen other union organisers in Victoria, marks perhaps the most significant turning point in the Albanese government’s efforts to reform the CFMEU since it first plunged the union into administration in August 2024.

But it’s not quite the story of expeditious reform as told by the Labor leaders including Premier Jacinta Allan, who has repeatedly declared the CFMEU’s old approach was being ripped out “by the roots”.

The Age has confirmed that over eight months ago, the union’s administrator received internal advice urging McCrudden’s and Shackleton’s removal. Senior union insiders also concede it was far too long in coming.

Meanwhile, the Victorian branch clean out also highlights all that hasn’t changed in the 16 months after The Age’s Building Bad investigation first aired the video confrontation along with evidence showing how union-backed bikies and gangland-linked firms, including those purporting to employ Indigenous workers, were winning Big Build contracts.

The union is attempting to clean house with sweeping redundancies, but the suspected corruption and lawlessness on the $90 billion Big Build remains mostly untouched.

This week, when CFMEU administrator Mark Irving, KC, and his chief investigator, Geoffrey Watson, SC, testified before the Queensland government’s commission of inquiry into the CFMEU, their evidence made clear that organised crime and corruption was vastly worse in Victoria.

Yet, the Allan government has refused to hold a similar royal commission-style inquiry.

In the last month, Victorian industry insiders co-operating with law enforcement or regulatory agencies have passed on credible intelligence that bikie-linked companies are still winning and servicing lucrative subcontracts on Big Build, and other state government, sites.

With informers too scared to give formal witness statements, authorities in Victoria are largely powerless to act.

Other companies that have hired gangland figures such as Mick Gatto or the Hells Angels to conduct their industrial relations negotiations are also operating freely on government projects.

One such firm, the Maz Group, is working on the Southern Cross Station’s escalator upgrade as well as Melbourne Airport projects, while another, Cycon Civil, has won multiple contracts indirectly funded by taxpayers. Cycon claims on its website to be synonymous with major infrastructure in Victoria. The firms have previously denied any wrongdoing.

Exacerbating the problem is the suspected corrupting and gangland infiltration of state Labor’s civil infrastructure Indigenous employment policy, which encourages the state government contracting partners to employ Indigenous subcontractors and firms.

Cycon Civil is one of many gangland linked firms with an Indigenous employment subsidiary winning government funded contracts.

The alleged victim of the confrontation on the 2023 video is an Indigenous firm that the union is accused of unlawfully banning from Big Build work.

Until his removal via a forced redundancy this week, Shackleton wielded outsized control over Labor’s Indigenous employment scheme.

His supporters insist Shackleton sought to champion Indigenous firms but lacked the experience or ability to do so in a way that didn’t lead to repeated accusations of nepotism or the alleged violent threats that have landed him before court.

Administrator Irving and state union boss Zach Smith have addressed this immediate concern by forcing Shackleton out of the union.

Union insiders, speaking anonymously to avoid repercussions, say that did nothing to fix the fact that the Big Build’s Indigenous employment scheme is badly compromised and operates with almost no regulation.

On state Labor’s Geelong rail line upgrade, one Indigenous firm was told by an influential project employee to use a Hells Angels fixer to win work.

This masthead has also confirmed that Kinaway, Victoria’s Indigenous business association, has previously encouraged Indigenous building industry firms to employ gangland fixers to win contracts. The senior Kinaway employee been doing so has since left the organisation and could not be contacted.

Despite the suspected deep and ongoing infiltration of taxpayer projects, not a single government official – politician or public servant – or senior employee of any major Big Build contractor has been held publicly accountable for the failure to safeguard projects and employment initiatives from union thugs and industry sharks.

Until the clean out at the CFMEU Elizabeth Street headquarters this week, Smith and Irving had faced the same accusations of inaction. The pair’s seeming support of McCrudden and Shackleton became a lightning rod of discontent among the Victorian business community and those in the union campaigning for true reform.

After news of McCrudden’s and Shackleton’s removals spread this week, CFMEU insiders, along with the bosses of Victorian building companies, were as one in agreeing that the union’s administration had taken a huge leap in cauterising what had become an open sore.

“It’s massive. It’s the clean out that had to happen, and it’s a disgrace it’s taken so long,” one still serving union official said of the departure of the pair alongside a dozen or so other Victorian union organisers and employees.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity fearing blowback, said the sense that long-promised reform had arrived was heightened by the sacking last month of corrupt CFMEU Victorian boss John Perkovic after this masthead revealed he’d taken up to $3 million in financial benefits from building companies.

On Friday, ex-NSW CFMEU boss Darren Greenfield and son Michael Greenfield were both jailed for their parts in a bribery scandal.

One lifelong trade unionist watching the saga unfold is former Victorian CFMEU assistant secretary Shaun Reardon.

In 2019, Reardon was the only CFMEU boss to quit on principle when disgraced former secretary John Setka committed domestic violence by harassing his ex-wife in abusive messages.

He won’t comment on the forced redundancies, other than noting that some honest organisers have been turfed out.

But, in an opinion piece for The Age, he has broken his long-held silence to declare that reform is needed.

Reardon’s call to arms goes to the heart of the industrial problem fuelling corruption on the Big Build and which was examined in depth this week at Queensland’s commission of inquiry: the way the building union gained unchecked power on government projects by freezing out the rival Australian Workers’ Union.

“The CFMEU was only built after several union leaders woke up to the fact that bitter (and sometimes violent) infighting, turf wars and demarcation disputes over coverage was not in the best interest of members,” Reardon writes.

“Today, as long as there are two unions battling for power over membership on the same infrastructure projects, nothing will change.”

Reardon’s opinion piece misses a major point. In Victoria, the Labor government and its bureaucrats helped the CFMEU take control of the Big Build by instructing major contractors to acquiesce to CFMEU demands.

Over the last 16 months, the Allan government has sought to reverse this problem, and the intimidation and corruption it fuelled, by offering public support of Irving’s administration and introducing new rules requiring contractors to report wrongdoing to authorities.

But the searing accountability of the commission of inquiry playing out in Queensland has been rejected by Premier Allan as unnecessary.

This week, new opposition leader Jess Wilson promised a royal commission into the CFMEU, and associated Big Build rorts, if she is elected in November 2026. Any such commission would surely call McCrudden and Shackleton as witnesses.

Reardon’s concern, though, isn’t politics. It’s rebuilding the CFMEU into a militant union that champions social justice and ordinary workers rights and is no longer synonymous with bikies, thugs and rorts.

“The Albanese government intends to keep Mark Irving as administrator until a time when it feels democratic elections can be safely held without what it calls ‘the elements of crime and corruption’ attached – so it’s well and truly time officials, delegates and rank and file members stopped throwing snowballs at the sun and started focusing on rebuilding this great union.”

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