Victoria has a royal commission into its construction sector, called by Premier Ben Carroll as his first act after being sworn in during July 2026, and the scope he has flagged runs from head contractors all the way down to subcontractors and labour-hire outfits working the state’s Big Build sites. Carroll also announced a Special Prosecutor to work alongside the inquiry.
The call was carried by NewsWire and published by The West Australian, and reported in detail by ABC News, which confirmed Carroll moved on the commission immediately after replacing Jacinta Allan as premier. Allan had resisted calling one until the end of her time in the job, the ABC reported, and that resistance contributed to her being toppled.
”No stone unturned”, according to the Premier
Carroll set the scope wide at his press conference. He said he wanted “no stone unturned. Whether it is top-tier contractors, subcontractors, labour hire, government, unions.”
“no stone unturned. Whether it is top-tier contractors, subcontractors, labour hire, government, unions.”
That quote, reported by The Daily Aus, is the line every builder in Victoria should read twice. It puts the two-truck labour-hire firm and the specialist subbie in the same sentence as the tier ones and the CFMEU’s Victorian branch.
Carroll said he’d met the head of the Department of Premier and Cabinet and asked him to “get to work immediately” on the royal commission, according to the ABC.
The backdrop is a run of reporting on violence and intimidation on Big Build sites linked to the Victorian branch of the CFMEU, and a report by anti-corruption barrister Geoffrey Watson SC into alleged crime, corruption, violence and extortion in that branch. Those remain allegations, and the commission’s job is to test them.
The numbers, and the fight over one of them
Victoria’s Big Build is a multi-decade, roughly $100 billion government program of roads, railway stations and tunnels, ABC News reported in July 2026. That’s the pipeline the commission will be pulling apart.
The more contested figure is what alleged criminal activity on those sites has cost taxpayers. The ABC reported an estimate of up to $15 billion. That number came out of the Opposition and the Watson report, and Labor MP Tim Richardson publicly rejected it as “unfounded and untested”, The Daily Aus reported.
Both figures matter for different reasons. The $100 billion is the work. The $15 billion is the argument about who’s been skimming it, and whether the inquiry can prove any of it.
Terms of reference are the whole ball game
As of early August 2026, the terms of reference hadn’t been set. That gap is where the politics lives, with a state election due in November.
Former IBAC commissioner Robert Redlich KC has warned that royal commissions get neutered when governments hand them “very, very limited jurisdiction to investigate.” A commission pointed only at one union branch looks very different to one that can follow the money through procurement, head contracts and labour-hire chains.
The Opposition has been pushing the same point from the other side. Deputy Liberal leader Jane Hume has been pressing on whether current and former Labor ministers will be compelled to give evidence, with News24 framing the terms of reference as the test of Carroll’s seriousness. The Opposition had previously sought its own royal commission covering alleged misconduct funding to outlaw motorcycle gangs and government culpability, which the Allan government knocked back.
What it means if you’ve held a Big Build subcontract
Royal commissions aren’t parliamentary inquiries you can politely ignore. They can compel witnesses to appear and compel the production of documents, and Carroll’s stated scope reaches labour hire and subcontractors, not just the tier ones and the union.
In practice, the paperwork a subbie generates in the ordinary course of a job is the evidence trail: site diaries, timesheets and inductions, variation claims and RFIs, invoices from labour-hire suppliers, and any correspondence about site access, delegate demands or delays. If you’ve run packages on level crossing removals, tunnels or station rebuilds over the past decade, that material is the record of what actually happened on those sites. Keep it, and don’t let a hard drive walk out the door with a departing PM.
The other thing to watch is procurement. Nothing announced so far stops a single job. What an inquiry of this size tends to do is slow and tighten the way government buys construction, which shows up on the ground as more prequalification questions, more scrutiny of labour-hire arrangements, and more time between tender and award. If you price Victorian government work, that’s a tendering cost before it’s a legal one.
What to watch next
Three things will tell you how big this gets: the wording of the terms of reference, who’s appointed commissioner, and whether the Special Prosecutor ends up running matters in parallel or waiting on the commission’s findings.
Victoria hasn’t run a construction royal commission since the 1981 to 1982 inquiry into the Builders’ Labourers’ Federation. Whatever this one recommends will shape how the state contracts, inducts and polices its sites for years, and the subbies who work those sites will be living with the answer long after the November election is done.
Frequently asked questions
What does Victoria’s construction royal commission cover?
Premier Ben Carroll says the scope covers top-tier contractors, subcontractors, labour hire, government and unions, though the exact terms of reference hadn’t been finalised as of early August 2026.
Can the royal commission compel subcontractors to give evidence?
Yes. Royal commissions can compel witnesses to appear and compel the production of documents, and Carroll’s stated scope reaches labour hire and subcontractors, not just head contractors and the union.
What is the disputed $15 billion figure about?
It’s an Opposition and Watson-report estimate of what alleged criminal activity on Big Build sites has cost taxpayers, reported by the ABC. Labor MP Tim Richardson has publicly rejected it as “unfounded and untested.”
When will the terms of reference be released?
As of early August 2026 they hadn’t been set, with a state election due in November adding political pressure to the process.
Sourced from The West Australian, NewsWire, ABC News, The Daily Aus, News24. Original article.
