source : the age
Workplace Health and Safety Queensland operations manager Deborah Dargan says the cumulative effect of these matters affected her mental health.
However, “it wasn’t even so much dealing with, like, the CFMEU and the arguments and the aggression, personally, for me, it was more what happened afterwards. So it was dealing with our internal people that stressed me out more”.
Asked if there were particular individuals who stressed her out, she said: “I found it really hard working with Mr [Mark] Houston.“
This culminated in an internal investigation by Houston into Dargan’s actions during an incident on a CFMEU site.
Dargan said she ended up taking three months off work, during which she saw her GP and a psychologist.
The latter told her she had anxiety and depression due to a “moral injury” common in nurses and police when forced to do something you feel is wrong or against what you believe “day after day”.
“It grinds you down,” Dargan said.
She is then asked a series of questions drilling into this more, to which she gives the following responses.
“I believe we were, we were forming an alliance, basically with the CFMEU to follow their agenda.
“What we were doing – the principal contractors we were targeting – it just wasn’t right, it wasn’t proper.
“I believe they weren’t interested in the health and safety of their workers. They were interested in other agendas they had going on that I wasn’t privy to.
“I obviously didn’t have a direct line to the CFMEU, but it was, as I spoke of earlier, things to do with enterprise bargaining agreements, preferred contractors, that type of thing.
“I believe it was following the CFMEU around and being perceived as under their thumb, doing their work. I felt that people felt I didn’t have any personal integrity for doing that. That was probably the main thing with the CFMEU, and also the subsequent treatment at the workplace for CFMEU-related jobs and being investigated and being questioned for those types of things that never happen out on other jobs.“
The inquiry has now taken a lunch break and will be back at 2pm.
Dargan is asked if she ever gave in to pressure from CFMEU officials to issue notices she did not think were valid, to which she says she did not.
Pressed on others who did, Dargan says she was lucky in her North Brisbane region to have a supportive team of inspectors around her.
Her statement notes this team, which was “more likely to stand their ground”, eventually had the Brisbane central business district taken out of its responsibilities as a result.
On the Gold Coast and in Mount Gravatt, however, others were working under operations manager Chris Mutton who “followed what was said by the director”.
Dargan names these experienced inspectors as Travis Dungey, John Azcune, Chris O’Donnell and Anzac Te Oka.
“Over that period of time, there were some people that went through that realisation curve: ‘This is my job. This is what I do. Hang on a minute. Should I really be doing this?’ ”
Asked what happened if people refused to issue such notices, Dargan says a CFMEU official “would walk away, make a phone call, and then we would get a phone call from our manager”, usually within the space of 30 minutes.
“It would be along the lines of, ‘why, what’s going on, why don’t you write in that notice’,” Dargan says. “That was primarily [operations manager] Mark Houston.”
Workplace Health and Safety Queensland operations manager Deborah Dargan is asked by Wood what the commission might find if it sought documents from her office about these types of CFMEU-related jobs.
Dargan says such records would exist, and that she believed they would show “the targeting of certain … principal contractors. And you’d see that there was some … interest other than safety that it was in relation to”.
Wood asks if there were specific features which made these jobs the object of CFMEU interest. Dargan replies that it was “their lack of an enterprise bargaining agreement with the CFMEU and their employment of certain subcontractors that weren’t favoured by the CFMEU”.
“So they would be going to site to for the particular purpose of finding these people doing wrong, disrupting the work of the principal contractor until it didn’t become tenable for them to keep them on site any more, it was easier to have them removed,” Dargan says.
She says she believed the CFMEU would have a preferred provider, or a preferred person “they’d want to get into that company”.
“I didn’t keep a record of it. I just noticed again that the same names kept coming up on different requests for assistance,” she says, recalling an organisation with a name along the lines Queensland Steel Fixing being targeted, along with major contractor BMD.
Dargan is being taken through her witness statement. She says despite the need for reasonable suspicion of a breach of law to exercise right of entry onto a worksite, CFMEU complaints were often vague and lacking in detail.
Workplace Health and Safety inspectors were directed to immediately attend such sites by former construction compliance and field services director Helen Burgess and would then be required to “walk” them with the union, Dargan says.
Union officials would then point out issues on sites not the subject of the right of entry notices “looking for hazards, to get us to write notices”.
“So you walked the entire site and then sat down in the office afterwards with the union and representatives of the principal contractor and discussed what was going to be done,” Dargan says.
“I felt as though my role as an inspector was being demeaned, to a certain extent, because I felt I was being led around these sites and being told what to do, rather than be treated like a professional and being able to manage the process myself.”
On another element of the inspectors work, Commissioner Stuart Wood calls Dargan back to some previous evidence where she referred to their role as akin to a referee.
“You’re there to give the yellow card or the red card. Players might want to come and argue with you when you’re giving out cards, but you wave them away and say, ‘this is my decision’. I don’t understand why this is happening,” Wood says.
Dargan says this was because she felt “I didn’t have the power like a normal construction site”.
“On a CFMEU job, you felt as though you had to convince them so they wouldn’t then turn around and report you up the chain and subject you to an investigation.” she says.
Things have kicked off for the morning now, with some disagreement between counsel for the state of Queensland, David de Jersey KC, and Commissioner Stuart Wood AM KC.
This has picked up on a point raised yesterday about one of the witnesses summoned before the inquiry to give evidence this week, former Workplace Health and Safety principal inspector David Cappelletti.
Cappelletti has given a sworn statement to the inquiry, and was revealed this morning after the withdrawal of a redaction to have been one of the signatories of a submission to the corruption watchdog about his workplace and former minister Grace Grace in 2022.
But Cappelletti had written to the Crown Solicitor about being “concerned and anxious” to give evidence, Wood tells the inquiry, saying: “I don’t think in my current mental state I can give evidence to any commission hearings due to my current levels of severe anxiety.”
De Jersey applied for Cappelletti to be excused on a temporary basis from giving evidence this week, on the basis of a letter from his GP.
Wood questions whether this series of events was appropriate, given the state had established the inquiry and should be assisting with its running, and suggested Cappelletti should have instead been told to seek independent legal representation.
De Jersey says that he would agree if Cappelletti had sought to justify his non-appearance based on something other than medical grounds, or was not an employee of the state.
“My respectful submission, [is] what was done was appropriate,” de Jersey says, noting his junior counsel colleague was set to speak with Cappelletti this morning – and the doctor this afternoon – to get the most up-to-date information.
Depending on the outcome of that, the doctor – who has also been given notices to provide documents to the inquiry – is set to be cross-examined tomorrow morning.
Having already heard from the CFMEU administration, union and industry figures, the commission of inquiry returned yesterday to kick off another three-day block, this time to ask questions of current and former Workplace Health and Safety Queensland staff.
In his opening remarks, senior counsel assisting, Patrick Wheelahan KC, said the questions related to a case study “that there was regulatory capture of the Workplace Health and Safety Queensland by the CFMEU during the period that Ms Grace Grace was the minister for industrial relations”.
“We use the term ‘regulatory capture’ in this case study to mean a form of institutional corruption,” he continued. This would add to three other instances of regulatory capture already detailed in part before the inquiry, or still being looked into, Wheelahan said.
Such matters included the development and implementation of the Best Practice Industry Conditions policies; a memorandum of understanding between police and the Office of Industrial Relations; and the Queensland Building and Construction Commission.
We heard of concerns raised with the corruption watchdog about the safety regulator and Grace, then began hearing evidence from the first of this week’s witnesses: Workplace Health and Safety Queensland operations manager Deborah Dargan.
Dargan told the inquiry yesterday that things began to shift in her office after the election of the Palaszczuk government in 2015, then again after Helen Burgess became construction compliance and field services director in 2018, with prosecution for right-of-entry breaches drying up and complaints from the CFMEU treated as higher priority.
Just jumping into the inquiry? Need a refresher on the ground covered so far? Here’s a bit of a recap of the powerful probe’s work to date.
The Crisafulli government launched the $19.7 million probe after reporting by this masthead and 60 Minutes into criminality, corruption and misconduct in the union and sector nationwide.
Due to provide a final report by July 31, the inquiry under Commissioner Stuart Wood has also faced questions of its own amid government attacks against the union and former Labor government.
Last week: Senior inquiry staff held an unusual media conference outside a Gold Coast traffic management company they said they would be looking into over its potential links to Melbourne underworld identity Mick Gatto. (The company says it wasn’t given a heads-up about the visit, and insists everything is above board.) Inquiry staff also said they had “uncovered more than we expected” when asked if they would need a time extension.
Last month: The inquiry held its first (of 10) three-day public hearing blocks for the year, with evidence from a senior civil construction industry figure and the CFMEU administrators former corruption-busting barrister. There was much focus on the latter’s recent Victorian-focused report, but also accusations that a former Labor minister directed his department to negotiate with the union.
Late last year: Across two weeks of hearings in November and December, the inquiry heard from government-appointed CFMEU administration figures about the former leadership’s use of violence to expand their “fiefdom” into civil construction. A second hearing block delved deeper into the why, how and who, driven by two union leaders on the receiving end, or in the middle of, the building union’s alleged efforts.
