Daintree, Dan and the HWU: the real scandal is the contempt for working people

In September 2019, staff at Bendigo Health received a training session in dealing with aggression, threats and violence in the health sector environment. The session was delivered by representatives of the Health Education Federation (HEF), a group established to deliver workplace training to health sector workers. Anyone who’s done their share of workplace training will recognise what that day was like:

Consolidated participant feedback was poor. For example, nearly 60% of participants believed the trainers were not organised or prepared; nearly 80% of participants believed the trainers did not have in-depth knowledge of occupational violence and aggression; and nearly 80% believed the trainers did not provide a program that was relevant to the health sector.

Operation Daintree report, p.72

You get one of those headaches just thinking about it, don’t you? The standard bad training session from hell. This was the training for which Dan Andrews’ Victorian government, through then-health minister Jill Hennessy, promised $3.4 million in grants requested by the Health Workers Union (HWU) in 2018.

To be clear, the HWU did not receive the funds directly — the Health Education Federation (HEF), a HWU-controlled entity, did. And to be really clear about it, the HEF was established in 2018, just before the grants were sought, and two of its three directors are HWU officers. 

Daintree comes to Treasury Place

This is one of the stand-outs in the Operation Daintree report (a deliberately random name) into the awarding and payment of these grants. Its focus has been on government procedure. In early 2018, the HWU had first proposed the funding deal to a health sector adviser (Advisor A in the report) in Dan Andrew’s Premier’s Personal Office (PPO), a core political-governmental operation in the now vast Department of Premier and Cabinet.

The adviser spent months trying to set up a scheme where this training would be provided by TAFE, i.e. a competent, hands-off authority. That was not acceptable to the HWU and its leader Diana Asmar, and they spent months lobbying to have the training contract and funding routed to the HEF, Asmar being one of its two HWU directors. 

In October 2018, weeks before the 2018 Victorian state election, Asmar met personally with Andrews, and gained a commitment to funding through the HEF. Thereafter, the funding was announced with much fanfare in the last weeks of the 2018 election campaign. 

Throughout, Health Department public servants charged with arranging payment details and commissioning the training process allegedly had serious doubts about awarding the contract to the HEF. It was not yet a registered training authority, was too close to the actual HWU, and there was no tendering.

An education in power

From a detailed investigation of the process by which this money was promised, granted and part of it delivered, IBAC has concluded there was no corrupt activity in the government and public service process that would meet the standard of criminal charge. That has allowed Andrews, while slipping into Lindsay Fox’s tartan, men-only 86th birthday party at the National Gallery of Victoria, to claim that the report was “educational” and had found no wrongdoing. 

Well, there may be further post-report revelations from within the public service to come. But what one can point out is the utter operational cynicism of this process at the other end, its role in Labor factionalism, and above all the questions that remain about how some of this money was used.

The sudden promise of these two grants — $1.1 million and then $2.2 million to the HEF and HWU — served multiple purposes. It was, above all, a factional buy-off. The HWU is part of Bill Shorten’s right subfaction, “the Shorts” — with Diana Asmar, its head, being one of Shorten’s closest associates; the late Kimberley Kitching its one-time general manager; her widower, the omnidisgraced Andrew Landeryou, a figure perpetually lurking around it.

No one thought there was any risk of Labor losing the 2018 election in the months leading up to the poll, which gave the factions a bit more freedom to make trouble, or the threat of such — a precursor to the “bullying” furore around Kitching’s sudden death in 2022. For the HWU, that was not only for factional clout but survival. 

Shut down the HWU

The HWU — technically HSU No.1 branch of the Health Services Union — is a broken-down dog of a branch, which treats its low-paid workers, many lacking English-language skills, as cheap marks.  Relentlessly loss-making in real terms in the past decade, it had to sell its headquarters for $7 million to stay afloat in 2016. Even so, it lost $3.3 million in equity overall in that period.

In 2021, it disguised a half-million-dollar loss in its accounts by counting the donation of 40,000 L’Oreal skincare packages as a $1.9m “donation”. Headed by Kathy Jackson until 2012, before her convictions for misusing union funds, the branch should have been dissolved years ago, its members reassigned to branches that would represent them. But as the sideline “skunkworks” union in the factional system, it remains protected, for the simple reason that dealing with it once and for all would create more mayhem than most people judge to be worth it.

Here’s the thing the Daintree report can’t say really explicitly. Everyone up the line to Premier Andrews himself knows this about the HWU, and knows — as a first principle of Victorian politics — that the training contract was being handed to a satellite organisation of a union with a long history of corruption and mismanagement so comprehensive as to seem willful. The HEF had zero claim to be a competent training authority. It had no RTO status, no track record, and at the time it was not even formally incorporated — so money channelled could not have been recovered for non-completion of contract. 

‘The fat’

What results from these exercises is what’s known as “the fat” — a gap between the money you get and what you get away with spending to deliver a semblance of what you’re contracted to do. For example, by sending a few office drongos to Bendigo to stumble their way through a bullshit training exercise for your fees-paying members. 

“The fat”, in general in these situations, rarely leaves the office in brown paper bags of cash these days — though it has in this union’s decades-long corrupt past as Health Services Union (HSU) No.1. Instead the expenses are padded, stuff is bought that people take home, “lobster lunches” as a reward for organisers that never took place. The money can also sub for other funds, i.e. general training, which can then be diverted to political or other causes.

This is the big question that hangs over the HWU, and should have disqualified it instantly from any receipt of funds handed over “for training purposes”. The HEF eventually received only $335,000 of the initial $1.2 million promised, and none of the later tranche. The HWU, in its response to allegations in a pre-publication draft of the report, claimed that its shambolic early training was part of an establishment process for the full training module. Yeah, right. Fewer than 80 workers were eventually trained in the program before COVID shut the whole thing down.

The Daintree report clearly establishes that political advisers pressured permanent public servants to award a non-competitive tender to an organisation completely unable to deliver it, or qualified to receive the money. That obviously makes for bad government. But it can be shrugged off, as the premier did —chalked up to political business as usual.

The real scandal

The real scandal, for anyone on the progressive side of politics, is: where did this bloody money sent to the HEF actually go? This is taxpayers’ money, provided to help low-paid workers in tough jobs. Where has it actually gone? Into the pockets of anyone with access to the HEF and HWU expenses’ provisions and accounts.

Which leads to the next question: did the Victorian premier open up a $3 million pipeline of taxpayers’ funds with the full expectation that it would be splashed against a wall, however much was used?

Why is it so easy to do this? Is it because people with names like Andrews and Hennessy can treat non-Anglo, low-English-skills workers with a basic cultural-racist contempt? Why is that acceptable to people in Labor that it happens again and again and again? Why is there no motivating shame at this, sufficient to prompt action from someone within this movement to break ranks and openly, publicly condemn it?  

A betrayal of working people

Funny, innit? When you get treated in hospital for cancer, it’s HWU members who do all the work that allows doctors and nurses to cure you. Yet no one in the mighty Victorian Labor movement has the courage to cut from its body politic this persistent malignant growth, a cancer on its members as much as the movement as a whole.

The contempt Andrews displayed towards reporters and the IBAC process yesterday wasn’t about them. It was a displaced form of the contempt he has developed for working people, and their outrageous demands to be properly represented by a union. It is the corruption of the soul of someone who joined the party in his teenage years, presumably wanting to make the world a better place. In turn, Andrews is spiritually corrupting the Victorian Labor Party, his centralisation of power having not merely an organisationally corrosive effect but poisoning it internally from the top down. Ultimately, he is disgracing the labour movement he leads, handed to him as a sacred trust.

The premier has come a long way from the gawky, grinning Labor fankid he was. Danny Boy, now called down the pipelines to a rich man’s gathering, another exhibit in his collection. Meanwhile, what is needed to follow the money is yet another full audit of the HWU and HEF. And the branch’s dissolution. It is beyond reform and recovery.

Our leader knows he has a chance to be one of the great premiers. But he is being led around by the nose by a bunch of hacks from a dying faction. Yeah, he’ll get away with it, for the moment. But great leaderships, in our era, come undone from petty hubris. Stuff like this could make him, eventually, like a Barry O’Farrell or a Gladys, going from the statue in the park to being the punchline to a joke. Which would be a hell of a training exercise.