CFMEU inquiry as it happened: Third day of workplace health and safety inspectors’ evidence at probe into union misconduct

Only manage to dip in and out of the stream, or this blog, over the last three days? Here’s a bit of a brief rundown of the key evidence.

Tuesday: Senior inquiry staff lay out the plan for the week: diving into what is described as a case study of a form of “institutional corruption” of Workplace Health and Safety Queensland by the CFMEU under Labor’s former industrial relations minister Grace Grace. We then start to hear evidence of this from operations manager, and former principal inspector, Deborah Dargan.

Wednesday: Dargan goes into detail about her experience of CFMEU influence over the office, which she described as “forming an alliance … to follow their agenda”, particularly driven by former construction compliance and field services director Helen Burgess. Dargan says any investigation of reports inspectors were required to lodge would show a targeting of companies out of favour with the union.

Thursday: Retired inspector Noel Hayes continues evidence he began on Wednesday, detailing incidents where he was pressured, sometimes to the point of compliance, by senior figures including Burgess to use his powers to aid the CFMEU’s agenda despite not believing there was a lawful basis for it. This is reiterated, again, by brief evidence by another former inspector, Paul Watts.

The inquiry will return at 10am on Tuesday for the third of its 10 scheduled three-day hearing blocks slated to run until mid-June. Senior inquiry staff have indicated the focus of next week’s evidence will turn to the Cross River Rail project.

A witness list for the next hearing is yet to be released.

The inquiry now calls another former principal inspector at Workplace Health and Safety Queensland, Paul Watts.

Watts says he came into the office in a similar way to Hayes: after a background in construction and other work as part of a push to hire inspectors with hands-on experience.

Senior counsel assisting the inquiry Patrick Wheelahan takes Watts through some elements of his statement, in a much briefer fashion than the earlier two witnesses with the inquiry’s 3.30pm slated sign-off for the day.

These are of a similar nature to that of Hayes and Dargan before him: examples of directions to write notices against companies or major contractors seemingly being targeted by the CFMEU, even when inspectors did not consider there to be valid lawful reasons.

Turning back to Hayes in the witness box, Smith asks him about the complaint he and 12 other then-current and former inspectors lodged with the Crime and Corruption Commission in 2022.

Hayes says he was not the author of the document, but did sign it as it was similar to the email he wrote to his former deputy director-general before his retirement in 2021.

“A lot of the inspectors got together and wanted to push for this. And the author of the letter wrote that, wrote it, for us on our behalf,” Hayes says.

He ultimately lodged the complaint on behalf of the group, as he believed he was in a better position to do it given his retirement and “it was something I wanted to do”.

Commissioner Stuart Wood is asking junior counsel assisting the inquiry Alastair Smith about the amount of “union interaction reports” – required by the safety inspectors to complete for jobs – after about 2018 that the inquiry has obtained.

Smith says about 80, fitting a certain criteria, have been provided by Workplace Health and Safety Queensland under notices to produce documents, and a broader notice could be issued to obtain more.

Wood says there are two reasons for this. The first, to complete a high-level “macro-analysis of all the documents to identify the pattern” or agenda of targeting certain companies, suggested by operations manager Deborah Dargan in her Wednesday evidence.

The other element was using the documents to get more contemporary detail on matters raised by Dargan and retired principal inspector Noel Hayes across this week.

The inquiry is back from lunch, but will start off picking back up on some of the technical issues that took up 45 minutes of this morning’s session.

We’ll be keeping an eye and ear on things for anything of more significance worth laying out here, but otherwise might allow our blogging fingers a bit more of a break.

Six months later, in March 2019, Hayes and inspector colleague David Cappelletti were back on the same Constructions Pty Ltd West End site for a CFMEU complaint about a tower crane operated by Falcon Cranes.

The issue was a condition attached to the 10-year engineer inspection certificate issued in 2012 requiring a review of maintenance in 2017, which Hayes says the issuing engineer told him he should not have placed on it.

Burgess then pressed for an interview of the crane owner and a prohibition notice to be written by Hayes and Cappelletti. Hayes refused to write the notice, but the pair carried out the interview, in which no issues were raised.

On this day, CFMEU official Blake Hynes appeared on site, and there was disagreement about whether he needed to sign in, Hayes’ written statement says.

Hayes says he still did not consider the situation required a prohibition notice to be written as there was no “imminent or immediate risk”.

Hayes recounts another matter on a construction site at 33 Browning Street, West End.

The project had only recently begun, and there was no shaded area for the five or so workers on site.

Hayes recommended the builder install a shaded structure for workers’ breaks, which he says had been done by the next time he attended.

Some time later, he says Burgess called him to say the CFMEU had complained he had not written a notice requiring “full amenities”.

This would have meant the builder needed to install site sheds, refrigeration, food-heating and more – though it was only required if more than 15 workers were on site.

Junior counsel assisting the inquiry Alastair Smith is takes Hayes through a specific case in his statement where he and another inspector were called out to a job at Calamvale.

It was June 14, 2018, and the site was at the Gateway abutment to Compton Road. The call was to resolve a dispute between contractor CPB and CFMEU officials over whether they had a right to enter.

A section of the Work Health Safety Act would have allowed one of those officials, Jade Ingham, to attend and resolve an issue – but not conduct a site inspection. Another, Blake Hynes, and a number of others were also trying to enter.

On the way to the job, Hayes says he was called by former construction compliance and field services director Helen Burgess at least two times. During one, she told him: “Whatever you do, don’t get them arrested”.

Noel Hayes is asked about some of his evidence yesterday regarding directions from superiors to write what he deemed to be “unlawful” stop-work notices on sites in response to CFMEU complaints.

He says he used to raise those concerns with those who asked him, including former construction compliance and field services director Helen Burgess.

“That conversation, it happened a lot of the time, a lot of the time,” Hayes says of the demands to write the notices despite lacking what he considered valid reasons under the law to do so.

“They were fairly relentless with it until you actually wrote the notice.”

Retired Workplace Health and Safety Queensland principal inspector Noel Hayes is walked through his witness statement again.

Junior counsel assisting the inquiry Alastair Smith takes Hayes to the “cry for help” email he wrote to Craig Allen, then-deputy director-general of the Office of Industrial Relation.

In particular, a line in which Hayes wrote: “I have been accused by builders of working directly for this stakeholder”. The stakeholder being the CFMEU.

We used to have a fairly good rapport with the builders. And things changed after ’18.”

“We used to have a fairly good rapport, or mostly inspectors have a fairly good rapport with the builders … we used to try and work with them,” Hayes says.