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A high-ranking Workplace Health and Safety Queensland officer has made explosive claims at the CFMEU inquiry that a senior colleague worked on the union’s behalf – perhaps for financial gain.
Giving evidence in Cairns on Wednesday, regional director Paul Smith accused then-WHSQ director of construction compliance and field services Helen Burgess, who the inquiry has previously heard was in a close personal relationship with former CFMEU state president Royce Kupsch, of working for the union.
“I always used to think, well, ‘does Helen really know who she’s working for?’,” he said.
“It should be the Office of Industrial Relations. It’s not doing the bidding and the work for the CFMEU, which she continually did.”
Commissioner Stuart Wood noted that was a “serious allegation” to make about somebody.
“Did you form any opinion as to why she was doing the bidding of the CFMEU?” he asked.
Smith replied: “I did.”
“I always thought she fervently believed in their ideology, or she was getting some financial benefit from it,” he said.
“That’s the only two outcomes that I could see why anyone would be like that.”
Smith said Burgess would not tolerate any disagreement with what the union wanted.
“Whatever the union said was right, no matter what my inspectors did or said … she would say ‘that’s not right, the union’s saying this’, and I would then send another inspector to get a fresh set of eyes on it to come back.
“Then I’d say, ‘well, no, this is my decision, I’ve made reasonable inquiry. This is it’, and she said ‘they [the CFMEU] won’t be happy with that’.
“And I said, ‘Helen, I couldn’t care less if they’re happy or not – the only people I’m concerned about being happy would be the [Crime and Corruption Commission].’
“I said, ‘as a government official, we need to administer this act appropriately. We shouldn’t have any favouritism or anything’. That was my stance, and I said that to Helen; I said that to [WHSQ executive director] Marc Dennett.”
Smith’s testimony came after a WHSQ officer held back tears as he told the inquiry about the toll his interactions with the union had on his family life.
John Dalamaras, WHSQ’s operations manager for Cairns, said he visited the Cairns Performing Arts Centre worksite in April 2018.
During that inspection, asbestos was found – but Dalamaras said he had formed the view that the material had been deliberately placed on the site in a CFMEU attempt to shut it down.
Dalamaras said he and his colleague, WHSQ inspector Rob Duckworth, refused the union’s demands as they did not believe there was an imminent and serious risk.
That did not go down well, he testified.
“They attacked me as a person, as an inspector,” he said, before his voice cracked. “It affected my family.”
Dalamaras recounted an April 2018 site inspection, at the CFMEU’s behest, at the Performing Arts Centre, at which local CFMEU organiser Roland Cummins stood centimetres from Duckworth’s face, repeatedly yelling “you’re a f–cking dog”.
Dalamaras said that interaction left Duckworth in a state of shock.
“I intervened and told [Cummins] that’s inappropriate behaviour, he shouldn’t be acting like this,” Dalamaras said.
“He just stood there and he was shaking in his face. He then went to go away, and I put my arm up, like a consoling touch, and said, ‘hey, Roly’ and he didn’t answer – he just took off.”
In the following days, Dalamaras said, the CFMEU criticised him and Duckworth on Facebook “saying we’re useless”.
Those posts were “liked” by Burgess.
When the Cairns office pushed back on what it considered to be unreasonable demands to issue worksite safety notices at the CFMEU’s behest, Dalamaras said WHSQ would send inspectors from Brisbane to apply more pressure.
“When Helen Burgess would call and we hadn’t taken any action – well, you can use the analogy Brisbane was the head and we were the toe, [and] if you stub the big toe, it causes quite a lot of pain,” he said.
“We were causing Brisbane quite a bit of pain, so they’d send these inspectors up as a flying squad, so to speak. And they’d come into the office and say, ‘What are you doing here?’.”
That, and other interactions with the union, prompted Dalamaras to leave WHSQ about two months later, but he ultimately returned to the organisation in early 2023.
Commissioner Wood asked Dalamaras what gave him the courage to return.
“The organisation I was with had pretty good external sources, and I was pretty confident there was going to be a change in government,” he said.
“There was also some other factors that led me to come back. I really enjoyed working with the staff there. I enjoyed being an inspector, doing the job.
“I was hopeful of change, and that change came.”
Earlier, Dalamaras’s predecessor, Shannon Farrington, said WHSQ was asked to attend the Performing Arts Centre site on “almost a weekly basis”.
Farrington said Burgess would call with a “shopping list” of issues at the site
“I assumed she was receiving real-time information from the CFMEU delegates,” she said.
The inquiry continues.
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