Well done to Angus Thompson at Nine newspapers who produced a little ripper of a yarn today on an internal staff survey of the discredited, and soon to be disbanded, Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC). Thompson reported that the survey revealed ABCC staff complaining of “contagious negative morale”, a “culture typified by active mistrust”, and having to engage in harassment of industry merely to generate statistics.
What was the ABCC’s reaction when Thompson sought a response? They sooled the lawyers onto him, threatening to sue Thompson if he published any material from the survey, and demanding he delete it and report back that he’d done so.
No wonder the ABCC was seething about Thompson’s great get — it exposed a body that was supposed to police construction industry workplace culture as having its own rotten culture. And maybe we now have a reason why instead of improving productivity in the building industry since its reestablishment, the ABCC instead sent productivity into decline: its harassment of the industry in the name of box-ticking and stats-generation wasted time and resources.
Today’s the day the ABCC’s function gets shifted to the Fair Work Commission. Good riddance.
Yes. Good riddance. I hope we never see a repeat of this discredited and frankly stupid approach to industrial relations. Only the Liberals could have come up with this sort of bastardry and the abolishment of the ABCC should be a lesson to them.
But of course, it won’t be.
The current beast was their second iteration. If they get back in power, it will return from the dead yet again.
It should be no surprise to anyone that a Gestapo-type organisation has a Gestapo-type culture.
A union busting organisation funded by long suffering taxpayers..good riddance you fleas..
The ABCC was never needed. They should have just de-registered the CFMEU instead, just as the old dodgy Painters & Dockers was.
Bad unions are never deregistered, only the good ones…