When I was a firefighter, I was told of a fire that had been burning, deep in a coal seam, for years. Nobody could put the fire out. All they could do was try to make sure that it didn’t burst into an uncontrolled conflagration.
Victorian premier Daniel Andrews must be feeling kind of the same way about the firefighters’ union scandal.
Back in 2013, Andrews made a grubby deal with the Melbourne city-based United Firefighters’ Union, promising a raft of favours – including taking over the volunteer, rural Country Fire Authority – in return for vital support at the state election. In 2016, Andrews kept his word, gutting the CFA and sacking his own emergency services minister, who objected. The CFA, beloved by Victorians and highly respected around the world as a top-class volunteer firefighting organisation, staged massive protests to no avail.
In an early demonstration of his astonishing ability to simply walk away from political crises that would bring down most governments (or Victorian voters’ astoundingly blind loyalty), Andrews escaped the CFA scandal seemingly unscathed, winning an increased majority at the next election.
But it turns out that the fire has never been quite put out. It flared up briefly in 2018, when the militant head of the UFU threatened to turn on Andrews. In a radio interview, Peter Marshall ranted that “the truth will come out”. He conspicuously avoided answering repeated questions about a secret recording he allegedly made of the premier.
In that interview on April 18, 2018, Marshall sent Andrews a very direct message; if you betray me and my members, I’ll come after you, even if you’re the Premier. The general view was that since 2014, Andrews had bent over backwards to give the UFU pretty much everything it wanted, yet here was Marshall torching one of the closest union-government alliances in the state’s history.
Marshall seemingly backed down from his threats. But, revelations of a secret anti-corruption investigation of the Andrews deal suggest that he has been on a slow burn ever since.
The interview came to the attention of IBAC, Victoria’s secretive anti-corruption authority. Whistleblowers also provided material and statements to the organisation. About the middle of 2018, six months before the November state election, IBAC started sniffing around the relationship between the Andrews government and the UFU.
Operation Richmond was off and running […] Over the next six months, including the tense four weeks of the 2018 election, the investigation slowly built, gathering information and interviewing witnesses.
The wheels of IBAC grind slowly and secretively. It can order phone taps and undercover surveillance, seize documents and electronic records, and hold secret hearings. But it is a painfully methodical process, with significant thresholds to each stage of an investigation.
IBAC is quite different to its counterpart in NSW, ICAC, which holds its hearings publicly. It was just such public hearings which have brought down three premiers: Nick Greiner, Barry O’Farrell and now Gladys Berejiklian.
By contrast, IBAC is so far refusing to comment on its Andrews investigation.
While it wasn’t commenting publicly, IBAC was busy crossing the legal thresholds to expand its probe and use more of its powers. Subpoenas started landing on doorsteps. Figures familiar with the 2016 CFA dispute and EBA negotiations were questioned under oath behind closed doors. Labor MPs, current and former political advisers and public servants were among those questioned in secretive hearings.
IBAC attended various addresses, in 2019 and 2020, collecting a trove of material.
Some sources believe IBAC has tapped phones, raising the potential that conversations between UFU figures and Labor MPs may have been recorded.
The Australian
“Teflon Dan” has so far survived: the East-West Link scandal (where he kicked off his term by paying a billion taxpayer dollars not to build a road), the CFA crisis, signing up to China’s BRI, the hotel quarantine disaster, the world’s harshest lockdowns, and even being caught openly lying about a broken promise to build 4,000 ICU beds.
But the slow-burning IBAC investigation threatens to erupt into a firestorm that even Andrews will find hard to put out – especially if his pet firefighters’ union downs hoses and starts pouring its own petrol on the flames.
Please share this article so that others can discover The BFD