Almost five weeks of hearings spread over the last three-and-a-half months have torn the scab off what appears to be a brutally Hobbesian commercial environment in which the union has apparently, and not with total success, tried to impose blanket rates of pay and working conditions on all employers.

Information gleaned from phone taps and evidence from a wide range of witnesses has indicated apparent misconduct, which in some cases takes the form of cartel-like behaviour, is not restricted to the CFMEU and its peers.

There has been clear testimony that once CFMEU-sanctioned enterprise agreements have been signed, affected employers in a range of sectors, including concreting, scaffolding and bricklaying, worked together to fix prices in order to make the union-specified wage rates a paying proposition.

Allegations about price fixing for concreting and scaffolding, aired when the commission was in the city in July, have already resulted in the establishment of an investigation by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

Wednesday's hearing heard a tape recording in which a Canberra bricklayer was effectively siccing a CFMEU organiser, John Lomax, onto a competitor who was undercutting the agreed rates for that work.

These issues, while alarming in themselves, are almost as nothing when it comes to the CFMEU's failure to control one of its own however.

The revelation former lead organiser, Halafihi "Fihi" Kivalu, accepted $100,000 in inappropriate payments on the understanding he would use his position of influence to obtain work for Gungahlin concreter, Elias Taleb, is one of the most serious matters brought to light by the commission since its establishment in 2014.

Matters are made worse by the fact that even though some of Mr Kivalu's workmates knew of alleged impropriety up to a year before the facts came to light in the commission, nothing was done.

Branch secretary Dean Hall admitted on Thursday that although Mr Taleb had shown him a list of work sites with amounts he said Mr Kivalu was demanding at a meeting in June he had not referred the matter to the police.

Mr Kivalu, who was made redundant due to performance issues last year, is now awaiting trial on blackmail charges.

Mr Lomax, a former football great who learnt last week that a blackmail charge against him would be allowed to lapse, has not emerged unscathed.

A litany of questionable CFMEU tactics, including blocking non union-sanctioned contractors from commercial jobs, was revealed in a succession of phone intercepts played to the commission on Wednesday.

While significant questions still remain to be answered about the political motivations that led to the then Abbott-Government's decision to establish the trade union royal commission, it does appear to have done the ACT a significant service by exposing dubious practices and a complex web of relationships to the light of day.