Abolition of the Australian Building and Construction Commission could cost WA $1b

The abolition of the building industry watchdog could cost the State nearly $1 billion, claims the Master Builders Association.

MBA executive director John Gelavis said EY modelling showed publicly funded health, defence and transport infrastructure projects could blow out from $9.64b to $10.5b if the Australian Building and Construction Commission was abolished.

The EY modelling was used in three case studies — the Morley-Ellenbrook Railway Line Extension, HMAS Stirling and Henderson and the Joondalup Health Campus upgrade — to support its claim of cost blowouts.

“Tackling the extreme militancy found only in construction unions has also received long standing bipartisan support,” Mr Gelavis said.

“These measures were not focused on discouraging the flying of construction union flags on construction sites but responded to the overwhelming evidence that construction unions use unlawful industrial tactics to bully, intimidate and coerce people working in the construction industry to sign up to union deals.”

Head of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, Mick Buchan, said the union would not run amok, but confirmed it will start bargaining for previously banned features from early next year.

Mr Buchan said the union would seek to reinstate features such a minimum quotas for apprentices on projects when it begins bargaining on new agreements next year.

The union says the building code — wound back from today — has allowed an environment in which there is a race to the bottom as companies sought to underprice each other.

In an expletive-laden rant, Mr Buchan reignited the language of the sleeping class war, heightening concerns of a discordant industrial relations environment.

Mr Buchan said there “always was, always will be” a class war, in which building workers were pitted against big business and the corporate world.

A written statement from the CFMEU said the ABCC was a “taxpayer-funded legal hit squad” set up to prosecute unions and workers who were “a threat to any employer’s ability to dominate workers and dictate wages and conditions”.

“The unscrupulous have been allowed to operate under this pseudo-regulatory government protection racket to gouge profit out of the rightful wages, worker and public safety, build quality, and working conditions on their projects and use that money to prop up their own profit margins or drop their prices to below the true cost of production,” said the statement.

“All it’s done is give an unnatural and unfair economic advantage to the bad operators and punish companies who are doing the right thing. It’s been an unqualified disaster.

“And the result has been a string of major building companies going under during what is supposedly a construction boom because they simply couldn’t compete on price against the scabs and bottom feeders ripping everyone off.”

The changes appear to have lifted the lid on a body that has caused a great deal of anger, with Mr Buchan calling the ABCC “a sh.t stain on the underpants of our industry and an afront to decency and democracy in our country”. “F..kthe ABCC,” he said.