‘Do deal or lose work’: Minister’s office freeze-out threat to builder over union disputes

November 10, 2026 — 7:32pm

A major Big Build contractor was told by state officials it would be frozen out of future multibillion-dollar transport projects unless it caved in to the CFMEU’s demands in a pivotal industrial dispute, the building royal commission has heard.

And on the same day in June 2022, a senior CFMEU boss told builder John Holland that if it yielded to union demands on the Sunbury project, in return, the union would help it secure the contract for Melbourne Airport rail.

John Holland executive Joe Aygur, the first of four witnesses to testify on Tuesday at the commission, said Rail Projects Victoria senior officer Peter Wilkinson had made clear John Holland would miss out on future state work if it did not resolve the industrial relations issues on the Gap Road level crossing removal in Sunbury.

The commission heard from the witnesses, all of whom had to be compelled to attend, that the site was subjected to a campaign of stoppages orchestrated by the CFMEU on “safety” grounds at a pivotal moment in the project, with trains stopped and work scheduled around the clock.

Aygur said he had contacted Wilkinson to double-check advice he had received from a more junior public servant, Damian Brizzi, that the construction consortium needed to visit the CFMEU’s Elizabeth Street offices to make a deal with the union and get work restarted.

Aygur said he was also told by Wilkinson there was within the state government “a view at the time that if we as an organisation could not work through these industrial relations matters, that we would potentially not win any further work in Victoria”.

Counsel assisting the commission Chris Young, KC, asked Aygur where Wilkinson said this “view” within the state government was coming from. “[The] minister’s office,” Aygur replied.

The minister responsible for rail construction projects at the time was Jacinta Allan.

Asked about the claim, Allan’s spokesman said the former premier would “co-operate with the important work of the royal commission [and] answer whatever questions the royal commission has for her about these allegations”.

Aygur told the commission that at the time Wilkinson made the comments, John Holland “was actively pricing the Melbourne Airport railway work. It was the only major project in the state at the time in the rail sector that was actively being bid.”

The evidence links the Labor government to a key moment in the CFMEU’s push to secure control across the civil construction sector that until that point had been largely controlled by the Australian Workers’ Union.

If proved, the claims mean the Victorian government threatened major builders with commercial punishment if they stood up to the CFMEU.

Earlier on Tuesday, John Holland general superintendent Steve Testolin, described driving to the same meeting with the CFMEU at its Elizabeth Street headquarters on June 7, 2022.

The meeting came after frontline managers concluded they were “on our own” and would not get support from WorkSafe, Victoria Police or the Victorian government in the face of union aggression.

Testolin recounted a tense discussion within the union boardroom with the CFMEU’s Big Build boss Joe Myles, who wanted to know what the company wanted. “So I said, ‘How about you cut the bullshit and tell me what you want?’” Testolin recalled.

Testolin told the commission that Myles had demanded the removal of the site’s elected health and safety representative, the installation of two union-nominated, non-working safety stewards, and the replacement of existing labour hire and traffic management firms with CFMEU-preferred companies BK Labour Hire and CCL.

Testolin said Myles then briefly left the room, and returned saying if John Holland “aligned ourselves with the union, there’d be a positive outcome, and we’d be looked at favourably for future projects [including] airport rail”.

Asked what was meant by being looked at favourably, Testolin replied: “We’d be one of the preferred contractors.”

The inquiry heard the union engineered the crisis by exploiting the consortium’s vulnerability during a critical rail shutdown, known as an occupation, which had been planned for more than a year to construct a rail bridge and road underpass.

Aygur said that missing the occupation deadline risked delays of up to six months because track access had to be booked up to two years in advance. Contractual delay penalties would also cost the company millions of dollars a day.

“Leading into an occupation is where we’re most vulnerable,” he said.

Work at the Sunbury site stopped on June 6 after union officials entered the project, serving multiple safety notices.

WorkSafe records tendered to the commission showed union officials sat on water-filled barriers and stood directly in front of machinery to prevent crane lifts.

Frontline supervisor Robert Van Den Tol entered a note into the site diary on June 6: “union here from 730am till 600am no work started they are stopping us.”

Van Den Tol testified that when union officials arrived, they shut down the site.

Both Van Den Tol and Testolin told the inquiry that appeals to the safety watchdog and police proved useless.

When the contractor asked police to remove the officials for trespass on June 6, officers attended but took no action, concluding that the dispute was an occupational health and safety issue.

WorkSafe inspectors declined to attend immediately, telling site staff there was nothing the watchdog could do without a formal grievance.

Shown an internal email he sent to Aygur three days before the shutdown stating “we are on our own”, Testolin said project staff were stranded.

A confidential John Holland strategy paper drafted on June 3 outlined two options: maintain resistance to the union or open discussions on representation.

The paper warned that continuing to resist would cause project disruptions that would lead to “negative feedback to our client” and create “doubts from our clients about our ability to manage Victorian IR”.

It noted that collaborating with the union would allow the company to “Further demonstrate to our client our credentials for managing industrial relations in a challenging Victorian environment”, even though the primary consequence would be that the “CFMEU gain control of our job”.

Testolin testified that immediately following the meeting at the CFMEU headquarters concessions, the allegations of a safety crisis on the Sunbury site disappeared.

He said site entry notices fell from about 12 a day to one for the remainder of the build, and the presence of the union-appointed safety representatives produced no change to site safety.

Crane operator Glenn Tyrrell, the site’s original safety representative, gave evidence that he was stripped of his elected position without a vote and forced to join the CFMEU at a personal cost of $1200 a year.

Tyrrell testified that he and about 15 other workers were transferred from labour hire company Zoom to union-aligned firm BK Labour.

Despite previous evidence that the replacement labour hire firm cost the government substantially more, Tyrrell said his own pay rate did not change.

Premier Ben Carroll, speaking on the state election campaign trail, said it was “not good enough” that government departments were causing delays by failing to produce documents to the commission within agreed deadlines.

Opposition Leader Jess Wilson called for the royal commission’s terms of reference to be expanded to investigate political incentives and the allocation of major project contracts.

The hearings continue before Commissioner Chris Kourakis.

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