Operation Richmond shows where the rot started

“Handshake has occurred – it’s done.” So wrote Gavin Jennings, at the time Daniel Andrews’ most trusted ministerial colleague, after four days of secret talks in an undisclosed location secured an in-principle agreement to placate an odious union boss.

It was April 12, 2016, and the Andrews government was 1½ years into what would become a nine-year rule of extraordinary consequence. One of its most pressing headaches was how to stop United Firefighters Union secretary Peter Marshall from “raining hellfire down on the government” if he didn’t get what he wanted out of wage negotiations with the Country Fire Authority.

In that moment, as Marshall, some of his UFU comrades and an unidentified Labor senator popped the cork on a bottle of sparkling white to celebrate, Jennings thought he had completed what he called his “secret mission” on behalf of a premier desperate to avoid an ugly industrial war with the same firefighters who’d campaigned for them at the 2014 election.

This was also Marshall’s view, IBAC heard, as his subsequent comment to a government adviser made clear: “This agreement was negotiated with f—in’ Jennings in a back room. It was endorsed by f—in’ Andrews and cabinet.”

And in that moment, Andrews sidelined the minister nominally responsible for the CFA and other emergency services, undercutting the ability of the CFA management to hold a strong line in negotiations, compromising a senior public servant by deploying him as a political operative and diminishing his own capacity to stand up to Marshall and other union bosses in future disputes.

The final report of Operation Richmond tabled in parliament on Wednesday serves as the origin story for all that became wrong within the Andrews government.

The IBAC investigation into this murky episode, Operation Richmond, does not contain findings of corruption against Andrews or anyone else. As successive IBAC commissioners have remarked and the government now accepts through its promise of reform, the narrow definition of corruption with which IBAC has worked since its inception, limits the scope of its investigations and capacity to make adverse findings.

Instead, the final report of Operation Richmond tabled in parliament on Wednesday serves as the origin story for all that became wrong within the Andrews government. Although it is the last to be published of four IBAC reports for which the former premier was privately examined by the anti-corruption agency, it was chronologically, the first scandal investigated by IBAC.

This is where the rot started.

Its theme and the concerns expressed within its pages about the conduct of ministers, MPs and public servants, overlap with what IBAC found in Operation Watts, an investigation into branch stacking overseen by former factional chief Adem Somyurek, and particularly, the Operation Daintree report, which delved into government money spent on a dubious training program to appease another union boss.

Richmond also dovetails with concerns raised by Ombudsman Deborah Glass when she looked at the politicisation of the Victorian public service and as a case study, the secretive and unorthodox development of plans to build the Suburban Rail Loop, a project now sitting like an anvil on the chest of the state’s finances.

In future years, if anyone wants to understand why former CFMEU boss John Setka was allowed to establish an industrial monopoly over the Big Build, how crucial decisions about a hotel quarantine program designed to stop a deadly virus could be made without the knowledge of any ministers responsible or how Andrews was able to rule unconstrained by the normal checks and balances of government, they should start with Richmond.

At its simplest, Richmond is what happens when a government decides that furthering its own political interests is more important than safeguarding the public interest. The lesson here is less for Andrews, who is long gone from public life, than for today’s premier Ben Carroll and whoever is in government after the November election.

“Operation Richmond highlights how government leaders, including ministers and the premier, can undermine established checks and balances when they fail to model high integrity standards and act as stewards of good governance,” the report notes.

“The matters investigated in Operation Richmond may have occurred some time ago, but the corruption risks and vulnerabilities highlighted – improper influence, failures in ministerial conduct, failures by senior public servants to act impartially and the politicisation of appointment processes for public sector boards – are serious and persist in Victoria’s public sector.”

Let’s unpack these observations with what we now know from the report about the secret meeting in April 2016 where, acting on Andrews instructions, Jennings and senior public servant Tony Bates met with Marshall and conducted a shadow enterprise agreement negotiation with the UFU boss. According to Andrews’ evidence to IBAC, his instructions to Jennings were succinct: “You need to fix this. This needs to be fixed.”

By this stage, Andrews had lost confidence in Jane Garrett, the minister for emergency services who had previously dealt with Marshall, to reach agreement on an EBA and avoid a damaging industrial dispute. Garrett, who died in July 2022 after she announced her retirement from parliament, told IBAC in 2019 what it was like dealing with Marshall, the UFU state secretary since 1995.

She described him as relentless, abusive and threatening.

“Mr Marshall is notoriously difficult to deal with and has been for many years,” she said. “He has a very violent temper and is known for not coping very well if things don’t go his way.” She said that some of her staff were “traumatised” by having to deal with him.

On this, Garrett, would have gotten no argument from Jennings. In May 2016, Jennings sent Andrews a text encapsulating the mood swings of the union boss through the course of a Fair Work Commission mediation. “At 11am he was convinced you were a treacherous c— and I was a f—ing idiot … By lunchtime, he was giving me the benefit of the doubt.”

In another text to a government adviser, he described Marshall as “a violin string about to break”.

Jennings, like Andrews, believed Garrett’s relationship with Marshall had become dysfunctional. He could also see, through near daily reporting in The Herald Sun newspaper, that a campaign was being run against the government from within. He told IBAC that some people were operating with “mischievous intent” and had no interest in resolving the dispute with the UFU. Suspicion would have naturally fallen on Garrett.

Given these circumstances, it was not unreasonable for Andrews to seek other means of reaching agreement with Marshall. But, by keeping Jennings’ “secret mission” and his handshake agreement with Marshall concealed from Garrett, senior public servants nominally involved in EBA negotiations and the Fair Work Commission which serves as the nation’s industrial umpire, Andrews weakened the negotiating position of his own government and emboldened Marshall’s brinkmanship.

Bates bit his tongue when, the day after Jennings sent his handshake text, Andrews and Marshall conducted what IBAC calls a “staged” meeting in the premier’s office, in front on an unwitting staff member, to continue the ruse that an agreement had not yet been reached.

Bates was not the only public servant who found themselves compromised. IBAC recounted how Craig Lapsley, an experienced and respected firefighting chief in Victoria and NSW then serving as the state’s inaugural emergency management commissioner, wrote to Garrett raising concerns that the UFU’s demands, which gave the UFU a broad veto over CFA management decisions, would reduce operational efficiency and potentially, public safety.

Two days later, after he was told by a senior bureaucrat that Eccles wanted the letter withdrawn, he issued a fresh letter recanting his concerns. Eccles told IBAC he had no knowledge of Lapsley’s sudden change of heart.

The pattern that emerges in Richmond, one repeated throughout the life of the Andrews government, is how Andrews’ centralised decision-making at the expense of ministerial responsibility, silenced dissenting voices, blurred the distinction between public servants and political operatives, stacked public sector boards and ran his government with unabashed deceit.

Andrews emphasised in a statement released on Wednesday that the original allegation that launched Operation Richmond – that Marshall blackmailed or otherwise compromised him to get a more favourable wage deal for his union members – was unsubstantiated and false.

Andrews is entirely right on this score but seemingly, blind to the serious problems IBAC did find in this investigation and others into his government. Andrews was not corrupt, but under his nine years in power, government decision-making in Victoria badly lost its way. This is part of his legacy. Operation Richmond shows where it started.

Read more on Operation Richmond:

Secret missions and staged meetings: How a backroom deal led to the IBAC probe.

How we got here: 5 things to know about Operation Richmond.