Victoria’s Attorney General’s integrity expert, Geoffrey Watson SC, has launched an extraordinary attack on his claims of corruption at the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFEMU) costing taxpayers at least $15bn.
The figure is among edited chapters from Watson’s Rotting from the Top report commissioned by CFMEU administrator Mark Irving KC and tendered during a Queensland inquiry into the union last week.
Watson, director of the Center for Public Integrity and a former lawyer assisting the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, described it as a “very rough” assessment based on the views of “highly qualified stakeholders”.
Victoria’s Big Build public infrastructure program is worth about $100 billion, and industry sources told Watson the costs associated with the CFMEU’s conduct were between 10% and 30%, he settled on an estimate of 15%, describing it as “not unreasonable” and “feasible”.
“The maths from there is simple – the CFMEU leadership has cost Victorian taxpayers something like $15bn,” the revised chapter reads.
“There’s another point to this — as you can see, most of the $15 billion went directly into the hands of criminals and organized crime gangs.”
In another redacted chapter, Watson alleges that the Victorian government “knew and had a duty to know” that corrupt union and underworld figures had infiltrated Big Build, but chose “to do nothing about it”.
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Chapters were removed from Irving’s final report “because they were not well founded or properly tested,” his spokesman said.
Kilkenny said it was “reckless for anyone to make unsubstantiated claims about our Big Build costing taxpayers $15 billion”.
“As lawyers, our professional credibility depends on evidence. That’s who we go to. We make a clear distinction between allegation and proof, and the rule of law rests on it,” she said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.
“The line between fact and allegation is now blurred. Mark Irving sees it, lawyers see it and we see it.”
Kilkenny’s intervention followed comments by the state’s police minister, Anthony Corbyns, outside Parliament on Wednesday morning in which he accused Watson of “giving a lot of wild ramblings… but not a lot of evidence”.
The Carbines said if there was evidence to “give to Victoria Police” Watson would not be “for the title”.
Watson hit back at Kilkenny and Corbyn’s comments, saying he had “deliberately refrained from speaking publicly” about the report but he was obliged to respond that the ministers’ intervention was “grossly inappropriate”.
“They shouldn’t say that. It crosses a line,” Watson told Guardian Australia.
“I don’t know why they are attacking me personally without addressing the real issues in Victoria. Neither of them have called me to talk to me about it.”
The shadow attorney general, James Newbury, said the ministers were “unfit for their jobs and deserve to be sacked”.
“The Victorian government is so rotten that the lawyer and police minister attacked an anti-corruption expert who exposed the worst corruption our state has ever seen,” Newbury said.
“No wonder corruption is thriving in Victoria.”
