The collapse at a multi-storey building site in Civic on Monday will be used as a test case in ensuring safety for members of Australia's largest construction union.
But the Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union's national health and safety expert, Martin Kingham, said he was denied access to the site yesterday morning on the grounds that he was not accredited under the Workplace Relations Act because he was not from the ACT.
Part of a building collapsed on the construction site on the corner of Alinga and Marcus Clarke streets about noon on Monday. Emergency crews said it was lucky none of the 139 site workers had been killed or injured.
In the wake of the collapse, the union has called for an audit of all formwork construction sites, in Canberra and throughout the country, and has brought in Mr Kingham, regarded as the union's foremost expert on all occupational health and safety issues.
He said yesterday the union needed to investigate the site to find out what went wrong so that all building companies could avoid similar disasters in the future.
But he said the provisions of the Act stipulating that only some union officials had specific statutory rights to access building sites hindered the work of the union in ensuring safe workplaces.
''It's a lot more instructive if we can say that on this job, there was a failure of this particular type of component, of this particular type of equipment, and pay some special attention to that,'' he said.
''That's what we do in this industry. If there's a near miss, or someone is injured or killed, we try to find out why, as quickly as possible, to share that information with the whole construction family to ensure that other people don't suffer the same risk.''
He said Leighton Contractors had been ''obstructive'' to the union in Canberra.
''It once again shows how [the Act] is so wrong if companies can use it to block workers' representatives from getting on to the site to do something as basic as have a look at why a building came down, get the information from WorkCover and the employer so we can share that with our members and assist in the process of getting the job made safe and getting the workers back on the site,'' he said.
But a spokeswoman for Leighton Contractors told The Canberra Times that an accredited union representative from the ACT had already been granted access to the site for the purposes of carrying out a safety investigation for Work-Cover. ''We don't want to get into a fight with CFMEU,'' she said. ''But from our perspective, it is a matter of relevance that an ACT representative of the union has been given access.''
The union's ACT branch secretary, Sarah Schoonwater, said it was also trying to expedite the process of getting workers back on site amid complaints they were not being paid after the collapse.
''There are workers who are not being paid on the job. Leighton's have denied this but we've had plenty of workers complain to us that they're not being paid.''
The spokeswoman for Leighton Contractors confirmed that all the company's employees were still being paid, and that most sub-contractors had either been relocated to other jobs or were still being paid while the investigation continued.