What Ben Carroll’s critics misunderstand about his kamikaze decision

Résumé détaillé

Despite what my colleague Nick McKenzie says, Ben Carroll will not regret calling the Big Build royal commission.

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Chris Kourakis, the retired judge in charge of the Building Bad royal commission, is overseeing a delicate operation.

It is commonplace once a government is voted out of office for a political party to subject itself to post-mortem examination. It is rare thing for the autopsy to be performed while the patient is still living.

There is no question that Victorian Labor is seriously crook. If we treat this week’s Resolve Political Monitor published by this masthead as an accurate read of the party’s vital signs, voters are preparing to administer the last rites on November 28.

Nonetheless, it seems slightly Monty Pythonesque for Kourakis and his team of counsels assisting to be slicing open the body and prodding vital organs while the government still has a pulse.

The gravity of wounds already inflicted during the first three days of royal commission public hearings has raised questions about whether the Carroll government was high on pethidine when it established this inquiry.

John Holland project manager Joe Aygur’s testimony that the government threatened to black ball his company from future work unless it appeased the industrial thuggery of the CFMEU goes to the heart of why the Big Build turned so bad.

The apparent absence of concern expressed by former premier Jacinta Allan, when told in a ministerial briefing that the CFMEU’s absurd wage demands for people who hold stop-go signs at building sites would add $400 million to the government’s tab, indicates an extraordinary disregard for how public money was being spent.

As this paper’s own one-man royal commission Nick McKenzie told Radio 3AW listeners at the start of the week: “By Friday, Premier Ben Carroll will likely regret having called the royal commission.”

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