Exclusive: Inquiry sends confidential documents back to wrong parties, including employee information it said was leaked improperly

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

The royal commission into trade union governance and corruption has apologised to the construction union after giving its confidential documents to another party.

On Wednesday the Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union alerted the royal commission that in a further breach it had sent the union confidential information of another company’s employees, the same information which the royal commission had criticised other parties for leaking in 2013.

The CFMEU’s national secretary, Dave Noonan, described the errors as an “incredibly careless and appalling way to treat material obtained by coercive powers, material that is meant to be treated confidentially”.

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The royal commission compelled unions and other parties to produce thousands of documents over a two-year investigation of union governance issues.

After the inquiry concluded in December 2015 many parties applied for their documents to be returned. Noonan told Guardian Australia that some of his union’s documents were returned to industry super fund First Super.

On 25 February, the commission wrote to the CFMEU’s solicitors acknowledging that CFMEU documents were “inadvertently forwarded to First Super when their documents were returned” as a result of being stored together. It has apologised for the breach of privacy.

“We apologise for this incident. We are in the process of advising the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.”

The CFMEU documents were internal telephone directories including contact details of its officials and employees.

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But First Super wasn’t the only party to receive the wrong documents.

The CFMEU received confidential information on employees of Lis-Con Concrete Constructions and Lis-Con Services, which it said was the property of industry super fund Cbus. Turc had found that Cbus employees breached the Privacy Act and the super fund’s rules by leaking that exact information to the union in 2013 to conduct a campaign over the companies’ superannuation arrears.

The construction union also received documents including membership lists belonging to the Australian Workers Union or Winslow Constructions and Telstra documents including phone records.

On Wednesday, the CFMEU wrote to commission and said the mistaken return of these documents “again constitutes an unwarranted breach of privacy by the commission” and breached the commission’s own confidentiality orders.

“This is particularly ironic given the findings made by the commission concerning the leaking of the spreadsheets belonging to Cbus,” the union’s lawyer wrote.

On 8 March, the CFMEU wrote to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, which is now responsible for the documents, to complain about the “extraordinary breach of privacy”.

The union’s lawyer said “the fact the documents belonging to my client could have been forwarded to a third party by your department is astounding. In the present circumstances, one wonders how many other documents has gone astray.”

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The union asked for an undertaking no further documents would be misdirected. It followed up on 6 April noting it had received no response from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and describing the ongoing privacy breaches as “bizarre”.

Noonan told Guardian Australia that the inquiry had hounded unions to produce documents, including conducting weeks of hearings on whether documents were properly stored or improperly disposed of in its Queensland branch.

“But when they do get the documents they don’t treat them confidentially or with due care, they appear to be scattergun in their approach to distributing them,” he said.

“What confidence can anyone have in the competence and integrity of this royal commission? Once they finished their witchhunt they were very happy to basically just send the documents wherever they wanted, holus bolus, irrespective of the rights of parties who produced them.”

“This royal commission was a low water mark of in Australian history with respect to its incompetence and political bias. These breaches show yet again they’ve disgraced institution of royal commissions.”

On 11 March and 6 April the union made further complaints to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.