There is something quietly unnerving about a construction site where the headcount doesn’t match the work getting done. There are high-vis vests everywhere, cranes on the skyline, and billions of dollars in public funding, but somewhere in the ledger, the figures don’t add up. That’s the situation unfolding across Melbourne right now, and it’s been building for years.
A consortium working on Victoria’s Big Build program reportedly warned the government that its workforce had been inflated by roughly 22 percent above what the project would typically require. Twenty-two percent. On a $109 billion infrastructure program, that’s not a rounding error. There is a ghost payroll issue in that industry. Leaked communications suggest that rather than addressing those issues, the government has put them on hold.
Premier Jacinta Allan has insisted that her government took appropriate action in response to the corruption allegations, citing Taskforce Hawk, a Victoria Police unit that targets criminal activity in the construction industry and has filed 93 charges thus far. Since its authority was increased, the Labour Hire Authority has revoked 164 licenses. These figures are accurate and should not be disregarded. However, Deborah Glass, a former Victorian Ombudsman, stated unequivocally last week that the response was far too slow. She said to ABC Melbourne radio, “This should have started years ago.” That is difficult to dispute.
The amount of money that has allegedly been embezzled makes this incident especially hard to ignore. According to an interim report from Queensland’s Commission of Inquiry into the CFMEU, the union’s actions cost taxpayers in Victoria approximately $15 billion. The CFMEU was placed into administration in August 2024 following corruption allegations, but reports have since emerged suggesting that officials continued appointing individuals with criminal records to major roles within Big Build firms. The administration process, it seems, didn’t fully close the tap.
This also has a deeper structural irony. While allegations of ghost workers and inflated headcounts circulate around the Big Build, the broader Australian construction industry is collapsing under real labour strain. The sector recorded 3,596 insolvencies in the 2025 financial year — the worst figure ever recorded — with Victoria accounting for more than 1,000 of those collapses. Record numbers of real tradies operating real businesses are failing.
According to a blue-collar counseling service, 440 of its 1,100 clients in 2025 were from the construction sector, and many of them had ongoing anger and depression. There is a clear disparity between the real workforce that is being overworked and the phantom workforce that is purportedly boosting the Big Build’s payroll.
Another noteworthy observation made by researchers at the University of Melbourne is that, although the number of construction workers has increased by 25% since 2013, those workers are working fewer hours and producing much less. Productivity in the sector has dropped more than 25 percent over roughly the same period. Some of that is structural — material costs, complexity of modern projects, workforce management — but it’s difficult not to wonder how much of the productivity loss is simply baked into a system where overstaffing was apparently tolerated, if not encouraged.
Calls for a royal commission have come from anti-corruption experts and, now, from across the political spectrum. Allan has resisted, arguing previous commissions targeted workers rather than organised crime, and that immediate police referrals are the more efficient path. The Victorian Greens, meanwhile, want IBAC — the state’s anti-corruption body — handed expanded powers now, not after another review cycle. It’s still unclear which approach, if any, will actually reach the deeper infrastructure of criminality that’s allegedly embedded itself in these sites.
What’s clear is that Melbourne’s construction boom, framed for years as a generational investment in Victoria’s future, has a credibility problem it won’t be able to crane-lift its way out of.
