Gangsters, corruption and cover-ups: What Victoria's building royal commission could expose
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What did Victoria's new premier announce about a royal commission into the building industry?
My first action as Premier will be to call a Royal Commission into the construction sector.
Victoria's new Premier, Ben Carroll, has announced a Royal Commission into the state's building industry.
We will also immediately establish a special prosecutor that will work in parallel with the Royal Commission.
It follows years of reporting exposing alleged corruption, organised crime links and misconduct within the sector, and years of resistance from the government and former Premier to Cinderella. The Commission now has the potential to examine what happened and who knew about it, forcing powerful figures in politics, business, unions and the underworld to answer questions under oath and in public. I'm Daniel James and you're listening to 7am. Today, investigative reporter for The Age, Nick McKenzie, on what the Royal Commission must uncover and the big names who could be called to testify. It's Friday, July 31. Nick, good to see you again. Over many years of painstaking investigative journalism, you've exposed big bill corruption.
Throughout it all, you've maintained the pressure for a royal commission, which Jacinda Allen famously or infamously resisted. How are you feeling this week? Do you feel like you're somehow responsible for Allen's demise, given it's widely accepted that this issue was a big part of what resulted in her losing the leadership?
I think it's unquestionable that journalism played a massive part in exposing, not just to the public, but to the body politic, what was going on on these government projects and Labor government projects.
Why did years of reporting push for a royal commission into big build corruption?
And there was so much wrongdoing and so much reporting of that wrongdoing, it was inescapable. And the Premier, or the former Premier now, Jacinta Allen, quite famously or infamously said she'd tough it out.
Now, will you call the Royal Commission? Will you hunt down the money that taxpayers may have lost to organised crime? As I said earlier on that claim, the administrator says that claim is not well tested. Do you plan to test it?
But story after story after story, it just kept building up. And it got to the point where her failure to act appropriately in the early days meant it really was inevitable that there had to be a Royal Commission. I mean, the time had passed for the other responses. So entrenched was her refusal to call a proper inquiry. And so significant was the amount of evidence suggesting that the wrongdoing was systemic and entrenched.
Perhaps the very first utterance from the new Victorian Premier, Ben Carroll, was the announcement of overall commission into the big bill corruption. What do we know so far about any of the details around that?
Well, nothing really, except that the new premier has promised this whole commission will look under every rock that needs to be looked under. So look at the politicians, look at the union officials, look at the gangsters, look at the companies. There's lots of players here. Look at the regulatory and policing agencies, which previously failed to do a good job or the job required. But, I mean, that's just rhetoric at the moment. We want to see what the terms of reference are when they're released. We need to see who the Royal Commissioner or commissioners are or is. They need to be independent and needs to be appropriately empowered. So they have the power to tap bones, have the power to call coercive hearings where gangland figures like Mikado have to come and answer questions.
They need to be appropriately resourced. The commission needs to have teams of investigators, analysts, et cetera, doing the digging. There's no point having a Royal Commission commission because it doesn't have the capacity to properly investigate. So the devil will be in the detail, excuse the cliche, and we're yet to find out what that detail looks like.
There's so much to this story which you've untangled over many years. What are the main issues you think need to be covered and questions that need to be answered by a Royal Commission?
Well, to boil it right down, basically what happened was the Labor government and the Premier, Jacinta Allen, bestowed just immense power on a very lawless entity in the form of the Victorian branch of the CFMEU, the construction union.
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