State Labor Party received donations from CFMEU affiliated labour hire companies

0:00An ex-guest was the man who came up with the figure of somewhere between $15 and $30 billion. Siphon off by the CFMU from Victoria's Big Build, some of which was allegedly handed to organised crime. He is Director of the Centre for Public Integrity, Jeffrey Watson, SC, good morning. Good morning Tom. Well, you know, we've spoken about this a lot this year and congratulations to you and your work. But today it's been revealed that, you know, Labor High Company is associated or affiliated with the CFMU donated, have donated money to Labor politicians and the Labor Party here in Victoria and being Carol, the new premier has said he will not hand that money back. I mean, to me, you know, you get a CFMU Labor High Company's donate money to a group of politicians and then those politicians turn a blind eye to corruption. I mean, to me that just seems very wrong. Your thoughts? What about the message from your listener, Angela? Angela, I'm with you. What's happening is that

1:04where this is corruption and where this seems to be nothing happening to stop it or stem it. Everybody in the community loses trust. I mean, it's just a really awful and serious feeling. Yeah, you want to talk about particular donations that's a slightly different issue, but I send my heart out to Angela. There's a lot of people who feel like you and I do Angela. Yeah, I mean, I don't know for certain that, you know, any of the individual politicians who receive this money were given a secret message. You know, don't talk about corruption on the big bill. But the point is, it looks bad. I mean, it's like we don't allow in here in the city of Melbourne for Councillors to receive money from property developers because we know that Councillors might favor those developments and that would be corrupt. So we sort of don't allow that, but we seem to put up with it at a state and federal level. Well, just to create the issues here, the immediate thing is these donations you're talking about came from contractors. Now, put aside the union issue because the connection of the Labor Party

2:08and trade unions is not something new. In fact, the trade unions came first, the Labor Party came second. Yeah, but let's get into contractors. I'd like to ask a broader question. Maybe a bit deeper and darker. What on earth are people who can benefit from government contractors doing donating to political parties of power who can allocate the contracts? Yeah. That's just a bad idea generally and that's got to be where it stopped. Well, that's true. And again, the new premier who I've interviewed maybe three times now said, you know, he wants to put a stop to this bad behavior, but he won't hand back that money. I mean, the money just don't know two or three years ago. Now, so maybe it's all been spent, but it just is a very bad look. And even the Prime Minister, you know, there's this six million dollar donation to the Marricville Golf Club, which sits in his electorate. And on the night of the 2022 election or the day of it, you know, the Golf Club put on social media vote, elbow vote, labor. I mean, I don't know if that's corruption, but it just doesn't

3:09look good, does it? Well, there's a couple of things in that. First of all, it is the style of corruption, which, you know, in the trade, we call it great corruption because it's on brown paper bag stuff. It's a very different form of it. It's very subtle. It can influence people without them even realizing they're being influenced. But could I just go back? I look, you know, I've been pretty tough on the Labor Party in Victoria over a period of time, Tom, but I tend to wonder whether there's any advantage in making the Labor Party pay that money back to him. Would they pay it? Would they pay it back to the bad guys? The point is that I would rather see this address at a more fundamental root and branch level by getting rid of the idea that contractors can be funding or paying donating to political parties. On the other easy thing, I can come to that separately. I know a bit about that. Well, this is the thing and then there's even deeper question. I mean, how should we fund political parties at all? I mean, on the left side of politics, they say, we don't want, you know, Gina Reinhart controlling politics in Australia, although frankly,

4:12I mean, I'd probably rather have Gina Reinhart doing it than the CFM EU if I had to make a choice. But they don't see on the left side of it. I wish to be placed in, Tom, but anyway, go on. But the left side of politics doesn't seem to see a problem with union donations, influencing things like the big building, thanks to your work, we know just how damaging that is being. Well, there's something else I do, which I regard personally as more important. I do a lot of work in the area of election funding. I do know a bit about that. The Center for Public Integrity actually deals with that all the time and we've done a lot of research on these matters. It's sort of simple as saying, for example, that they should be publicly funded to get the people out of it. Now you can't have that. You want to have people involved. You want to see some sort of donation limit, but it gets very tricky when you talk about a spending limit because that gives a huge advantage to the major parties, over independence and smaller parties. So the whole

5:14thing is a really complex area, but I can tell you right now that Cartel, as I call them, the Coalition and Labor, they've got no interest in fundamentally reforming the election funding system because at the moment it suits them right down to the ground. All right. Now, one final question, you might not have been aware of this, possibly of this gray corruption that you mentioned, a suburban golf club here in Melbourne, a Cheltenham Golf Club, and Cheltenham of course is where these suburban rail loop is going to start if you're going to get built. But they, the suburban rail loop itself donated $60,000 to the Cheltenham Golf Club for a golf simulator. Now we've already had one golfering up and say a simulator only costs 10 to 12,000 dollars, which begs the question what the other $48 to $50,000 is going to be used for. But again, the suburban rail loop donating money to a local golf club presumably to placate members in the area, is that another example of gray corruption? Well, I haven't heard of this before you raised

6:15a bit on continue right now. My eyebrows are up. It's, that's pretty strange. I don't know that I could call it gray corruption without knowing it knowing more, but I would say distinctly weird and requires some sort of public justification. Tom, it's public money. It needs to be advocated where it's needed and where it's most effective. It's not hard. You've got to justify every penny that you use. Now that's public money on a golf simulator. Yeah, exactly. All right, thank you me Tom Jeffery. What's an SC director of the Center for Public Integrity? And look, I can't guarantee that whether it's elbows donation to the Marickville Golf Club or the suburban rail donating money to the Cheltenham Golf Club or Labor politicians receiving money from CFMU affiliated Labor hire organisations. I can't put my hand on my heart and say this is definitely corruption, but I can look at it and say it stinks.