Death threats, a suicide attempt, a "CFMEU tax": the inquiry driving tradies to One Nation

Pauline Hanson's One Nation says its head office has spent this week fielding calls from tradies and construction workers who want to tear up their CFMEU membership and sign with the party instead. The timing isn't a coincidence. It lands as a Queensland inquiry hears day after day of sworn evidence that the union bullied and threatened its way across the state's building sites, terrorising employers, public servants and even a rival union, and that a Labor policy handed it the power to do it.

The CFMEU, the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union, is the militant union that runs Australia's building sites. It's been in forced administration since August 2024, after allegations of bikie infiltration, corruption and standover tactics serious enough that a Labor government stripped its own affiliate of the right to govern itself.

Grant Galvin says the CFMEU drove him to a breakdown and a suicide attempt

On Tuesday, Grant Galvin, who ran Master Builders Queensland from 2013 to 2022, gave evidence to the Commission of Inquiry into the CFMEU and Misconduct in the Construction Industry, before Commissioner Stuart Wood KC. Master Builders is the peak body for building employers. Galvin described a years-long campaign of intimidation he said was led by former CFMEU leader Michael Ravbar, one he didn't fully grasp until it had almost destroyed him.

He pointed first to an October 2017 protest outside the Master Builders headquarters in Brisbane, where union members turned on his staff.

"It was clear early on that these were aggressive people. I heard some disgraceful, sexist, swearing, derogatory comments ... of the sexual nature, particularly focused against the women within the building. Nobody should have to put up with those comments."

The breaking point came in February 2022, at a rally over the future of BUSSQ, a roughly $6 billion superannuation fund for building workers that the CFMEU part-owns and where it appoints half the directors. The regulator APRA had been urging smaller funds to merge, and a plan to fold BUSSQ into the larger CBUS fund, chaired by former Labor treasurer Wayne Swan, was on the table. The union was determined to keep BUSSQ independent, and it blamed the fund's employer-appointed directors for the push. When those directors walked out over the deadlock, the CFMEU turned its anger on Master Builders, where Galvin was chief executive.

Thousands of members descended on his workplace and riot police were deployed. Galvin told the inquiry protesters tried to force their way into the building and hoisted a coffin into a tree outside his office window, which he took as a death threat. He likened the slow toll to boiling a frog, the water heating until it's too late to jump out.

"You don't actually realise the impact until it happens. I'm lucky to be here today. I had a mental breakdown and attempted to commit suicide."

Galvin, who says he was targeted while serving on the board of the Building Unions Superannuation Scheme Queensland, resigned soon after. Even a meeting at the union's own headquarters, he said, ended with him returning to a car plastered in CFMEU "viper snake" stickers.

"It's vandalism, it's intimidation, it's bullying, and if it was at any other worksite the police would have been called."

If this story raises concerns for you, help is available at Lifeline on 13 11 14, the Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467, and Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636.

A rival union leader says the CFMEU threatened to kill her

The most chilling evidence didn't come from an employer at all. Stacey Schinnerl, the first woman to lead a branch of the Australian Workers Union in its near 140-year history, told the inquiry the CFMEU ran a campaign of intimidation against her, led by former CFMEU leaders Michael Ravbar and Jade Ingham, as their union tried to muscle into the AWU's traditional civil construction turf.

She said masked CFMEU members passed a message to her through an AWU organiser that if she "stuck her head up, it would get knocked off." She took it as a threat to her life. At a 2023 Labour Day march, she says a CFMEU member confronted her in front of her 13-year-old child and taunted her son that his mother sells out workers.

"I live in a perpetual heightened state of anxiety."

Schinnerl, a mother of two sets of twins, told the inquiry she instructed her own children to stop wearing AWU-branded clothing in public so they wouldn't be targeted. When she raised her fears with police, she said, they "generally showed little interest," and the union eventually stopped contacting them. This is a union leader, not an employer, describing what she says the CFMEU did to her.

The union frightened a senior public servant into silence

It wasn't only employers and rival unionists. Deanne Hawkswood, chief procurement officer at Queensland's Department of Transport and Main Roads, told the inquiry she sat in silence through a 2020 meeting with the union because she was too scared to speak, despite having "valid points that needed to be heard."

She described Ravbar and Ingham as "quite aggressive," swearing and, at one point, rolling water bottles across the table at the state's most senior transport officials. Ingham, she said, later warned he would "cause a lot of disruption" on a worksite.

"It became really clear to me that anyone who got on the wrong side of him would pay, and I didn't want that to be me."

The "CFMEU tax" Labor built into the price of your house

The reason a Brisbane inquiry matters to a family in the suburbs is a Labor policy called Best Practice Industry Conditions, or BPIC, brought in by the former Queensland Labor government in 2018 and known on site as the "CFMEU tax." It effectively forced contractors on big government projects to strike deals with the CFMEU, pay above-award wages, down tools in bad weather, and hand workers an extra 26 days off a year.

The inquiry has heard where that led. Costs on affected projects climbed by about 25 to 30%, productive days on some sites fell to as few as two a week, and Queensland's housing shortage got worse. Those aren't abstract numbers. They're baked into the price of every government-built home, road and hospital in the state, and in the end into what you pay.

One Nation says disillusioned tradies are now calling to quit

Against that backdrop, One Nation says workers are voting with their feet. In a post across its Facebook, Instagram and X accounts, the party said its "head office is receiving calls from disgruntled tradies and workers" who've decided to cancel their CFMEU memberships and sign up with One Nation.

The party hasn't released membership figures, and the wider union movement rejects any suggestion of a mass exodus. But for anyone following the evidence in Brisbane, the sentiment isn't hard to follow. The union that spent decades claiming to be the only thing standing between workers and their bosses is now the one some of those workers can't get away from fast enough.

One Nation is pitching itself as the party of the worker

One Nation's argument is that Labor can't discipline the CFMEU because Labor is funded by it. Party senator Tyron Whitten has called the relationship "market sabotage," arguing the union's grip on building sites drives up the cost of every home and every hospital while both sides look after each other. The party points to cases like the CFMEU trying to force a builder off a $320 million Queensland hospital job, and in Victoria it has pledged a Royal Commission into CFMEU Big Build contracts that Premier Jacinta Allan won't call herself.

Even the inquiry airing all this exists because the Crisafulli Liberal National government ordered it, after a damning report into union violence. The Labor administrations that presided over the CFMEU for a decade never did.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. One Nation has overtaken Labor in Queensland and is climbing in every state, and it's doing it by talking to the very people the CFMEU claims to represent. For a party the political class still likes to dismiss, fielding calls from tradies who want out of the union is the kind of problem it's happy to have.