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The Commission of Inquiry into the CFMEU has heard a union “hit squad” flew from Brisbane to Cairns to intimidate workplace health and safety officers, who also faced internal pressure from Brisbane-based Workplace Health and Safety Queensland officials to do the union’s bidding.
The commission moved to the Far North Queensland city on Thursday to hear evidence from two local WHSQ officials, who outlined their dealings with the CFMEU and their Brisbane-based superiors.
Karim De Ridder, WHSQ’s acting team leader in the Cairns asbestos and demolition compliance unit, told the inquiry he found the conduct of CFMEU delegates to be “aggressive and angry” – something he assumed was a theatrical “power thing” for the benefit of union members on site.
“I don’t know if they get trained in that manner when they, or if they, have some training as a delegate or whatever they do down south, but it just seemed to be very similar,” he said.
De Ridder, who said he came from a strongly pro-union household, could not recall any “civil” encounters with CFMEU officials on worksites.
As a former bouncer who is 1.93 metres (six foot, three inches) tall and weighed about 115 kilograms, De Ridder said he was not easily intimidated. But the CFMEU’s pattern of behaviour in dealing with him and his WHQS colleagues gradually wore him down.
“The thing that always stood out to me is the CFMEU used to push the mental health side of things over the years, but they didn’t care about our mental health,” he said.
“They didn’t care about the PCBUs [person conducting a business or undertaking]. It was just, it flew in the face of what they really were standing for.”
De Ridder said he also felt pressure from head office to do the union’s bidding on sites in Cairns, including a former Sizzler’s site on Mulgrave Road.
Local CFMEU organiser Roland Cummins was there, De Ridder said, as was Michael Ravbar, although he did not introduce himself.
Among the CFMEU demands was an on-site first-aid room. De Ridder said it was not required as there were only 30 workers on site and the threshold was 100.
The union delegates left in a “bit of a rage”, De Ridder said, but not before calling the WHSQ officers “f---ing dogs” on their way out.
The delegates complained to Peter Twigg, a Brisbane-based WHSQ director, who subsequently phoned De Ridder.
During that call, De Ridder said he was pressured to issue a notice to get a first-aid room installed at the site – something he refused to do.
“I thought I was probably going to get management disciplinary action based on how adamant he was for me to issue that notice on that day,” he said.
In what he described as a “heated” phone call, De Ridder said he told Twigg he could issue the notice himself.
De Ridder did agree to issue a notice concerning a lack of emergency procedure drills on the site.
Counsel assisting the inquiry, Dimitri Ternovski, noted De Ridder logged that notice as being issued under Twigg’s direction.
“I wanted to record that because, to me, it was a movement away from my ethics,” De Ridder replied.
De Ridder said he was frustrated by the amount of attention the Cairns office was being directed to give to CFMEU complaints at the expense of other worksite issues elsewhere in the region.
“We had other work that was occurring of a high-risk nature,” he said.
“I had one alleged possible asbestos exposure by plant [equipment] running over asbestos on the ground at a local tip. There was a work-at-heights, and possibly working within an exclusion zone on a house.
“There was also a gas incident that I had to follow up on, but it was always a priority – obviously driven by the south-east corner – to go and deal with the CFMEU issues, regardless of the severity.
“And that was pulling us away from other workplaces.”
The second witness was Shannon Farrington, a former WHSQ operations manager for the Cairns and Far North Queensland region.
Farrington said CFMEU delegates bypassed normal channels when demanding action at worksites, instead phoning senior public servants at WHSQ – calls Farrington herself refused to answer.
Farrington said there was a marked change when Helen Burgess, who the inquiry has previously heard was in a close personal relationship with former CFMEU state president Royce Kupsch, became director of construction compliance and field services in Brisbane.
“There was definitely more of an urgency, and certainly a lot more of what I felt was harassment from upper management to send people quickly and urgently [to CFMEU sites] and to remove people from other jobs, no matter what they were doing,” she said.
Farrington said Burgess’s demands for WHSQ notices, usually made in abrupt and “quite rude” phone calls, increased during CFMEU action – despite Burgess having no authority over WHSQ inspectors north of Gladstone.
“If there was a campaign going on, as in we knew that a particular construction site was undergoing an enterprise bargaining agreement, we would be tied up for possibly two months, or the length of the project, or the length of the enterprise bargaining agreement,” she said.
Farrington said, after a few years, the CFMEU’s complaints got to a “level of ridiculous”.
“It was no longer about serious and imminent risk – it was about toilets and sanitary bins in toilets for female employees,” she said.
“That would be named in CISr [the Office of Industrial Relations’ central case management system] as a serious and imminent risk, and I would be directed to send inspectors right away.”
The inquiry continues.
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