Who rules Victoria?

When I first came to live in Melbourne there was something strange about the ambulances. Vandals had managed to graffiti nearly all of them.

I soon realised the police weren't searching for the culprits because they were most likely uniformed and sitting in the defaced vehicles' driver and passenger seats.

The paramedics were in a pay dispute with the state Liberal government. They had covered their emergency vehicles with slogans about how badly they were paid and how the Liberals were destroying public health.

Few Melburnians seemed to object. Also the supine government seemed to be doing nothing about it.

Of course, I understand the ambos, along with all health workers, are now considered to be angels sent to us in human vestments and no amount of money can ever be enough for the job they do … etc, etc/

Even so, I regarded their vehicles as public property improperly turned into partisan political billboards.

It was a lesson about who runs Victoria.

The Liberals were sitting on the government benches, following a surprise narrow win over the long-serving Bracks/Brumby administration, but I began to realise this was an aberration or blip, a passing annoyance to Victoria's well-entrenched power establishment.

Following an innocuous and largely ineffective three years, the Baillieu/Napthine government duly sunk meekly, almost gratefully, with barely a ripple beneath the incoming tide of a new Labor government.

Since Jeff Kennett's two-term government ended in 1999, Labor has been continuously in power, save for that three-year intermission.

Victorian Premier Dan Andrews has not been shy about how much his government owes to the unions, who waged incessant war against the Liberal usurpers.

"The Labor Party is strong," he said after re-election in 2018.

"The labour movement is even stronger."

Following the 2014 election, former Labor Party secretary Nicholas Reece wrote in The Age that the unions allied with Labor set a benchmark for "ground game" campaigning in Australia.

"Trades Hall spent the past eight months mobilising thousands of union volunteers – fire fighters, paramedics, nurses, teachers and others – converting them into a "boots on the ground" campaign army," he wrote.

Andrews has repaid that debt handsomely out of the public purse.

The ambos, who complained they were the lowest paid in Australia (so better value for money?) got their pay rise as have public sector employees across the board.

The Australian Financial Review reported that since Andrews's election Victorian public sector pay has grown faster than any other state or federal bureaucracy.

At the end of last year Victoria's average weekly public sector wage outstripped average private sector renumeration by $333.

The other huge beneficiary of Andrews Government largesse has been the construction industry.

Under what he terms his "Big Build", Andrews has committed to $81 billion worth of public works.

While there are other large and strong unions in this sector, by far the most omnipresent is the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU).

Around Melbourne bulky work-booted (usually) men display the union's black-and-white logo on clothing or the alternative blue-and-white Eureka Stockade Southern Cross insignia.

Either by design or coincidence the designs look like bikie colours and there is little doubt in Victoria's union hierarchy the 144,000-member strong CFMEU is the apex gang.

This is not to be confused with the Apex Gang, which either is, was or wasn't a criminal association, according to Victorian Police.

Of course, the CFMEU isn't a criminal organisation either, or at least not a historically outstanding one.

ABC Factcheck informed us of this in 2019 when "debunking" then Federal AG Christian Porter's claim the union was "the most unlawful organisation in the history of Australia's industrial laws".

"While the CFMMEU has repeatedly and deliberately breached legislation governing industrial action and conduct in the workplace, chalking up more breaches and more fines than any other union in the past 25 years, historical records show that its unlawful behaviour is exceeded by that of other unions in earlier decades," the ABC helpfully pronounced.

The "Big Build" is certainly big bucks for the labour movement.

It creates a lucrative financial feedback loop of taxpayer money poured into (union-approved) projects, pumping up CFMEU and other union memberships and dues, which flows back to the ALP as affiliation fees or helps out in campaigning generally.

The skewing of the economy towards construction explains why it was deemed an essential lockdown industry.

At first this might seem odd, especially as nearly all the major government projects are well behind schedule, why worry about adding a few extra months or years?

Sending kids to school in their vital development years might be considered more important.

The most essential need, housing, is likely to become more available with Victoria being the only state to suffer a net loss in population during Covid, as people vote with their feet.

Construction, even with reduced numbers, was always a Covid risk. It brings together a large group of people into prolonged immediate contact.

What makes the industry a bigger risk is, as we saw from the ABC "rebuttal", that construction and construction unions tend to be a law unto themselves.

It isn't particularly shocking that inspectors discovered 73% of sites were non-Covid compliant.

As the wildfire Delta strain spreads like honey poured on a hardhat, Victorian Labor responded in almost the only way it knows how, with a heavy-handed edict, in this case banning tearooms.

Obviously, you could sense … ahem… trouble brewing.

Unionists started having high tea on the High Street blocking the CBD thoroughfares.

The Victorian Government reacted by closing all construction sites for two weeks and declaring vaccination mandatory to work in the sector.

A young tradie took his life at a site after this announcement, a story that was underreported.

Suddenly protesters in high-viz gear with standard CFMEU official branding, along with the signifiers of other construction and tradie unions, gathered outside the CFMEU office in central Melbourne.

The CFMEU boss John Setka, attempted to calm things down but retreated inside as the crowd grew angrier.

Melbourne's very busy riot police, looking like a cut-price troop of Star Wars baddies, materialised to eventually quieten things down but not before the offices were damaged.

The next day protesters marched again and ended up at Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance war memorial.

Left-leaning outlets, such as the Guardian and the ABC, were very keen to pin these protests on "far-right activists", as were Setka and ACTU leader Sally McManus.

However, The Age, the Guardian and Crikey all admitted the CFMEU office protest impetus came overwhelmingly from unionists.

On the national CFMEU Facebook Page, which only allows current union members to join, comments under the official post "condemning the protest" were seething with anger.

"The CFMEU office has lost the plot listen to your members you should have marched with them! Sellouts (sic)" read one comment that had 426 "likes" and no negative reactions.

It wasn't just the rank-and-file, the Victorian Government's top construction industry adviser, Peter Parkinson, quit reportedly in protest at the lack of consultation over the new rules.

The vehement reaction is hardly surprising, CFMEU members are used to getting what they want in a state that has been largely run for them.

They are also well versed in the union lore that everything they have, they have fought for and will fight for again if necessary.

Despite the rush of Labor's friends and enablers in the media and academia to fan a blizzard of "far-right" conspiracy disinformation, what transpired was mostly an uprising of rank-and-file workers, union and non-union, against the bosses, in this case Andrews, McManus and Setka.

It was a Labor "family" dispute. You might say "bruvver versus bruvver".

However, it also the case that any civil disturbance, especially in a state simmering under what is now a world record number of days of lockdown, will attract loons and goons.

There was a lot of excitement among various academic and media figures who spotted some such "ring-ins", the type of fringe characters who are drawn to trouble like iron filings to a magnet.

This alarming development even spurred the ABC to call in a terrorism expert, Deakin University Professor Greg Barton.

"Perversely, they are invoking the Anzac Digger Spirit," Barton said of the Shrine rally.

"Yet, channelling the same sort of frankly, neo-fascism that the Diggers fought against. But they think that this is iconic and it works for them."

But how representative of the protesters were the neo-fascists?

The Age's Chip Le Grand intrepidly approached one of the dangerous riff-raff.

Le Grand wrote: "Tim, a self-employed tradie and father of two, is sitting with a friend on the grassy slope that leads up to Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance.

"In a quiet voice, he explains the frustration and despair he feels at seeing what is happening to a city where, until recently, he planned to raise his family.

"We've sat idle for 18 months and watched this state deteriorate; people losing their jobs and kids not going to school," he says.

"I'm a parent, I'm a husband, I'm a veteran and I have completely lost faith in this government.″

Chip was obviously lucky to escape unharmed after encountering such a violent extremist.

The rebellion by construction unionists and other workers in the sector represents a small but significant crack in Labor's power base.

It was largely the result of the state's disastrous Covid record, which can be traced to the dysfunction of the other most important pillar of Labor's dominance of Victoria, which will be explored in a subsequent piece.