May 2026

Victoria’s Big Build was sold as nation-building.

What The Age’s Nick McKenzie and his colleagues have exposed is something very different: a multi-billion-dollar warning about what happens when governments confuse spending with delivery, and when political cowardice lets union power, poor governance and organised crime feast on public money.

Let’s be clear about the source of this material. The primary revelations come from sustained investigative reporting by McKenzie, David Marin-Guzman, Ben Schneiders, Kieran Rooney and others at The Age, whose work has peeled back the layers of the Victorian infrastructure machine. Their reporting, much of it published under the Building Bad banner, has alleged a deeply disturbing pattern across the state’s $100 billion Big Build program: rorting, coercion, inflated costs, weak oversight and criminal infiltration.

And the numbers are obscene.

One estimate, attributed to corruption expert Geoffrey Watson SC, suggested CFMEU-linked misconduct and cost blowouts may have hit taxpayers by as much as $15 billion. That figure was later disputed as untested, but even the debate over the number tells you something important: this is not petty pilfering. This is not a rounding error. This is potentially one of the great taxpayer rip-offs in modern Australian infrastructure history.

The villain here is not merely a dodgy contractor or a rogue union heavy.

The villain is a system.

A system in which major contractors allegedly felt pressured to use favoured labour-hire firms. A system in which legitimate operators could be frozen out. A system in which people with bikie links, underworld associations and criminal histories reportedly found pathways into lucrative taxpayer-funded work. A system in which bureaucrats and ministers were warned, but the machine kept rolling because stopping it would have meant confronting the CFMEU and risking industrial chaos.

That is the heart of the scandal.

The Big Build became too big to challenge.

The most grotesque example was the so-called Women in Construction scandal. According to The Age’s reporting, a labour-hire firm marketed as a women-led supplier of female workers was allegedly owned by a man with a history of domestic violence and had been managed by a convicted drug trafficker. It reportedly secured major work on Big Build sites and, at its peak, was generating up to $2.5 million a week.

You almost have to admire the audacity.

A program dressed up in the language of equity and inclusion allegedly became a vehicle for inflated charges, union coercion and private enrichment. Contractors were reportedly pushed toward using the firm even though its rates were up to 20% higher than competitors.

Then there is the governance failure.

A confidential Victorian Ombudsman briefing reportedly found that the Victorian Infrastructure Delivery Authority, the agency managing Big Build projects, had poor financial record-keeping and inadequate procurement documentation. In plain English: the state was spending staggering sums of taxpayer money without the systems needed to properly track where it was going.

That is not an administrative hiccup.

That is an invitation.

When billions are flowing, records are poor and oversight is weak, the wrong people do not need a second invitation. They move in.

The political fallout has been significant. The CFMEU’s Victorian branch was forced into administration. John Setka exited the stage. Victoria Police established Taskforce Hawk to examine gangland and corruption-linked building industry offences. More than 140 labour-hire licences were cancelled. Premier Jacinta Allan’s government has faced pressure over what it knew, when it knew it, and why stronger action was not taken sooner.

But the bigger question is this: why does this keep happening in Victoria?

Because mega-projects make great press conferences. Hard hats, hi-vis, tunnel-boring machines, ribbon cuttings. They create the impression of momentum. But behind the theatre sits the unglamorous work that actually protects taxpayers: procurement discipline, record-keeping, independent oversight, whistleblower protection and real consequences.

Victoria did the theatre brilliantly.

The controls appear to have failed spectacularly.

The Big Build scandal is not just about corruption. It is about arrogance. It is about a government so addicted to announcing projects that it lost control of the machine delivering them.

And when government loses control, taxpayers pay.

In Victoria, they may have paid by the billion.