Firefighting politics in Victoria has it engulfed in burning intrigue

The Labor government in Victoria is dogged by a political bushfire that appears to defy all effort to extinguish it.

Fires outside Benloch. Picture: Mark Stewart

Five years have passed since a misfit political adviser named Tristan Weston helped blow up Victorian premier Ted Baillieu’s leadership after starring in four hours of ­secret recordings.

Liberal Party officials, fearing the worst if Weston were to go off the rails after being exposed plotting to undermine the then police commissioner, were detailed in the recordings trying to soften the former adviser’s landing.

The reward when the recording was leaked was days of scandal and the resignation of Baillieu, who was already a diminished leader, but who never recovered from the controversy.

Dismissed as a Walter Mitty character, Weston shuffled off into the night but his legacy has, ­bizarrely, permeated Victorian politics in ways that he could never have imagined. Ever since, there has been a strange, somewhat ­unsettling, stream of recordings of private conversations and meetings, most of which have related to the Liberal Party.

Only on Friday, it emerged that former Liberal frontbencher ­Sophie Mirabella had secretly taped a conversation with federal Aged Care Minister Ken Wyatt as part of a defamation action she was pursuing against her local newspaper. Mirabella, the court was told, had followed Wyatt at a Liberal function in Sydney last year, where she fronted him and recorded the discussion without his permission as part of her legal attempts to prove she hadn’t ­pushed him.

The broader concern for the political classes is that the recordings keep coming and that people continue to make and distribute them, much to the benefit of ­journalism.

It would be wrong to think that the Liberal recording disease doesn’t have implications for Labor. If the speculation is right, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews is facing a potentially ­career-limiting scandal over what he may or may not have promised United Firefighters Union secretary Peter Marshall.

The central argument is that Andrews has so bungled the handling of the restructuring of the Victorian fire services that Marshall must have something on him ­because of the policy to downgrade the role of volunteers.

Marshall’s UFU helped Andrews win the 2014 election by campaigning stridently for Labor, despite having a deeply mixed ­relationship with the party for the simple reason that the union ­leader is considered by some to be erratic and difficult to deal with.

Marshall loathes not getting his own way.

At the centre of Labor worries is that Marshall, or someone close to him, recorded Andrews making promises before or in the wake of the UFU’s support for Labor at the election. The Premier’s Labor ­enemies are convinced. What they lack is evidence.

The Victorian opposition has referred the issue to the state’s anti-corruption commission, with Marshall now fuelling that speculation, having recently fallen out with the government over the ­appointment of a British head of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade.

This falling out comes as Marshall faces an internal fight to ­retain his job.

On April 18, Marshall refused to rule out the existence of a ­recording during an ABC radio ­interview that showcased the union leader’s tactical skills.

Interviewer Rafael Epstein asked: “You don’t have a tape of Dan Andrews that we don’t know about, do you?’’

Marshall: “You’ll have to ask Dan Andrews that, not me.’’

Pursued further on the subject, Marshall refused to rule it out.

Five years after Tristan Wes­ton’s 15 minutes of fame, Marshall had sown seeds of doubt in a paddock rich with political fertiliser.

If there is a tape, the argument goes, then Andrews is cooked as premier. Of course, it would depend what was on it.

Privately, those close to the Premier say a tape doesn’t exist but, in reality, nobody other than Marshall and those closest to him can say.

Asked by The Australian for a copy of the tape, Marshall responded with a text message and a clipping of an episode of The Simpsons where the evil owner of the nuclear plant, Montgomery Burns, hires a campaign team to overhaul his image. But no interview.

For most of Andrews’ premiership, there have been rumours of a secret deal with Marshall, fuelled by the fact that the UFU has been on the receiving end of, until now, generous treatment and the ­government has been rolling from one fire crisis to the next, due in no small part to its decision to ­preference paid firefighters over volunteers. The paid firefighters are almost always UFU members.

Since the 2014 campaign, Andrews’ appeasement of Marshall has been blamed on a series of cock-ups on fire policy.

Andrews has lost one emer­gency services minister, Jane Garrett, who resigned in horror at the way the Premier handled UFU ­negotiations, falling for Marshall’s tactic of going around ministers, straight to the premier of the day.

The volunteer-based Country Fire Authority board was sacked and a generous EBA was pushed through. The CFA chief executive Lucinda Nolan, CFA chief officer Joe Buffone and the deputy chief officer Bruce Byatt also quit.

MFB board members resigned and the government tried to ­restructure fire services, followed by more MFB departures.

On Good Friday, Labor’s bid to restructure the fire sector was ­defeated in parliament after a ­bizarre decision by the Opposition Leader to cheat the Upper House vote by telling two MPs granted pairs by Labor to return to the chamber.

It has been total political and policy chaos.

There are strident critics in Labor who accuse Andrews of dealing with Marshall despite Marshall causing a revolt among the state’s volunteer firefighters and traumatising people including Garrett, who Marshall allegedly warned that firefighters would bury an axe in her head. He has ­always denied the allegation and did not respond to the interview request with The Australian.

Marshall’s critics argue he is primarily interested in widening his union’s coverage by demanding more professional firefighters in Victoria in both the MFB and CFA.

Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria chief executive Andrew Ford runs an organisation that acts for the CFA volunteers, who are a powerful lobby of people that successive governments have not so much wooed but genuflected at their altar.

Not so Andrews, who has ­instead backed the UFU over volunteerism.

“Whatever’s happening behind this dogged persistence to carve up the CFA to satisfy industrial ­demands, it doesn’t pass the pub test,’’ Ford told The Australian.

“It stinks; we absolutely are mystified. We have got a CFA service model that has proven both in day-to-day service delivery and major disasters in this state that it works.

“It’s capable of the highest levels of professional service. It is the only service capable of rallying ­together the resources that are needed for big fires.’’

Volunteers, who by nature strive to be apolitical, argue that the relationship collapsed after April 2016, when the Premier ­inserted himself into negotiations with Marshall. They chart from this point a greater emphasis on Marshall’s members than the volunteers, a fact that has staggered many in Labor.

Not so much because Andrews has backed in the UFU but the fact that Marshall has proved to be such a difficult character to deal with over decades.

In the first part of the Bracks government after taking power in October 1999, there was an internal revolt that almost led to then emergency services minister Andre Haermeyer quitting over Marshall.

The Australian understands Haermeyer was annoyed with the tactics used by Marshall to negotiate directly with then premier Steve Bracks.

Haermeyer, however, insisted on the government paying homage to the volunteers, helping strike the CFA Volunteer Charter in 2000 that made clear their rights and place in the emergency services framework.

Garrett was then a senior ­adviser in the Bracks government and familiar with the way Marshall operated. Neither she nor Haermeyer would comment.

“To be fair, he’s always been ­insufferable,’’ a senior figure from the government of the day said.

Back in that first Bracks term, Marshall was well known for ­ringing people at all hours of the night or texting them to pile on the pressure.

It seems that Marshall sleeps very little and he obsesses with winning his position for the union.

Nearly 20 years ago, people ­insist there were rumours of Marshall having a recording of Bracks, although — again — this is ­impossible to prove without the evidence.

Another senior Labor figure told The Australian that the tape of Andrews was a “total fiction’’ and emanated from the Bracks era; in short, it was a latter-day ­invention to destabilise the present government.

A political figure close to Marshall says he has never heard a tape or seen evidence of it.

One persistent suggestion is that the so far mythical tape does not contain any powerful policy commitments but rather off colour comments about Garrett.

Andrews denies the existence of the tape and his deputy, James Merlino, would not directly address the issue.

Opposition Leader Matthew Guy said Marshall’s indication in the ABC radio interview that there had been a secret deal with ­Andrews warranted an investigation by the state’s anti-corruption commission.

“We are pretty concerned about this. I have never seen anything like this before, where a union leader is literally holding the government to ransom and the government is pretty cagey in its answers.’’

Under the government’s reforms, it wants to make the CFA volunteer only, merging paid ­volunteers with the MFB to make a much larger Fire Rescue Victoria — reforms that would change forever the way the CFA functioned; it currently is supported by a large paid staff as well as a broader volunteer framework.

Gutting the CFA is a huge gamble for Labor but Merlino has vowed to fight on.

“We are considering all parliamentary avenues to see the passage of this legislation,’’ he said.

“The Liberal Party is more ­focused on using firefighters as a political football than providing community safety.’’

The Turnbull government, meanwhile, is odds-on to continue to exploit the bitter divisions in Labor, although the first electoral test will probably be the November Victorian election.

It is without doubt that the fire issue is a significant negative for Labor, although whether it translates to a significant number of seats is up for debate.

One senior Liberal holds the view that voters are somewhat confused about the facts of the fire debate.

Wall-to-wall coverage of minor shifts in policy do not always sink into the collective conscious.

What the story needs, the MP said, is an obvious peg that goes ­beyond the optics of a premier ­appeasing a powerful unionist.

“A tape would do that,’’ the MP said.

Indeed it would.

If it exists.