Victoria Police Commissioner Shane Patton says the force is investigating – for at least the second time in about a year – whether allegations of misconduct in Victoria’s CFMEU construction branch amount to criminal offences.
Speaking on ABC Radio Melbourne this morning, Patton said Premier Jacinta Allan wrote to him midway through last year “raising what I would call anecdotal concerns about whether criminality was occurring within the Major Transport Infrastructure Authority”.
Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton alongside Premier Jacinta Allan.Credit: Simon Schluter
That authority is the body tasked with delivering Victoria’s $100 billion Big Build road and rail infrastructure program. On Saturday, this masthead’s investigation into the CFMEU revealed many bikies and criminals acting as union delegates were employed in these publicly funded projects.
On Tuesday, Patton said last year a “detailed assessment” of then-deputy premier Allan’s concerns was conducted, but no further action was taken “because there wasn’t deemed to be any threshold of criminality met”.
He said Allan wrote to him again on Sunday and referred this masthead’s investigation of the CFMEU to police.
“We are actively assessing that at the moment,” Patton said.
“There’s obviously some really inappropriate, thuggish behaviour. There’s potential threats. There’s potential influence in contracts. Whether that meets the criminal threshold, though, is a different matter.”
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Patton said Victoria Police’s crime command could now spend a month or two investigating before determining whether any specific incidents raised in this masthead’s report reached a criminal threshold requiring action. He said the force would work with Victoria’s anti-corruption watchdog to figure out if they were better suited to dealing with the allegations.
“But it’s not being brushed under the carpet, I can assure you of that,” Patton said.
The chief commissioner said he thought police had enough resources within its crime command to tackle the issue, but was open to creating a dedicated taskforce.
“If it turns out that it meets a criminal threshold and we need to put a team of detectives at it, we’ll do that,” Patton said.
“But we’ll just wait and see.”
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