An unseasonably cool spring morning saw the leader of Australia's building industry reform, Mark Irving, KC, facing a death threat. The threat stems from a violent gangland figure, Joel Leavitt, once allied with the CFMEU, who has significant industrial influence on key projects. Leavitt is said to be behind the threats, aiming to destabilize Irving's reform efforts.
On an unseasonably cool spring morning last week, the man with one of the toughest jobs in Australia requested urgent help from a security firm led by an ex-special forces soldier.
With threats also made in NSW and Queensland, Irving felt obligated to urgently deploy small teams of highly trained former military and police officers outside CFMEU headquarters around the nation. By embedding gangland figures like Leavitt within a key sector of Australia’s economy via state government and other projects and empowering them with the union’s raw industrial strength, the CFMEU created a risk for itself if the bikies’ revenue streams were threatened.
In NSW, the CFMEU became a fiefdom promoting gangster-aligned companies with appalling worker safety records. Organisers who objected were warned to stay quiet. When workers employed by the Southern Project Alliance encountered Joel Leavitt in early 2023, they typically pondered an immediate and pressing question.
Myles wielded the CFMEU’s industrial power on the Victorian government’s signature Big Build projects via a small team of union organisers, delegates and health and safety representatives like Leavitt. Working alongside Leavitt as purported union health and safety representatives on the $530 million Southern Project Alliance Hurstridge rail line upgrade were two other hard men: ex-bikie and convicted killer Johnny “Two Guns” Walker and Charlie Farrugia.Walker was jailed for bashing a man to death before being welcomed into the union as one of Myles’ Big Build delegates.
“As soon as we discovered their bikie links, no one on the level crossing project wanted to challenge them,” a project insider said. “It was safer and easier to give in to them than fight their every demand.”According to sources who worked with him, Leavitt’s role extended well beyond his health and safety remit. He demanded major state government contractors pay disputed debts to union friendly subcontractors.
At the head of the list is Top Up Labour, which was repeatedly promoted by the CFMEU, but it includes other union-backed labour hire firms OCC and Women In Construction, which also have underworld links. The union argued this lucrative arrangement was endorsed in the industrial agreement covering the Big Build. At least two major contractors insisted it wasn’t, but they paid it anyway.
In one incident described by two insiders, a group of Comancheros arrived on a government site to face off with gang members aligned to Leavitt.To defuse tensions between rival gangs, the union ultimately removed a bikie as a delegate from the site, shifting him to the North East Link Big Build project.
Bandido sergeant at arms Marty Albert and ex-bikie Johnny Walker would lose their union posts after the Building Bad series broke in July. There is no suggestion Myles was doing anything but socialising, but the situation raises questions about influence at the union. Leavitt remains active in the building industry, but appears now to be focused less on union power and more on making money.
Zac Smith, who has also taken over the Victorian branch, has called on his organisers to cut off the bikies and begun a wind back in the promotion of labour hire firms
AUSTRALIA UNION DEATH THREAT BUILDING INDUSTRY CFMEU JOEL LEAVITT REFORM
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