Hadgkiss off
It’s hardly surprising that the scandal engulfing the CFMEU has led to a chorus of calls for the return of the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), the “tough cop on the beat” that gave us the 2016 double dissolution election and which Labor dismantled in February 2023.
As we’ve already pointed out, much of what was captured by Nine’s reporting on the union took place while that tough cop was still around. But that didn’t stop Sky News getting hold of former ABCC head Nigel Hadgkiss to point out that “Blind Freddie has known the depth of the problem within the building construction industry throughout Australia” and declare he has no confidence in the Albanese government’s ability to fix things. Hadgkiss has also shown up in the Australian Financial Review arguing the ABCC was a “highly successful regulator” and concluding “the rule of law must be restored on Australian construction sites”.
Given this admirable commitment to stamping out lawlessness, it’s interesting that these outlets didn’t note when or why Hadgkiss’ tenure at the ABCC came to an end.
As Crikey reported in September 2017, Hadgkiss resigned after admitting “to a major breach of the Fair Work Act“.
In an admission to the Federal Court, the ABCC admitted that its predecessor body the Fair Work Building Industry Inspectorate had for two years misrepresented the law in relation to the location of meetings between union representatives and workers.”
Worse, Hadgkiss had acted to prevent the inspectorate staff from correcting its misrepresentation throughout the period from 2014 to 2016 despite staff raising concerns about both the misrepresentation and the legal consequences of it.
Then again, employment minister at the time Michaelia Cash knew about this even before appointing Hadgkiss to the ABCC. So if the government didn’t care, why should journalists?
To Morrow, To Morrow, you’re always a day away
Perhaps it’s the distorting effect of the Trump years — the appointment of family members, the enmeshing of business and political interests, the use of foreign aid as an inducement to investigate political enemies — that certain fans of his can’t conceive of things working any other way. Case in point: The Daily Telegraph‘s national affairs editor and lord of the dance James Morrow couldn’t understand why Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential election race using personal letterhead rather than White House stationary.
We’re happy to explain — it’s because it’s a party political decision and not an act of his administration, a division that at one time was a really, really basic tenet of politics. Anyway, looking forward to reading Morrow’s analysis of US politics in the coming months.
Pump it up
There are subtle ways a skilled investigator can find clues of wrongdoing; say, if someone accidentally sends a photo of themselves robbing a house to all the work contacts on their victim’s phone, or hasn’t checked whether a live mic is attached to their lapel while muttering “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course”.
And so it is with Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) charging four people for allegedly running a “pump and dump” scheme on Telegram. A “pump and dump” scheme involves artificially inflating the price of cheaply acquired stocks before selling them off.
Australia’s corporate watchdog became suspicious when it intercepted Telegram channels with normal names like “ASX Pump and Dump Group”, which had 1,666 subscribers, and a second with the even more mysterious name of “ASX Pump and Dump Channel” (1,030 subscribers). We’ve long lamented the state of Australia’s regulators, and indeed the Australian Financial Review notes that ASIC is hoping to shake off its toothless tiger reputation with this and a few other cases. We shall watch with interest to see if it can make this one stick.
Taking out the trash
It’s always worth keeping a close eye on what a government does while your attention is drawn elsewhere. With the avalanche of takes and coverage loosed from the mountainside by the withdrawal of Joe Biden and the anointment of Kamala Harris, a Labor government that came to power promising to “end the climate wars” (which they have, in a way) and fix environmental laws probably couldn’t have picked a better time to approve more offshore gas exploration and 10 permits for thoroughly discredited carbon capture and storage schemes.
At the Nine papers, caught up with Harris, the CFMEU scandal and the looming Olympics, the news barely made a ripple. There’s a page 9 piece in today’s Australian Financial Review, sympathetically describing the move as “consistent with [the government’s] policy position that gas will be needed for several more decades to firm renewables during the energy transition, and enable manufacturing to continue”. Meanwhile, at the time of writing, a story about the approvals sits 27th on the ABC homepage.
