The man brought in to probe violence in the CFMEU’s Queensland branch has told an inquiry that a conscious campaign to push the Australian Workers Union (AWU) off civil construction sites was done to emulate what the CFMEU’s Victorian branch had achieved under disgraced former boss John Setka.

In his second day of evidence to the Commission of Inquiry into the CFMEU and Misconduct in the Construction Industry, investigator Geoffrey Watson said hostilities between the union and the AWU, its main rival on large infrastructure projects, were a matter of economic significance to the entire nation.

Watson, hired by the federally appointed CFMEU administrators to investigate allegations of violence in Queensland after reporting by this masthead, The Australian Financial Review and 60 Minute

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