Australia news LIVE: Labor exec to decide CFMEU response; Nuclear plan puts farms in radiation zone, minister says

ACTU secretary Sally McManus has defended herself against suggestions she must have known about the alleged wrongdoing within the CFMEU.

She says former Victorian branch boss John Setka “hates her guts” and had isolated his Victorian CFMEU branch from the ACTU.

Here’s what McManus told ABC’s RN Breakfast:

People have got to understand what happened five years ago, the ACTU set a standard for behaviour. And we said it wasn’t tenable for John Setka to be a state secretary, after he was found guilty of DV related charges. We stood up to him.

We told him to his face, the whole union movement, the ACTU, this same executive supported that call.

John Setka hates our guts, hates my guts, hates [ACTU president Michelle O’Neil’s] guts, the ACTU as well.

These last five years, his union has been totally isolated from us. He went about then getting rid of anyone else who stood up to him and said, ‘This does not align with union principles.’

That includes his deputy. That includes the national secretary of that union. That includes [CFMEU manufacturing boss Leo Skourdombis], who stood up to him as well.

I would not be welcome in the front door of the office let alone on a building site for the last five years.

Because Setka’s union has been isolated from the ACTU, we had no idea of this alleged infiltration by criminal elements. We thought he did not uphold union principles and that he was someone who pursued vengeance. We did not know this.”

While a union official claims she was “shocked” by the reports alleging wrongdoing including corruption and intimidation in the CFMEU, a teal MP says no one is “overly surprised” by the allegations.

“Anyone who had any sort of weather eye on what was going on in the CFMEU wouldn’t have been particularly surprised,” Independent MP Zoe Daniels told Nine’s Today.

“Unions protect workers. Great. But at the same time, they can’t be using intimidation and all sorts of allegedly criminal tactics to lock companies and businesses out of worksites and to flex muscle,” Daniels said.

“It’s simply inappropriate. Not okay. And I think the vast majority of Australians will think that that is wrong.”

Daniels’ comments came after ACTU President Michele O’Neil told Today that she was “shocked” by the reports published by The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Financial Review.

Asked if she’d heard talk or rumours about the CFMEU’s conduct, O’Neil said: “I’ve been shocked by what we’ve seen over the last 4 or 5 days.”

With AAP

Labor’s national executive is deciding whether it will continue taking donations from the embattled CFMEU’s construction division after state branches and the peak union body suspended links.

The union’s construction division has been under fire over a series of reports alleging corrupt conduct and organised crime links.

The national executive is set to meet on Thursday and would be “dealing with this in a fairly firm fashion”, Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke said.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese foreshadowed the national executive meeting, noting in a press conference on Wednesday that part of the response “will be a suspension from engagement in the Labor Party, and that will occur through the national executive, which will be convened over the coming days.”

Burke has moved to install an independent administrator to overhaul the construction arm of the union. He warned he would introduce legislation into parliament if the CFMEU challenged the proceedings.

The administrator would be appointed after a court application by the Fair Work Commission.

Peak union body the Australian Council of Trade Unions has suspended the construction and general division of the CFMEU while various state Labor governments have also moved to ice their affiliations and halt donations.

The vote of about 50 ACTU executives was almost unanimous, secretary Sally McManus said.

“We would ask the union, the whole of the union, including the Queensland branch, to co-operate with external independent administrators, this is the best path forward,” she said.

Her comments came after Queensland and NT branch secretary Michael Ravbar said the prime minister had “panicked and soiled himself over some unproven allegations in the media”.

McManus warned the union not to fight the Fair Work Commission’s push to appoint an administrator, saying it was the best way to ensure confidence in the labour movement.

AAP with Josefine Ganko

Nuclear energy threatens Australia’s food production with more than 11,000 farms near the opposition’s proposed reactor sites, the government says.

The farms are located within an 80km radius of the seven earmarked sites, according to a data analysis released by the federal government on Thursday morning.

Under international standards that radius is classified as an “ingestion exposure pathway” in which people may be exposed to radiation through contaminated food, milk and water after a nuclear leak.

In the US, farmers in those zones must take on preventative measures in an emergency, such as providing livestock with separate feed and water, holding shipments and decontaminating produce.

“Based on international practice, farmers would need to take expensive steps during a nuclear leak and would need to inform their customers that they operate within the fallout zone,” Agriculture Minister Murray Watt said in a statement.

“It’s bizarre that the Nationals and Liberals are putting at risk our prime agricultural land like this, especially without the decency to explain it to farmers and consumers how they’d mitigate all the potential impacts.”

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton announced the nuclear strategy a month ago, flagging nuclear reactors at coal power stations that have closed or are winding down.

Loy Yang Power Station in Victoria’s Gippsland region, Callide and Tarong in Queensland, Port Augusta in South Australia, Collie in Western Australia, and Mount Piper and Liddell in NSW have all been earmarked.

AAP

Welcome to today’s national news live blog. My name is Josefine Ganko, I’ll be taking us through the news as it develops through the morning.

It’s Thursday, July 18.

Here’s what’s making headlines this morning.

• Union officials have vowed to fight “to the ends of the earth” against federal government moves to appoint an administrator to oversee the scandal-plagued CFMEU, as the reports of alleged wrongdoing continue.
• Mining billionaire Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue will slash 700 jobs and merge its mining and energy divisions.
• Nervous investors are seeking reassurances from the Albanese government over the fate of the renewables rollout, Energy Minister Chris Bowen has revealed.
• Overseas, Israeli airstrikes killed more than 60 Palestinians in southern and central Gaza, including one that struck an Israeli-declared “safe zone” crowded with thousands of displaced people.