CFMEU organiser urinated on bathroom floor to ‘make a point’, inquiry told

A CFMEU official urinated on the bathroom floor at a Gold Coast worksite in front of site management to prove a point, Queensland’s commission of inquiry into the union has heard.Tim Ellis, the workplace health and safety manager at civil construction firm JF Hull Holdings, told the inquiry on Tuesday CFMEU organiser Luke Gibson deliberately urinated on the floor of a newly constructed toilet block at a Coomera Connector stage one site at Helensvale.Ellis said cleaners had to be brought in to clean up the mess after Gibson’s alleged act, during which two employees – project superintendent Scott Holmberg and safety manager Justin O’Neill – and Electrical Trades Union organiser Stephen Bravo were also present.Tim Ellis gives evidence at the commission of inquiry on Tuesday.Commission of Inquiry“Mr Bravo came in with a valid permit that day from the ETU to query some of the electrical issues on site,” Ellis said.“They were looking around the toilet area. They looked at this floor drain on the site – ‘they’ being Mr Gibson and Mr Bravo – and from what I was advised and told by Mr Holmberg and Mr O’Neill, Luke said ‘that plug is meant to be connected to the sewage tank underneath the building’, and the guy said ‘no, it’s not’, and he made a point of it by urinating on the floor.“Mr Holmberg and Mr O’Neill, once they saw what he was doing, walked out of the toilets so they could not be present when he was actually there doing it because they had heard of similar things happening on another project before.”CFMEU Queensland organiser Luke Gibson deliberately urinated on a bathroom floor, the commission of inquiry has been told.Along with union visits, Ellis said the worksite was under intense scrutiny by Workplace Health and Safety Queensland officers.Ellis said that in March 2024, inspector Mark Schaumburg arrived at the site unannounced, at the direction of Helen Burgess – whose appeal against her dismissal was denied last month by the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission – a day after WHSQ inspectors had cleared the site.The commission of inquiry previously heard accusations that Burgess, as WHSQ director of construction compliance and field services, effectively worked on the CFMEU’s behalf in her role at the government agency.“I asked [Schaumburg] why we would get a further visit, and his response to me was along the lines of, the minister had requested the major projects team undertake a proactive weekly visit of our project,” Ellis said.Just which minister Schaumburg was referring to was not disclosed in that conversation, Ellis said, but he told the commission he suspected there was “probably some link” between that WHSQ visit and an earlier visit by Gibson, who threatened to “involve the minister”.In a contemporaneous incident report tendered to the commission, it was noted that Gibson refused to give the name of that minister, inferring only that she was a woman and was not then-industrial relations minister Grace Grace.Ellis described the worksite as being “on edge” prior to the CFMEU going into administration in 2024, with serious concerns about employees’ “psychosocial health”.“Every time somebody saw a black ute in the driveway, I’d get somebody knocking on my door saying ‘the CFMEU is here’, and it would just be somebody who’s turned up in a black ute,” he said.“We would have people out on site that would say, ‘that looks like there’s somebody here at the fence line that’s trying to get in; looks like one of your union blokes’, and it turns out it wasn’t, it was one of our workers fixing a fence, or something like that.“So everyone was a little bit edgy, everyone was on high alert, and I would hate to think what that would have done to the project culture, what it would have done to our people on the project long term for their own health and well-being.”Ellis said his experience on the Coomera Connector was not his first brush with the CFMEU. About a decade ago, in 2016 or 2017, he was working for CPB Contractors on the Logan Motorway enhancement project.At one point, police were called after continuous unauthorised entry attempts every 45 to 60 minutes, in what was interpreted as an attempt to overwhelm management.“What I’d been advised – and I still can’t remember who it was, unfortunately – but I was advised at the time that one of the police officers had said that they’d been told by the police union not to get involved in the dispute because it was a union issue,” he said.“And they were backing the union.”Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.From our partners