THE Australian Building and Construction Commission has again demonstrated it is nothing more than a very expensive political arm of the Liberal Party, with yet another hopelessly failed prosecution attempt.
The Southport Magistrates Court's acquittal of glazier Daniel Wilson on trumped up 'hindering' charges underscores the fact that the real crime is the ongoing waste of taxpayers' money and the courts' time, CFMEU Queensland and NT secretary Michael Ravbar said.
"What you have here is a paralegal offshoot of the Liberal Party so desperate to notch up a few cheap headlines it engages in the most spurious of court actions."
"In this case we have a hard-working Health and Safety Representative trying to do his job, trying to fulfill his responsibilities in this most dangerous of industries, and his efforts are rewarded with criminal charges."
"This is just ugly and cynical politics," Mr Ravbar said. "The Health and Safety officer was used as a pawn by Malcolm Turnbull in the last election campaign and held up as an example of why the then Prime Minister needed to reintroduce punitive oversight of construction industry unions."
"But the whole case was thrown out of court in the space of a day."
"While the Coalition government are deserving of contempt for their waste of public funds and abuse of the legal process, the Health and Safety representative at the centre of this failed case, Dan Wilson, deserves special commendation for doing his job despite the intimidation he faced."
"The ABCC – with its long list of flimsy and failed and prosecutions - has nothing to do with 'cleaning up' the construction industry, and everything to do with acting as a publicly funded Praetorian Guard for the Liberal Party. It is more interested in tabloid headlines than policing the corporate thuggery, wage theft, safety abuses and sham contracting that is rife in the sector.
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