Federal Court has fined Australia’s construction union and former official Brendan Murphy a total of $34,500 for obstructing work at Geelong Grammar School in 2014.
The then Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMMEU) organiser entered a construction site without providing notice, the court heard.
Mr Murphy refused to show an entry permit, refused multiple requests to leave and called a meeting of workers, Federal Court judge Debra Mortimer found.
“Mr Murphy’s conduct was not at the egregious level of impropriety, but neither was it trivial nor minor,” she said.
“It was confrontational, aggressive and rude. Mr Murphy was bullying and overbearing, and deliberately so.”
After the meeting he told the site manager he would refuse to leave until all the workers were offsite.
A number of workers left the site and work ceased, the court heard.
Mr Murphy claimed he had concerns for subcontractors working in the dark and threatened he would be back the next day to make sure the site remained closed.
In an earlier liability hearing Justice Mortimer rejected Mr Murphy’s claim that he was concerned about safety at the site.
She found his claims were “contrived” and accepted evidence he was instead unhappy with the subcontractors the site’s building company Harris HMC had hired.
“I am not satisfied there was any real health and safety issue, despite Mr Murphy’s references to people working in the dark,” she said.
Aside from the loss of “a relatively small amount of money” there “was no evidence of any financial impact from Mr Murphy’s conduct”, she added.
In fixing the “appropriate penalty” Justice Mortimer considered Mr Murphy’s aggression, language and refusal to leave “all because of his personal preoccupation with Harris HMC using a particular subcontractor, which it was entitled to do”.
But Justice Mortimer also accepted the conduct, although deliberate, was not systematic or part of an ongoing campaign.
Australian Building and Construction Commission Commissioner Stephen McBurney said CFMMEU and its senior officials “all too regularly” flouted the law.
“This decision illustrates a repeated pattern of bullying behaviour with officials claiming to go onsite over safety reasons, only to be found by the courts that their real motivation is to shut sites down and cause disruption for industrial purposes.”
CFMMEU declined to comment on the judgement given Mr Murphy no longer works for the organisation.
