ur bid more attractive than the other bid.''
This may have helped win the bid but it was a costly and risky route to take.
Workers have expressed frustration to The Age at regular problems with getting equipment and that poor management has meant they can spend days with little or nothing to do.
The senior executive agrees. ''Thiess didn't have enough skilled supervisors and managers to do it.''
Cesar Melhem is an industry veteran from the Australian Workers Union. He says directly hiring staff can work, as it did on the AWU-dominated EastLink project, but it needs management skill. ''On a project like this, if you haven't got the right supervision … you're buggered.''
The AWU offered another path for Thiess in Victoria's brutal building IR landscape. The AWU is unpopular among building unions, which accuse it of cutting cosy deals with employers, something Melhem rejects. During the West Gate dispute in 2009, the CFMEU and metal workers' union went to war with the AWU, accusing it of striking a low-ball deal with John Holland.
Curiously, when the Brisbane-based Thiess won the right to build the project, it favoured giving coverage of the work to the more feisty CFMEU and metal workers, and left Melhem and his union sidelined. Powerful figures in the ALP group associated with the AWU believe the decision was in part driven by complex factional manoeuvrings within Labor. They will never forgive John Brumby for his handling of the desal project and how it hurt Labor's 2010 election prospects.
If rival bidder John Holland had won, Melhem says, the AWU would have had up to 500 extra members on desal. The Age has confirmed John Holland would have made much greater use of contractors and pushed for flexible AWU conditions.
During the bid process John Holland also attracted high levels of scrutiny from the Department of Sustainability and Environment, with detailed questions on the deal it planned with the AWU.
Barraclough would not be drawn on whether political pressure was exerted. Former treasurer John Lenders - a member of the AWU-associated group within the Labor right - rejects the theory as ''over-the-top nonsense''.
For Thiess' spend-it-big and union-friendly approach to work, there needed to be genuine goodwill between the builder, unions and the workforce.
Mighell and other unions say there was - at first. ''I gave my word to the premier of Victoria [John Brumby] that we'd get it done.''
But the risks taken on by the builder led to another costly mistake, where the money flowed with little oversight.
In early 2010, senior Thiess executives secretly funnelled more than $500,000 to strike-breaker Bruce Townsend for eight weeks' work before the arrangement was abruptly terminated.
In November 2010, The Australian reported details of the deal and that Townsend had been engaged to infiltrate the workforce. The news sparked a walk-off - the first of a series of strikes over the next seven months.
It also led to the departure of project director Greg Miller and senior executive Marcus Carroll, neither of whom have ever commented on the agreement. One theory is that, having signed such a generous union deal, management panicked and felt they needed a back-up plan if things went horribly wrong. Yet the Townsend affair, while dramatic, was just one of a number of missteps.
Thiess launched - and just settled - a large legal case against the CFMEU for unlawful strikes and has lodged claims with the Baillieu government for the ''cyclonic weather'' and labour problems on site.
No expense has been spared in litigating in the hope that some of the huge losses will be retrieved. Whatever the outcome, the builders are unlikely to come out ahead - unlike the lawyers and workers on the project.
But while the big left-wing unions got their way at Wonthaggi, in the long run they may not be so lucky, with revived right-wing foes using Red Wonthaggi to overturn and crush the union gains.
Ben Schneiders is workplace editor. Royce Millar is an investigative reporter.