They call it Get Square Time.
It’s when the CFMEU introduces its own “GST”, builders say, and takes on employers with a renewed freedom and power.
That’s the refrain the industry hears from the CFMEU when a new Labor government abolishes the building industry watchdog, the Australian Building and Construction Commission, as has happened multiple times over the past three decades.
This week, as parliament resumed, the Albanese government made it one of its priorities to gut the powers of the watchdog under the federal building code, which regulates behaviour on projects and bans restrictive agreement content.
The move has the industry in a state of suspense about how the CFMEU will respond on building sites. For Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who made an enemy of CFMEU Victorian secretary John Setka when he called for his expulsion from the party following domestic violence allegations, an increasingly belligerent CFMEU could become a political liability.
Master Builders NSW executive director Brian Seidler says that, since the scrapping of the code, some builders were reporting a change in attitude from CFMEU organisers and delegates, who they said were telling employers “this is our time now”.
“They’re already letting contractors know ‘we’re back’,” he says. “And there’s certainly growing agitation about which subcontractors they’re using [that] have CFMEU agreements. That’s always been there, but there are more signs that Labor’s back and ‘we’re going to have a free rein’.”
