For years, whispers about standover tactics, inflated invoices and union-linked influence on Victoria’s Big Build sites have circulated through court documents, IBAC reports and parliamentary hearings without ever being tied together into a single, authoritative account. It is time that changed, and a royal commission is the only mechanism with the power, the compulsion tools and the public standing to do it properly.
A pattern, not an isolated case #
Victoria Police and the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) have each, at various points, confirmed they are investigating conduct connected to major infrastructure projects, including allegations of standover behaviour, alleged kickbacks and claims that some subcontractors were pressured off sites. IBAC has said in public reports that it continues to examine corruption risks in the construction sector, including on government-funded projects. None of this amounts to a finding that any individual company, official or union figure has engaged in unlawful conduct — that is a determination for a court, or for IBAC’s own findings process, not for a newsroom.
What is clear, based on the pattern of separate investigations, court matters and IBAC inquiries that have emerged over recent years, is that the concerns are not confined to a single project or a single contractor. Our readers have followed pieces of this story as they have surfaced — a charge here, a court mention there, an IBAC hearing referenced in Parliament — but no single public process has yet tried to join the dots.
What a royal commission can do that other bodies cannot #
IBAC does important work, but its findings are not always made public in full, and its jurisdiction is bounded by strict rules about what it can disclose given ongoing criminal matters. Victoria Police investigations, by design, focus on whether a brief of evidence can support a criminal charge against a specific person — not on the broader system that allowed alleged misconduct to persist. Parliamentary committees can ask questions but cannot compel the same volume of documents or testimony under oath that a royal commission can.
A royal commission sits above all of these. It can compel witnesses, including senior public servants, former ministers and industry figures, to give evidence under oath. It can access documents that would otherwise be shielded by commercial confidentiality or departmental privilege. And critically, it can produce a public report with findings and recommendations that survive well beyond any single court case or election cycle.
Victoria has used this tool before. The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System reshaped an entire sector through recommendations government was compelled to respond to. The Royal Commission into the Management of Police Informants forced disclosures about conduct inside Victoria Police that would never have emerged through ordinary channels. There is no reason a similarly structured inquiry could not do the same for the Big Build.
The questions that remain unanswered #
Chief among them is a simple one: who in positions of authority — inside government departments, inside major contracting firms, inside industry bodies — knew about allegations of corrupt conduct on Big Build sites, and when did they know it. Court documents and IBAC materials made public to date have, in places, referred to concerns being raised internally well before matters became the subject of criminal charges or formal investigation. Establishing the timeline of who was told what, and what action — if any — was taken in response, is precisely the kind of systemic question a royal commission is built to answer and a single criminal trial is not.
A criminal court, when a matter proceeds to trial, will determine whether a specific person is guilty of a specific offence beyond reasonable doubt. It will not, and cannot, examine whether government oversight of major contracts was adequate, whether reporting channels for whistleblowers actually functioned, or whether regulatory bodies had the resources to act on red flags. Those are policy and governance questions, and they matter just as much to Victorian taxpayers footing the bill for projects running billions of dollars over budget.
The risk of doing nothing #
Without a coordinated public inquiry, the pattern we have watched build over several years risks being resolved piecemeal — a handful of prosecutions here, an IBAC report tabled quietly in Parliament there — while the underlying systems that allegedly allowed misconduct to take hold remain unexamined and, more importantly, unreformed. If oversight settings were inadequate in 2019, there is little to suggest they have meaningfully changed by 2024 absent a forcing mechanism.
There is also a public confidence dimension. Victoria’s infrastructure pipeline — the Metro Tunnel, the West Gate Tunnel, the Suburban Rail Loop and dozens of level crossing removals — represents one of the largest concentrations of public spending in the state’s history. Victorians are entitled to know whether the systems meant to protect that spending from corruption actually worked, and if they did not, why not. A royal commission with genuine terms of reference covering procurement oversight, subcontractor treatment and the handling of internal complaints would go a long way toward answering that.
What terms of reference should cover #
Based on the matters that have already surfaced through court proceedings and IBAC’s public statements, any credible royal commission would need terms of reference broad enough to examine:
- How allegations of standover conduct and alleged kickbacks on major project sites were reported internally, and what happened to those reports;
- Whether departmental oversight of head contractors and subcontractors was adequate to detect the conduct now the subject of criminal charges and IBAC scrutiny;
- What role, if any, industry bodies and union officials played in site access decisions, and whether that role was properly regulated;
- Whether whistleblower protections functioned as intended for workers who raised concerns; and
- What reforms are needed to prevent a recurrence, regardless of which individuals are ultimately found responsible by the courts.
None of this presupposes guilt on the part of any individual currently before the courts or under investigation. A royal commission’s findings about systemic failure can, and should, run on a parallel but entirely separate track from any criminal prosecution. Courts determine individual guilt; royal commissions determine whether the system around that individual functioned as it should have.
Where this leaves Victorians #
The state government has not announced a royal commission into Big Build corruption, and any decision to establish one rests with Cabinet. But the case for one has been building steadily through IBAC’s own public commentary, through matters already before Victorian courts, and through years of reporting — including our own — that has traced individual threads of this story without ever being able to answer the bigger question of how the system allowed it to happen in the first place.
We will continue to report on the criminal matters as they proceed through the courts, and on any developments from IBAC. But the broader accountability Victorians deserve — a clear-eyed, public account of who knew what and when — is unlikely to come from either process alone. It is time for a royal commission.
Any person or entity referred to in relation to ongoing investigations or court proceedings is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. The matters discussed in this piece include allegations that remain before the courts or under investigation by IBAC and Victoria Police, and no findings of wrongdoing have been made against any individual named in connection with those processes.
