It’s hard to find anyone in the federal government who’s unhappy about the downfall of the construction division of the CFMEU.

The airing of serious allegations that go beyond common-or-garden thuggery to standover activities and links to organised crime have created the circumstances to enable interventions that some in the Labor party and the union movement have desired for a long time.

Could anyone have acted sooner? Well, the creeping increase in the abuse of power and disregard for old codes of operation has been under way for years. The specifics of allegations now laid bare by investigative journalist Nick McKenzie in the Nine newspapers and on the 60 Minutes program may not have been known. But the culture that spawned the allegations certainly was.

So why has it taken until now? Ah, well there are a range of factors involved in that.

For a start, the construction and general division of the CFMEU is huge and size equals money equals power. There is massive money in construction – big projects and big players – and that makes it ripe for vested interests to create and pursue paths of least resistance.

The CFMEU was formed during the union mergers of the 1990s. The construction division brought together a whole lot of small craft unions in the sector – the painters, bricklayers, carpenters, tilers, plasterers and others – with the already-dominant Building Workers Industrial Union (BWIU). The BWIU had picked up workers previously covered by the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) and left stranded when then prime minister Bob Hawke deregistered the BLF in 1986. That move followed a royal commission that uncovered corruption and BLF secretary Norm Gallagher was jailed for taking bribes.

When the CMEU conglomerate was formed, traces of the old BLF culture appear to have survived.

The influence of key........

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