Before six in the morning, the car parks around Brisbane's inner-city building sites are already full. Scaffolders, riggers and concreters file through swipe-gates in high-vis, past safety boards logging the days since the last lost-time injury — a number some crews watch as closely as their pay slip. A few kilometres away, at Victoria Park, tower cranes are starting to rise over what will become the main stadium for the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, one of seventeen venues the state has roughly six years left to build. For decades, the industrial muscle behind that safety board — and the pay packet that comes with it — has belonged largely to one union: the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union. In August 2024 the federal government put the CFMEU's construction division into administration over allegations of corruption and organised-crime infiltration. In Queensland, a state government elected weeks later has used that crisis to tear up the pay-and-conditions framework the union helped negotiate on every major government building job, and to open its own inquiry into the union's conduct. Working out what was genuine reform, what was cost-cutting dressed as reform, and what was corruption rather than ordinary industrial muscle, is now a live question with a fixed Olympic deadline attached.
A national scandal, a state inheritance
The crisis was not Queensland's making. Through mid-2024, national media reporting alleged that bikie gangs and organised-crime figures had infiltrated parts of the CFMEU's construction and general division, and that some officials had used standover tactics against employers and rival unions. The federal Parliament responded with the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment (Administration) Act 2024, which received royal assent on 22 August 2024. The following day, the Fair Work Commission placed the CFMEU's Construction and General Division and its divisional branches under administration for up to five years, over "allegations of corruption, criminal conduct and other serious misconduct including bullying and harassment and general disregard for workplace laws." Barrister Mark Irving KC was appointed administrator, with powers to suspend or remove officials and investigate current and past conduct. In Queensland, branch secretary Michael Ravbar was removed from office under the scheme; he challenged its constitutional validity in the High Court, which dismissed every ground of appeal in a unanimous judgment on 18 June 2025, upholding the administration as lawful.
Queensland's new LNP government, elected on 26 October 2024, chose to go further than simply accept the federal process. On 13 July 2025 it announced its own Commission of Inquiry into the CFMEU, led by Stuart Wood AM KC, examining organised-crime links in the construction industry, financial irregularities in the union's dealings, misconduct that made building sites unsafe or unwelcoming for women, and the union's relationship with government agencies. The Commission began public hearings on 1 August 2025 and is due to report by 31 July 2026. Its hearings have already ranged widely — from a supply-chain inquiry into traffic-control contracts linked to Melbourne figure Mick Gatto, to sworn testimony from a former Queensland Building and Construction Commission licensing manager alleging that ministerial pressure under the previous Labor government blunted the regulator's willingness to act on union-related complaints. None of that testimony has yet become a finding; the Inquiry's final report is still eleven months away at the time of writing.
Pausing, then scrapping, the pay schedule
Alongside the administration and the Inquiry, the new government moved on a second front: Best Practice Industry Conditions (BPIC), the wages-and-conditions schedule the Palaszczuk government introduced in 2018 under its "Buy Queensland" procurement policy for all state building projects worth $100 million or more. BPIC set three areas of expectation for contractors — workplace health and safety systems, apprentice and trainee ratios, and industrial conditions — with the CFMEU and other construction unions invited, alongside employers, to negotiate the project agreements that gave the industrial-conditions pillar its detail. In practice, those agreements came to include provisions such as automatic double-time pay for working in rain, mandatory tools-down once the temperature reached 35 degrees (or 29 degrees at high humidity), a weekly mobile-phone allowance, and roughly 5 per cent nominal annual pay rises, layered on top of ordinary enterprise agreement rates.
In November 2024, a month after taking office, the Crisafulli government paused BPIC for new state contracts. It then asked the independent Queensland Productivity Commission to inquire into construction-sector productivity; that inquiry ran an interim report on 31 July 2025 and delivered a final report to government on 24 October 2025, publicly released in January 2026. On 11 November 2025 the government announced BPIC and subcontractor pre-qualification would be permanently removed, with the change taking effect through the Queensland Procurement Policy 2026 from 1 January 2026 — cutting a roughly 700-page procurement document, of which 269 pages had been the BPIC schedule alone, down to about 50 pages. Deputy Premier and Industrial Relations Minister Jarrod Bleijie described the old arrangement as one "created for Labor's CFMEU mates" that had caused cost blowouts and delays. By July 2026, media reporting indicated the government was drafting a replacement building and construction code, covering state projects above $2 million, that would require site-specific enterprise agreements without BPIC on 2032 Games venues — a proposal the Queensland Council of Unions publicly criticised as a legal "picnic" risking conflict with the federal Fair Work Act and possible delays to Olympic construction.
The strongest case
Construction is still a dangerous industry, and BPIC was never only a pay claim
Building sites remain genuinely hazardous: national data recorded 37 construction workers' deaths in 2024, about one in five of all Australian workplace fatalities that year, with falls from height rising sharply. Site unions built their bargaining strength by campaigning on exactly that toll, and BPIC's founding policy set workplace health and safety systems and guaranteed apprentice ratios as equal pillars alongside pay and conditions — not a wage schedule dressed up as safety policy. The federal administration and Queensland's Commission of Inquiry are targeted at specific, serious allegations — organised-crime infiltration, standover conduct, and claims of improper pressure on a regulator — not at the ordinary business of enterprise bargaining, and neither an administration nor a live inquiry is a criminal conviction. Michael Ravbar tested the administration scheme all the way to the High Court rather than simply accept removal; the court found the scheme lawful, which is a finding about the Commonwealth's power, not a finding of personal guilt. The great majority of the Queensland construction workers whose enterprise agreements the union administers were not personally implicated in any of the conduct under investigation, and a state government is entitled to credit for choosing an open, evidence-gathering Commission of Inquiry — with public hearings and a fixed reporting date — over simply legislating against the union by decree.
What the numbers show
The Queensland Productivity Commission's construction inquiry found labour productivity in the state's building sector was only about 5 per cent higher in 2025 than it had been thirty years earlier, in 1994–95, against roughly 65 per cent growth across the broader market economy over the same period — and that productivity had fallen by around 9 per cent since 2018 alone, the year BPIC was introduced. The Commission also found the gap between the value of construction work in the pipeline and the value of work actually completed had widened from about $13.3 billion in June 2020 to about $34.3 billion by 2025. On BPIC specifically, the Commission modelled that continuing the conditions to 2029–30 would likely raise government project costs by somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent, depending on the assumptions used, producing a net economic cost of up to $20.6 billion over five years through fewer homes built and higher rents — as many as 26,500 fewer dwellings, and rents up to 8.3 per cent higher than they would otherwise have been.
Those figures sit inside a much larger and only partly related picture of state project cost growth. The Queensland Audit Office's Major projects 2025 report, tabled 17 December 2025, found the total estimated cost of the government's major capital works had grown to about $153 billion in the 2025–26 capital statement, up from about $107 billion the year before — a rise the Audit Office attributed to a mix of cost escalation and a growing number of projects. On Cross River Rail specifically, the same audit found higher material and labour costs, workforce shortages, supply-chain disruption and reduced productivity from industrial action had together pushed the project's cost past $19 billion, with first passenger services now expected in 2029. BPIC is one contributor the Audit Office and the Productivity Commission both point to; it is not, on their own evidence, the sole explanation for a cost run-up spread across a $153 billion pipeline.
The critique that doesn't quite add up
The government has folded two different arguments into one slogan. One is a governance argument: that parts of the CFMEU's national leadership tolerated or enabled corruption and organised-crime links serious enough to justify statutory administration — a case made by the Commonwealth, not the Queensland government, and upheld by the High Court. The other is a productivity argument: that an industrial-relations schedule negotiated in the open, by an elected Labor government, with unions as one party among several, raised costs by an amount the state's own modelling puts somewhere in a fifteen-point range. Calling both the "CFMEU tax" is politically efficient, because it lets a genuine corruption scandal lend weight to an ordinary bargaining outcome. But a wide modelled range — 10 to 25 per cent, not a single confident number — is being represented in press statements with more certainty than the modelling underneath it supports, and the Productivity Commission's own headline finding was that the construction industry's deeper productivity problem stretches back thirty years, well before BPIC existed.
The government's own timeline also cuts against the idea that it had a ready plan waiting. BPIC was paused within weeks of taking office in November 2024, but no permanent replacement was settled until the Queensland Procurement Policy 2026 commenced fourteen months later, on 1 January 2026 — a long stretch in which contractors bidding for major government work, including Olympic venues, worked without a settled industrial framework. What has replaced BPIC is itself now contested: by July 2026, unions were publicly warning that the government's draft building and construction code for 2032 venues could conflict with the federal Fair Work Act and delay the very projects it is meant to protect. If that dispute ends up in the Fair Work Commission or the courts, the state risks recreating the cost-and-schedule uncertainty it blamed BPIC for, this time on a fixed Olympic clock that cannot be paused the way BPIC was. And the accountability side of the story is still open: the Commission of Inquiry examining the CFMEU's Queensland conduct, and the previous government's handling of it, does not report until 31 July 2026 — nearly a year after BPIC was already permanently scrapped and the political argument for scrapping it had already been won.
A union placed under federal administration for alleged corruption and a pay schedule its own government helped negotiate were retired under the same slogan — but only one of them was ever accused of a crime.
The risk to the future
An unsettled code, an unfinished inquiry, and a deadline that cannot move
Queensland has roughly six years left to deliver the Brisbane 2032 venues program inside a capital pipeline the Audit Office already values at about $153 billion and cannot yet fully reconcile. If the government's replacement building code is successfully challenged as inconsistent with federal workplace law, as the Queensland Council of Unions has warned, the same cycle of delay and cost the government used to justify scrapping BPIC could recur under its replacement — except this time against an Olympic opening date, 23 July 2032, that is fixed rather than negotiable. The Commission of Inquiry's findings, due by 31 July 2026, may yet implicate conduct reaching beyond the union itself, including how past government agencies handled it; if so, the fix required is regulatory and institutional, not merely a procurement policy switch already legislated and moved on from. Scrapping BPIC removes one modelled cost pressure from a much larger, only partly understood cost problem. On the government's own evidence, that is not the same thing as solving it.