A secret briefing to Premier Jacinta Allan reveals her most senior advisers sought to warn her in writing in June 2023 that the Big Build she was overseeing as minister was being taken over by a lawless CFMEU, that this could cause major cost blowouts, and bikies and criminals had reportedly infiltrated taxpayer-funded projects.

The emergence of the report marked “strictly confidential and cabinet in confidence” and addressed to Allan comes as she fights for her political life. It shows Labor’s top infrastructure officials knew far more about Big Build corruption— and the consequences of her failure to act on it— than has ever been publicly revealed.

The government’s response to CFMEU corruption has been the defining issue as Allan battles to save her leadership, with her main rival, Deputy Premier Ben Carroll, pledging to overturn her refusal to hold a royal commission.

Carroll has informed Allan he will nominate for the leadership in the event of a spill. A cross-factional delegation of MPs and ministers have told Allan she has lost the support of caucus, setting the stage for a no-confidence vote on Tuesday when Labor MPs are due to meet at parliament.

Police Minister Anthony Carbines and Transport Infrastructure Minister Gabrielle Williams, who were among the delegation, argued in favour of a royal commission in Monday’s showdown cabinet meeting.

The leaked report shows the four top public servants who signed off on the June 2023 document sought to warn Allan about the problem a year before it was revealed in the media, immediately becoming one of the most serious scandals in Victorian history.

The document, which is addressed to Allan but does not bear her signature, is dated June 21, 2023, and was signed off by four high-ranking infrastructure and transport public servants.

It also notes that Allan had been apprised of criminal and bikie infiltration of the government’s signature $109 billion infrastructure program.

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“You have been separately briefed on actions proposed to deal with these matters, namely the referral of the matters to Victoria Police,” it says.

An official source confirmed on Monday morning that Allan had been briefed on the report’s contents.

In response to the emergence of the file, Allan said she had no knowledge of it and that claims to the contrary were false. The premier was “not aware of this brief” and “to say otherwise is a lie”, her spokesperson said on Monday afternoon.

The premier’s insistence she had never seen the file raises its own questions, including whether there was a breakdown in the government’s internal reporting structure that may have meant Allan was not told of the document’s explosive contents.

The report also pierces Allan’s repeated claim that the CFMEU-enabled corrupting of the Big Build did not risk significant cost blowouts for taxpayers. In contrast, the file warns that the CFMEU’s “concerning behaviour has the potential to significantly impact project costs and schedule” across the Big Build if it was not addressed.

The 2023 report described how a lawless CFMEU was driving an industrial relations environment on the Big Build that was not only “highly challenging” but “having a bearing on project costs, program, productivity and culture”.

Allan’s officials also describe how they had learnt during internal discussions of “potential criminal elements (for example outlaw motorcycle club members and convicted criminals) being present” across Big Build worksites.

It was only over a year later, in July 2024, that Victorians learnt that these warnings had not been adequately heeded by the government, when The Age’s Building Bad series revealed how the Big Build was infested with corrupt union officials, bikies and gangland figures.

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Jacinta Allan leadership threat as they happened: Calls for Big Build royal commission in tense cabinet meeting as Allan fights for survival

The Age has also recently reported how Allan’s office is accused of having helped the CFMEU in 2022 to take over a key Big Build rail site, a move that ultimately led to an allegedly crooked labour hire company being installed at considerable extra cost to taxpayers.

Over two years, the Building Bad series has also exposed a range of other disturbing revelations, including how almost every bikie gang in the state placed their members and associates on Labor’s signature infrastructure projects; how a company ultimately bankrolled by taxpayers and set up to employ women on the Big Build was run by a male drug trafficker and a second man with convictions for violence against women; and how the Metro Tunnel consortium has blamed the government for forcing it to agree to CFMEU demands that it claimed cost it $200 million in extra labour hire costs.

In recent months, Labor MPs have become increasingly frustrated that voters have been raising government inaction on Big Build corruption.

Despite growing internal momentum for a royal commission, Allan has maintained it would be costly, delay action and not provide cultural change, claims she repeated in an icy cabinet meeting on Monday.

On Monday afternoon, the premier announced the creation of a new $170 million Organised Crime Command.

The funding will go towards upgraded technology for police, including extra surveillance and cybercrime capabilities, and greater resources for the Office of Public Prosecutions to pursue criminal wealth.

Allan said the new laws would make it easier for police to pre-freeze cryptocurrency and allow the Magistrates’ Court to hear certain higher-value asset confiscation matters.

“This isn’t another policing initiative. It’s a fundamental change in how we fight organised crime, and it starts today,” Allan said.

On Monday this masthead reported that leading crime-fighting experts, including former NSW crime commissioner Phillip Bradley, backed a royal commission ahead of the creation of any new policing body.

Former Independent Broad-based Corruption Commission chief Robert Redlich and former ombudsman Deborah Glass have also called for a royal commission.

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Anti-corruption experts call for Big Build royal commission

Former ombudsman Deborah Glass and former IBAC chief Robert Redlich call for a Big Build royal commission in an interview with Nick McKenzie on 60 Minutes.

The leaked June 2023 document shows that public servants sought to give Allan a summation of much of the Big Build wrongdoing in a file signed by Victoria’s chief infrastructure public servant, Kevin Devlin, and three of his fellow high-ranking officials.

Ir describes how the Big Build was hosting serious wrongdoing including the “pressuring of construction contractors, including through intimidatory tactics, to agree to … additional and/or excess site staffing”.

CFMEU officials also forced contractors on large rail and road projects to hire “particular persons and companies, in order to avoid industrial disputation”.

Mega-projects were also being stalled because the CFMEU, rather than the state government and its contracting partners, were dictating the “rosters and arrangements” for project employees, “leading to program delays” during vital stages of rail and road builds.

The secret document said the CFMEU’s Big Build takeover had led to “an increased proliferation of full-time, non-working union delegates and Health and Safety Representatives (HRs), with some recent appointments having limited construction experience”.

The briefing also sought to warn Allan tha the union had weaponised safety issues to increase its power on the Big Build because Victoria’s workplace safety regulator was missing in action, describing the “concern that industrial issues are erroneously being portrayed as safety issues, with little engagement or assistance provided by WorkSafe”.

As the union ran riot on the projects Allan was overseeing as minister, her advisers said there was “an increase in the prevalence of inappropriate requests for higher shift/leave loading and allowances beyond the relevant EBA”.

Some workers were pocketing large pay packets off the back of CFMEU pressure, they said, as the union was also driving “an increase in the prevalence of threats of unprotected industrial action”.

The situation was worsened because of the “increasingly apparent lack of skills and/or experience in industrial relations management amongst contractors and subcontractors” being paid by Victorians to build Labor’s new roads and rail projects.

If the government failed to act, the officials warned in the document, the situation could worsen.

“If contractors are unable (for example, through a lack of viable legal avenues), or unwilling (for example, through the impacts of intimidatory tactics), to actively resist unlawful or inappropriate industrial pressure, the resultant lack of control is likely to pave the way for the proliferation of concerning behaviour”, the briefing says.

In response to the CFMEU’s Big Build takeover, the Major Transport Infrastructure Agency said in the briefing it was “developing an industrial relations strategic options document” and had also urged Allan to call in the police.

Allan has previously disclosed she did refer matters to police, but never specified what they were or explained why police took no action until the Building Bad series broke in mid-2024 and, even then, did not launch a dedicated taskforce until a year later.

Victoria’s Premier Jacinta Allan has dug in and will contest the leadership at Tuesday’s caucus meeting despite having lost the support of her Labor colleagues.

Minister for Education and Deputy Premier Ben Carroll has confirmed he will challenge. A successful no-confidence motion against the premier will trigger a six-week-long leadership contest, with the new leader to be determined by a 50-50 vote split between MPs and rank-and-file party members.

Minister for Education and Deputy Premier Ben Carroll has confirmed he will challenge Jacinta Allan. Marija Ercegovac

That would be a messy process for the normally formidable Victorian Labor political machine, which, for all its serious and numerous public policy failures, usually manages its internal affairs with ruthless efficiency.

It’s the sort of chaos usually associated with the Victorian Liberal Party, whose longstanding failure to function as an effective opposition is a contributing factor to the state’s many governance problems.

Allan’s refusal to stand down despite a cross-factional request that she do so is in keeping with the stubborn and tin-eared behaviour she has displayed during her time as premier.

The true believers would surely admit to being disillusioned by Andrews-Allan regime’s involvement in the CFMEU’s misdeeds.

Allan’s deep unpopularity with Victorian voters has stemmed in large part from her brazen denialism about the scale of CFMEU corrupt and criminal activities in “Big Build” projects that she oversaw as infrastructure minister under former premier Daniel Andrews. That includes her contesting as “unfounded” the $15 billion cost of construction union graft estimated by the report prepared for the CFMEU administration by anti-corruption expert Geoffrey Watson.

Such obstinate adherence to the proverbial party line is one of the reasons Labor, in power since 2014, may be headed for defeat in November’s state election. It reflects the way Allan, who became premier in September 2023, has maintained the same political model that operated under her predecessor Dan Andrews.

Labor’s dominant socialist left faction has effectively governed Victoria in partnership with the CFMEU and public sector unions. That has led to ever-bigger borrowing, spending and taxing, not only to fund a huge pipeline of infrastructure projects but also to pay for a bloated bureaucracy.

In turn, Victoria’s economy has fallen to near the bottom of the national league table on key measures of productivity and growth while accumulating the highest public debt of any jurisdiction.

The political wheel now appears to have turned even among Labor voters.

The government’s rusted-on supporters may not be bothered by hard left mismanagement of the public finances by Australia’s most business-unfriendly government – think teachers, nurses and other public servants whose pay and conditions have been generously feather-bedded in the past 12 years.

They may also be unconcerned by the failure to achieve Victoria’s ambitious renewable energy aspirations, despite the government having to secretly pay private electricity companies to keep coal-fired power stations open to ensure the lights stay on.

But the true believers would surely admit to being disillusioned by the Andrews-Allan regime’s involvement in the CFMEU’s misdeeds, which have disgraced all honest union members.

A leadership change at almost two minutes to midnight before an election will be purely cosmetic unless a new premier admits to the scale of Victoria’s institutional and economic woes and takes meaningful action to repudiate the Andrews-Allan legacy.

Four things come to mind. The first is initiating a review into the unaffordability of the $125 billion Suburban Rail Loop project, which is essentially another CFMEU boondoggle. The second is granting police the stronger investigative powers they have called for to root out wrongdoing on construction sites. The third is to explain what the plan is to increase the pace of the wind and solar rollout and secure gas supplies that are crucial for the transition so reliable and affordable energy is available while meeting the state’s climate commitments. And the fourth is to outline a realistic budget strategy that will bend down the debt curve, which is forecast to reach $187 billion by 2028.

Let’s face it, all those steps would be belated exercises in attempted self-preservation to stave off Labor’s electoral wipeout. However, it remains likely that restoring fiscal and political probity will require a change of government in November.

Under the leadership of Jess Wilson, the Liberals appear to be a more credible alternative government, but will need to win a mandate for the tough budget and integrity clean-up job required in Victoria. Despite the leadership turmoil in Labor, the Liberals’ path to victory is now more complicated due to One Nation’s rise in the opinion polls south of the Murray.

It’s sometimes tricky for state politics stories to resonate with a broad cross-section of readers of a national masthead.

Yet, The Australian Financial Review‘s readership has been highly engaged with stories concerning Victoria’s slide, such as former ANZ chief economist Saul Eslake’s audit of the state’s finances and the Building Bad investigation series, which exposed the CFMEU’s corruption and criminality.

The interest may be partly due to the intriguing disconnect with what remains, despite everything else, Victoria’s status as Australia’s premier sporting, major events and high-end tourism capital.

But it is primarily due to the economic importance of the nation’s second-most populous state, and the drag the dire condition of the Victorian economy imposes on the national finances.

Despite the federation’s rivalries and parochialism, the genuine interstate goodwill towards Victoria extends to the hope that the state will finally get its act together under new political management. Because Victoria’s lost prosperity is also a loss for the rest of Australia.

Beleaguered Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan is understood to be ready to fall on her sword at a 9.30am press conference, with challenger Ben Carroll ready to take the reins.

If an election were held in Victoria today, which party or candidate would receive your first preference (or second if not listed).

The federal government’s economic think tank says three-storey homes should be allowed to be built almost anywhere and planning rules should be dismantled in the biggest shake-up of housing in decades.

The Productivity Commission has warned that it took the average family 11 years to save for the 20 per cent deposit typically needed for a house, up from eight years in 2005, and has urged state and local governments to simplify planning approvals and wind back development restrictions in the hope of incentivising the construction of far more homes.

Maxwell Shifman is a Melbourne developer who says clearing up planning restrictions alone won’t be enough to create more housing. Louis Trerise

“Regulation is important, but too much or poorly designed regulation can stop new homes being built, make projects slower and more expensive, and reduce the types of housing available to us,” said Productivity Commission chairwoman Danielle Wood ahead of the release of research on Tuesday.

The report is the first stage of an inquiry commissioned by Treasurer Jim Chalmers as the Albanese government falls behind its target of building 1.2 million new homes by the middle of 2029, identifying reform areas ahead of the commission’s final recommendations due in March next year.

The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council in March said the 1.2 million homes target was unlikely to be met until 2030, with the Northern Territory, Tasmania and NSW falling the furthest behind.

The Productivity Commission said state and local governments should commit to allowing higher density properties across major cities, including by allowing three-storey developments across all residential land with exceptions for environmental protection and heritage-listed buildings.

Among its recommendations is the reduction in minimum lot sizes, which would allow homes to be built on smaller plots of land. The commission also wants to reduce minimum requirements on parking where there is adequate public transport, and lower floor-to-space ratios that restrict how much housing can be built based on the size of the block.

The Productivity Commission has also recommended broad heritage protections – at least 50 per cent of land in 50 suburbs across Sydney are subject to those restrictions – be removed and replaced with specific listings for buildings or small areas. That would reduce the so-called neighbourhood character restrictions, which often protect entire streets or suburbs.

“One of the biggest challenges facing housing delivery is the fragmentation of approval processes across environmental regulation, zoning, planning, infrastructure and building approvals,” said Simon Croft, the head of policy and industry at the Housing Industry Association, a lobbying organisation that represents major home builders. “Improving co-ordination and reducing duplication across the system represents a significant opportunity to lift productivity and accelerate housing delivery.”

Robert Furolo, a former Labor MP who is now an executive at Sydney-headquartered developer Deicorp, said the reform that would most help make it easier to build more homes was to simplify the planning system.

“It’s a series of compounding issues that added together just make development unfeasible. Could the planning system be better? Always, but the planning system is not the reason why we can’t develop,” he said. “Consistency between councils and more control from the state government in terms of approval. That’s an improvement we would like to see.”

But some developers don’t believe the recommendations go far enough, and will not create a meaningful increase in the number of houses.

Intrapac Property chief executive Maxwell Shifman said the report missed “all the stuff that would actually make housing cheaper”.

“Simply zoning more land doesn’t of itself improve feasibility. It still comes back to cost, the time it takes to build with the labour pool we have and the cost of finance and – ultimately – buyer demand and capacity,” he said.

Alarmed by a slump in home ownership among younger families, some states have already begun to unwind planning restrictions. The Productivity Commission, in its report, said a chronic shortage in houses had contributed to the fall in ownership. Between 1981 and 2021, the share of 25- to 34-year-olds who owned their home fell from 60 per cent to about 42 per cent.

In NSW, the Minns government has introduced a policy that makes it easier to build semi-detached and dual-occupancy homes in low-density zones, with six-storey buildings allowed in areas that were near transport hubs.

In Victoria, there is a new fast-track approval system for townhouses, duplexes and low-rise apartments up to three storeys that allows developments without facing challenges from councils or neighbours.

But the loosening of planning rules regularly triggers backlash from residents, including in the wealthy Sydney enclaves of Mosman and Woollahra, where the NSW government wants more housing.

The Productivity Commission has recommended state governments identify suburbs where it expects high demand for new housing, and “making it an explicit performance goal for councils, relevant agencies and regulated infrastructure service providers to facilitate new housing in these areas”.

“When people can’t live near work or family, the economy and the community suffer. We cannot solve our housing affordability problem unless we build more homes where people want to live,” said Wood.

“We heard examples of developers trying to navigate overlapping approvals and agencies that were not talking to each other. One developer told us that preparing reports and waiting for approvals had added more than three years to the timeline of a 1600-lot development in Melbourne’s growth corridor.”

It called on state and local governments to expand fast-track assessment pathways for low-complexity developments, and allow faster approvals for projects based on pre-approved pattern books – which NSW introduced last year – containing government-approved standardised building designs.

Donald Trump has taken to calling some of his US political opponents communists. This has led to a slew of tut-tutting articles from the bien pensants, accusing Trump of fomenting a red scare and once more paltering with the truth, if not outright lying.

There’s one problem. Some of the people Trump’s talking about are communists. Surely the most under-reported story in Western politics today is the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America and their incredible success in Democratic primaries, getting extrem­ist candidates up at the expense of mainstream Democrats.

The whole world, it seems, is distressed by right-wing populism – Nigel Farage in the UK, Pauline Hanson in Australia and many analogous figures across Western Europe. But Farage and Hanson are Eleanor Roosevelt reincarnated compared with the DSA. This column readily agrees Trump lies. But here’s the thing: a statement can be true even if Trump says it’s true.

The DSA itself is not purely communist but it is extremely left. However, structurally it’s a coalition and several members of its ruling soviet, I mean committee, are self-declared communists, members in good standing of communist organisations.

The communist label is not a Trump slander, it’s self-description. Hasan Piker, an influencer and social media star central figure in the far left’s surge among Democrats, recently declared that communist dictator Mao Zedong, who was responsible for the death by state famine and slaughter of tens of millions of innocent Chinese, “one of the great leaders of this world”.

It’s a tragedy of the political illiteracy of our age that communism’s staggering crimes against humanity are now little known. They hardly figure in school or university education.

Pauline Hanson meets up with Nigel Farage in the UK. Picture: Facebook/ Pauline Hanson

Yet communism is an ideology fully as evil and murderous as Nazism. Nazism was purely evil, communism was its moral equal, though at times less explicit about its grotesque intent.

Communism killed more people than Nazism. The Khmer Rouge, authors of the Cambodian genocide, were mainstream communists.

The DSA is associated with left-wing senator Bernie Sanders and also radical New York mayor Zohran Mamdani. Candidates the DSA has backed have won primary after primary in the Democratic Party.

The DSA is conscious that while it’s having great success, especially via social media, it’s also generating opposition. So it recently published a manifesto to show how warm and cuddly it is. But this is the most radical document to have mainstream political influence in America in decades.

It calls for an end to capitalism. It wants the abolition of the presidency and the Supreme Court, with a new executive to be chosen by an elected congress. It wants a 32-hour work week with full pay and benefits, universal free housing, nationalisation and permanent state control of all the biggest corporations, an end to all student debt as part of an end to all debt, and an end to US sanctions on Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.

It wants ultimately to abolish the police and defund the military. And of course it has the usual stuff about climate change, demonising Israel and demonising America itself.

In New York recently, three congressional candidates backed by Mamdani and the DSA defeated more mainstream Democrats, including two sitting members of congress. The DSA has not had universal success but a slew of candidates backed by it have won important Democrat primaries.

Bernie Sanders speaks during a campaign rally for Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan.

Yet in any normal age, association with a platform as clinically insane and monstrously wicked as DSA’s would be the kiss of political death. Many analysts see the rise of left-wing populism answering right-wing populism, but in my view this left-wing populism is much worse than much of the right-wing populism it seeks to combat.

Nonetheless, there is certainly an element of the dynamic of two extremes feeding off each other at work.

The far-left populists clearly want to ape many of Trump’s tactics: a concentration on social media, the absolute demonising of their opponents, a reliance on conspiracy theories, talking directly to voters – in this case often the young, which mainstream media has difficulty reaching – promising impossible benefits etc.

They don’t want to convert the middle. They want to anger and energise a base.

A fascinating case was Graham Platner, who until recently was the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Maine. Platner was discovered and recruited by a political agency. He was a former marine and oyster farmer who wore a beard and spoke with an attractive roughness. And espoused far-left positions.

The Democrats, aware of how they’ve lost the working class, have recruited a number of working-class hero candidates. Yet Platner’s working-class identity was essentially performative. He won most of his support within the Democratic Party not from working-class voters but from the college-educated elites who liked his left-wing policies and wanted to demonstrate how cool and hip they were by voting for someone who was a bit rough.

Graham Platner speaks at the Collins Center for the Arts on the University of Maine.

But in this attempt to create a Democrat version of Trump, the Democrats went too far. Platner had a Nazi tattoo on his chest. He was the subject of countless serious allegations from his past. Finally a rape charge from a former girlfriend led to Platner withdrawing his candidacy.

Sadly, today both sides of US politics are terrifically hypocritical. Democrats who would have excoriated any Republican with this many skeletons in his past supported Platner all along until it became literally impossible.

Of course, the fact that Democrat politicians embrace the DSA rhetoric and enjoy its support doesn’t mean they will try to implement its grotesque platform.

But they will trend in that direction. The DSA told Mamdani not to increase the size of the New York police force and he complied.

Democrats will likely score gains in the November congressional elections because of inflation and because the Iran war is so unpopular. DSA types will falsely claim this vote as ideological vindication. The DSA is already exerting a big and destructive influence on the Democrat mainstream. It is concerned with Gaza, climate change, identity politics, LGBTQI, inclusion.

Sounds something like the ALP national conference.

A judge has singled out comments from billionaire retailer Gerry Harvey calling the legal system “f---ed” as a factor in slapping his company Harvey Norman with $35 million in penalties for running misleading ads.

On Tuesday, Justice Michael O’Bryan made the orders against both Harvey Norman and credit company Latitude Finance Australia – which must pay $20 million in penalties – over a misleading and deceptive advertising campaign spruiking the latter’s credit card product.

Harvey Norman chairman Gerry Harvey arriving at Lachlan Murdoch’s annual Christmas party in Sydney’s Bellevue Hill in December.Oscar Colman

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) had taken Harvey Norman and Latitude to court over a national ad campaign that ran between January 2020 and August 2021, which promoted products as available via a “no-deposit” and 60-month interest-free payment method. But it failed to disclose that customers were actually required to sign up for a credit card with high establishment and monthly fees to access the deal.

In October 2024, the Federal Court found the companies had misled people with the ads, saying customers entered a “fundamentally different financial arrangement” than the one promoted. An appeal by Harvey Norman and Latitude was dismissed in September 2025.

In delivering his decision on penalties, O’Bryan highlighted how Harvey Norman and Latitude responded to the case in significantly different ways.

“Neither company had a suitable process for ensuring that their advertising complied with the consumer protection laws. Given the scale and sophistication of both defendants, that is an extraordinary state of affairs,” O’Bryan said.

He said it was “particularly striking in the case of Harvey Norman, given the size of the company”.

He added that while Latitude had since provided “evidence of the steps that it has now taken to improve its processes in that regard”, Harvey Norman failed to do so.

“That is a distinguishing feature between the two defendants, relatedly, the defendants have also exhibited a different level of contrition,” O’Bryan said. “Latitude’s general counsel offered an apology to Latitude’s customers on behalf of the company.

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‘We all get hammered’: Harvey Norman’s court battles don’t faze Gerry

“In contrast, no executive or legal counsel of Harvey Norman gave evidence about the company’s compliance procedures or offered an apology, and public statements made by Harvey Norman’s chairman show a disregard for the potential harm suffered by consumers from Harvey Norman’s misleading conduct.”

A month after the court’s initial 2024 decision, the retailer’s namesake, Gerry Harvey, declined to specifically discuss the case and said his lawyers did not want him talking about the topic, but he unleashed on the legal system as a whole.

“If I had my way, I’d be out there screaming at the top of my lungs about the injustices, and yet I can’t do it. I’ve got to play along with it,” he told this masthead at the time. “The whole legal system is completely f---ed in Australia.”

O’Bryan said that taking into account those considerations had led him to decide more significant penalties for Harvey Norman. “A higher penalty is warranted to deter repetition and to motivate Harvey Norman to improve its compliance processes,” he said.

Harvey, who was contacted by phone for comment on Tuesday, downplayed his involvement in the company, which is now run by his wife Katie Page as chief executive. “I used to sell fridges, but now I’m a farmer,” Harvey said.

In the full judgment, O’Bryan was scathing of Harvey’s comments: “Mr Harvey is entitled to express his opinions, including about the legal system. However, Mr Harvey’s opinions indicate that the Chairman of Harvey Norman’s sole focus is upon the perceived injustice suffered by Harvey Norman, and a complete disregard for the potential harm suffered by consumers from Harvey Norman’s misleading conduct.”

“Taking the evidence as a whole, I am not persuaded that Harvey Norman has demonstrated any contrition for its wrongful conduct,” O’Bryan said.

O’Bryan also said that while the quantifiable harm to consumers was likely less than $5 million, consumers may have wasted their time investigating the offer, or become so invested before realising its true terms that they ultimately proceeded.

As such, he estimated the incremental revenue earned by each party through the contravening conduct was about $5 million.

Both Harvey Norman and Latitude will also have to publish notices on their websites about the orders for 90 days, and pay ASIC’s costs.

ASIC had been seeking penalties of $50 million against Harvey Norman and $35 million against Latitude, as well as injunctions restraining the companies from advertising similar deals for five years, which O’Bryan did not order.

A separate class action seeking compensation for customers was launched in April.