Victoria's Big Build Plagued by Corruption Allegations Amid Calls for Royal Commission

The revelations keep rolling in – organised crime gangs, underworld figures and a raft of unsavoury characters on building sites, profiting from Victoria’s massive spend on infrastructure – the much-vaunted Big Build. Evidence of intimidation, extortion, fraud and bribery among the myriad of misdeeds. All on government construction sites funded by the public purse, at an escalating cost.

Yet the Victorian premier’s latest response is to blame inflation, not corruption, and to claim that existing agencies have the matter in hand.

Do they? As the evidence of wrongdoing mounts, so do the questions that need answers. How did the CFMEU get a monopoly on government building sites? How much has this cost us? What did those in power know? What is needed to stop the rot?

No Victorian integrity agency is empowered or resourced to deal with misconduct on this scale. No police investigation could answer these questions. And police are ill-equipped to deal with systemic corruption, which needs the transparency of public exposure.

These revelations can only be explored by a royal commission. Yes, they are expensive, don’t deliver quick results and are often rightly disparaged as lawyers’ fests.

But nothing else will give us answers.

It would have been different if Ibac – Victoria’s anti-corruption commission – had a broader remit. Ibac cannot currently investigate “grey corruption” – misconduct that is not necessarily criminal, where rules are bent or broken to benefit mates, political organisation or networks, where public funds are abused or misused. Conduct that is deeply damaging to public trust, and which Ibac’s counterparts in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia can investigate.

Every Ibac commissioner since its inception in 2013 has called for reform in this area, claiming to be hamstrung in the fight against corruption, reform which successive Victorian governments have resisted. Until now, with Jacinta Allan recently claiming she was taking “decisive action” to give Ibac the powers it needs, although not until the end of 2027 and after the next state election. Decisively too late.

The Victorian government has staked its political legacy on the Big Build – the huge rail and road projects “that will keep Victorians moving in the decades to come”, to quote its website. These projects come at an eye-watering cost. Not in itself wrong or surprising, but their very scale should have been a compelling reason for the most stringent checks and balances extending to every contractor and subcontractor. To ensure not a single public dollar was wasted.

Instead, the narrative is driven by political expediency. A government focused on delivering big projects at any cost, as long as the premier and ministers could be seen in hard hats and hi-vis jackets projecting action.

I saw this in my last major investigation as ombudsman, looking into the gestation of the Suburban Rail Loop – an orbital rail link announced just before the 2018 election – with a recently estimated cost over $200bn. It was developed in excessive secrecy, without the knowledge even of the secretary of the responsible department. Its business case was “proved up” by consultants, and the announcement “blindsided” the agency set up by the same government to remove short-term politics from infrastructure planning.

It played well with the electorate, allowing the then premier to counter any criticism by claiming he had a mandate.

But what did the electorate actually know in 2018 when they ostensibly voted overwhelmingly for a project that will take decades to build at an unimaginable cost? They certainly weren’t told it had been cooked up in secrecy, or that its likely cost would, in the words of the now former secretary, “crowd out” better uses of funds.

Thanks in large part to the Big Build, Victorians are paying some $24m a day in interest on the state’s debt. The impact on public services, including health, housing and education, is obvious. But in Victoria, it seems, when you’ve started digging a big expensive hole, you just keep on digging.