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CFMEU inquiry updates: Health and safety inspectors back on stand in construction union probe
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‘Cry for help’ to Industrial Relations Office deputy director-general ignored
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Hayes says he had two failed attempts to apply for higher roles in the safety office, including a lead inspector role he had filled in an acting capacity in late 2017.
Former Workplace Health and Safety Queensland construction compliance and field services director Helen Burgess was on the selection panel for the permanent role a year later.
Hayes was unsuccessful. After calling Burgess to ask why, he says she told him he was “too much of a stickler for the regulations”, and “had to get on board with the views of the government and the department of the day”.
Hayes says he believes Burgess was unhappy with the way he allocated work and pushed back on prioritising CFMEU jobs – responsibility that was eventually stripped from him.
During these final years until his retirement in 2021, Hayes says the office lost about 25 construction inspectors, which he described as a higher turnover than previous years.
Inspectors directed to write stop-work notices for CFMEU, says retired inspector
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Hayes says there was significant change around the office in about 2017 and 2018.
Before this, most complaints came from builders with right-of-entry issues with unions. After this, it flipped, and most were “generic” complaints from the CFMEU.
These would be 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 under that [compliance enforcement and monitoring] policy, where before we had a bit of discretion with how we wrote notices and how we dealt with people,” Hayes says.
“It all seemed to change around the implementation of Miss Burgess, that’s when it started.“
Retired principal Workplace Health and Safety Queensland inspector called as witness
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Junior counsel assisting the inquiry Alastair Smith now calls Noel Hayes to the witness stand.
Hayes is taken through his background in construction, working his way up from being a bricklayer to an inspector with Workplace Health and Safety Queensland in 2004.
This occurred on the back of a “big push from the union” he was a member of at the time, the CFMEU, to get people with “construction-based” experience into safety roles.
He estimates that about 20 others started with him at the same time as a result of that push. Hayes then joined the Together union while at the safety regulator.
Hayes says he was then promoted in 2013 to the role of principal inspector, allocating jobs to others.
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‘No other choice’ but to remove former safety director over CFMEU matters, ex-inspector says
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Dargan is now being brought to the end of her statement, in which she says things have improved since the departure of former Workplace Health and Safety Queensland construction compliance and field services director Helen Burgess in late 2023.
Commissioner Stuart Wood asks about the discrepancy between the departure date given by Dargan and the July 2024 date given by senior counsel assisting the inquiry Patrick Wheelahan on Tuesday.
This is explained as a change in reporting lines, in which inspectors went back to reporting to their regional directors.
Wood asks why this change occurred and why Burgess was ultimately removed from her role.
Dargan replies: “I believe that at that stage, enough evidence had come to light that there was no other choice than to move her from that role.”
The inquiry now wraps up its evidence from Dargan.
‘We’ve got a Labor government, this is what it is’
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We’re back from lunch, and Dargan is asked by junior counsel assisting the inquiry Alastair Smith if she ever raised concerns about CFMEU influence with her superiors.
Dargan says she did – with her operations manager, Mark Houston. Asked what was raised, she said: “How the conduct was undermining inspectors’ professionalism and their discretion on site.
“I also was upset by the fact that inspectors were being removed from sites if they didn’t agree with the CFMEU … and inspectors abandoning actual risk, and construction sites we should be attending.”
Dargan says Houston’s response “was, basically, we’ve got a Labor government, this is what it is. Either like it or leave”.
She is then asked about a period during which inspectors, through their Together union, were refusing to write notices “because we wanted something done”.
Safety office’s CFMEU focus affected inspector’s mental health
By Matt Dennien
Workplace Health and Safety Queensland operations manager Deborah Dargan says the cumulative effect of these matters affected her mental health.
However, “it wasn’t even so much dealing with, like, the CFMEU and the arguments and the aggression, personally, for me, it was more what happened afterwards. So it was dealing with our internal people that stressed me out more”.
Asked if there were particular individuals who stressed her out, she said: “I found it really hard working with Mr [Mark] Houston.“
This culminated in an internal investigation by Houston into Dargan’s actions during an incident on a CFMEU site.
Dargan said she ended up taking three months off work, during which she saw her GP and a psychologist.
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Team lost central Brisbane role after being more likely to ‘stand their ground’: ex-inspector
By Matt Dennien
Dargan is asked if she ever gave in to pressure from CFMEU officials to issue notices she did not think were valid, to which she says she did not.
Pressed on others who did, Dargan says she was lucky in her North Brisbane region to have a supportive team of inspectors around her.
Her statement notes this team, which was “more likely to stand their ground”, eventually had the Brisbane central business district taken out of its responsibilities as a result.
On the Gold Coast and in Mount Gravatt, however, others were working under operations manager Chris Mutton who “followed what was said by the director”.
Safety jobs appeared to target firms ‘out of favour’ with union, inquiry hears
By Matt Dennien
Workplace Health and Safety Queensland operations manager Deborah Dargan is asked by Wood what the commission might find if it sought documents from her office about these types of CFMEU-related jobs.
Dargan says such records would exist, and that she believed they would show “the targeting of certain … principal contractors. And you’d see that there was some … interest other than safety that it was in relation to”.
Wood asks if there were specific features which made these jobs the object of CFMEU interest. Dargan replies that it was “their lack of an enterprise bargaining agreement with the CFMEU and their employment of certain subcontractors that weren’t favoured by the CFMEU”.
“So they would be going to site to for the particular purpose of finding these people doing wrong, disrupting the work of the principal contractor until it didn’t become tenable for them to keep them on site any more, it was easier to have them removed,” Dargan says.
She says she believed the CFMEU would have a preferred provider, or a preferred person “they’d want to get into that company”.
“I didn’t keep a record of it. I just noticed again that the same names kept coming up on different requests for assistance,” she says, recalling an organisation with a name along the lines Queensland Steel Fixing being targeted, along with major contractor BMD.
‘I didn’t have the power like a normal construction site’: former inspector
By Matt Dennien
Dargan is being taken through her witness statement. She says despite the need for reasonable suspicion of a breach of law to exercise right of entry onto a worksite, CFMEU complaints were often vague and lacking in detail.
Workplace Health and Safety inspectors were directed to immediately attend such sites by former construction compliance and field services director Helen Burgess and would then be required to “walk” them with the union, Dargan says.
Union officials would then point out issues on sites not the subject of the right of entry notices “looking for hazards, to get us to write notices”.
“So you walked the entire site and then sat down in the office afterwards with the union and representatives of the principal contractor and discussed what was going to be done,” Dargan says.
“I felt as though my role as an inspector was being demeaned, to a certain extent, because I felt I was being led around these sites and being told what to do, rather than be treated like a professional and being able to manage the process myself.”
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Inquiry launches day in legal weeds over ‘anxious’ witness
By Matt Dennien
Things have kicked off for the morning now, with some disagreement between counsel for the state of Queensland, David de Jersey KC, and Commissioner Stuart Wood AM KC.
This has picked up on a point raised yesterday about one of the witnesses summoned before the inquiry to give evidence this week, former Workplace Health and Safety principal inspector David Cappelletti.
Cappelletti has given a sworn statement to the inquiry, and was revealed this morning after the withdrawal of a redaction to have been one of the signatories of a submission to the corruption watchdog about his workplace and former minister Grace Grace in 2022.
But Cappelletti had written to the Crown Solicitor about being “concerned and anxious” to give evidence, Wood tells the inquiry, saying: “I don’t think in my current mental state I can give evidence to any commission hearings due to my current levels of severe anxiety.”
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