The Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU) — of which we have been hearing so much in the past week, and not in a good way — is the fifth-biggest union in the country.
Its history gives us a particular window into Australia's economic, political and industrial landscape over the past 40 years which somehow pulls together threads of several of the big stories dominating the news this week.
As unlikely as this sounds, that stretches from JD Vance being named as Donald Trump's vice presidential running mate, to Andrew Forrest's "retreat but not surrender" on green hydrogen, to a ramping up of Labor's counter-attack on the Coalition's nuclear policy.
That's all on top of the tawdry tales emerging from the union's construction division, particularly in Victoria, and the rather unedifying spectacle of federal and state governments apparently being completely blindsided by what has been revealed.
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But what to do about the CFMEU's construction division?
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton wants to make deregistering the union an election issue.
There are calls to bring back the Australian Building and Construction Commission, among other measures, to deal with a union, and a culture, which is infecting everything from the catastrophic bullying of young kids on work sites, to the cost of taxpayer-funded construction projects right through to questions of political donations and superannuation governance.
Others are not so sure that deregistration, as attractively simple as it sounds, would solve the problem.
The CFMEU, this argument goes, is itself a creation of the vacuum left when the old Builders Labourers Federation was deregistered by the Hawke government. Coalition government legislative changes, which mean industrial representation is not just limited to unions, also mean it is not clear where the bad elements would end up next.
The rise of 'mega-unions'
The CFMEU was one of the "mega-unions" created in the great industrial restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s.
The rapid decline of Australia's manufacturing base and the dismantling of centralised wage fixation were diminishing the power of unions which had traditionally been based on particular trades.
The plan was to maximise bargaining power by merging "craft" unions into industry-based entities.
(Not all the craft unions disappeared: the Breweries and Bottleyards Employees' Industrial Union of Workers of Western Australia is still listed by the Fair Work Commission and the Bacon Factories' Union of Employees, Queensland was only deregistered last year.)
Nurses, shop workers, and teachers have much bigger unions than the CFMEU, which has been a hotchpotch of workers covering construction, forestry, maritime, mining and the textile, clothing and footwear (TCF) industries.
The miners, however, voted to leave at the end of last year. Legislation passed by federal parliament a couple of weeks ago clears the way for the manufacturing division — notably the women employed in the textile, clothing and footwear sector — to leave too.
All those de-mergers of themselves will have some influence on the CFMEU's power, whatever is happening in the construction sector, as will more serious attempts to distance the union from the ALP, and thus the government.
These re-alignments come at a time when there are new shifts in the broader economic environment of the sort that led to the formation of such mega-unions in the first place.
The mega-unions arose as the economy was being deregulated in the 1980s and 1990s.
Before that, governments of both persuasions had been intervening to support the development of heavy industries from steel production to cars.
In the great deregulatory push, industry policy and government intervention became dirty words.
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Renewable energy ambitions
But we are now in a new global era of industry policy, driven by a need to overcome market failures in new low emissions industries.
Huge government spending policies in the United States are designed to do this. And at home, the government's Future Made in Australia policy is also trying to overcome these market failures, as well as address strategic vulnerabilities we might have (that is, industries we need to have onshore) as geopolitical tensions grow.
There are, unfortunately, so many threads of ambition tied up in the Future Made in Australia idea that the government has been fairly woeful at explaining what it is actually trying to do.
But the policy — or suite of policies — probably also suffers from "government interventions" still feeling a little unnatural after decades of free market rhetoric, even in an age when the supposed party of free markets is advocating a government-owned nuclear power industry costing hundreds of billions of dollars.
It also involves advocating renewable energy or low carbon industries which have been under relentless political attack for more than a decade.
Which is where Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest and his company Fortescue come in with their announcement this week that Fortescue was pulling back from ambitious plans for green hydrogen — hydrogen produced by splitting the hydrogen from oxygen in water using renewable energy.
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The Albanese government has nominated green hydrogen as the "flagship" of the "net zero transformation" part of the Future Made in Australia plan, because it can be used to make things like "green" iron and steel.
Forrest's plans were slightly more ambitious: to export green hydrogen as an energy source in itself — a bit like LNG. But the market just now doesn't support that.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen noted this week that Fortescue was not on the government's shortlist of 103 clean hydrogen projects in Australia, "including 13 already operating and 17 under construction".
A critical and difficult decade ahead
But the headlines, particularly in an industry which most people don't understand, have created even more confusion about what the government might be trying to do with its policies, a confusion that the Coalition has been more than happy to foster in its response to the Fortescue announcement.
At the National Press Club this week, Bowen stepped up Labor's counter-attack on the Coalition's nuclear policy.
Whether for reasons of energy certainty or climate change, we face a critical decade on energy policy, he said.
Our choice has to be an "either/or" proposition between renewable energy and nuclear since the spectre of nuclear energy was likely to wipe out the necessary investment already happening in renewables.
This brings us to JD Vance and his speech at the Republican National Convention about the broken small town communities left behind by change in America's industrial base in the past 40 years.
Those small towns resonate with another element to Labor's "critical decade" argument. Communities facing decline as coal-fired power stations close in the next decade can't wait for the possibility of nuclear power some time down the road. They need greater certainty now about what will happen to them.
Labor is overseeing renewable energy hubs being built in these communities and also wants its proposed Net Zero Authority to oversee transition plans for such places that actually help them adjust. While well intentioned, many of the transition schemes for industries like cars and TCF industries didn't work in the past.
Persuading workers who might feel powerless and without a future that the government is looking out for them, rather than turning a blind eye to workers made powerful for all the wrong reasons in the construction industry, should be a potent message in the lead up to the next election.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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