Source : the age
Jane Garrett did not look like the sort of politician who would sabotage her own career for a principle. The woman appointed in 2014 as Daniel Andrews’ minister for emergency services was a rising star of the party, well versed in the Byzantine calculations of Victorian Labor’s factional power plays.
And yet, the anti-corruption watchdog’s Operation Richmond report traces the story of a politician who fought so hard against the calculus of political convenience – in the face of obscene pressure – that she torched her own future rather than put up and shut up.
Now, a decade after she resigned from her ministry rather than endorse a cosy deal with the United Firefighters Union, her stance has been vindicated by the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission.
While the long-delayed report released on Wednesday stopped short of identifying any corruption – within the confines of the legislated definition – it found the union’s secretary Peter Marshall exerted extraordinary influence over a state government desperate to keep him on side.
This is not – chiefly – about rampant sexism, but it does paint a dismaying picture of what happened to a woman who refused to eat the shit sandwich she’d been served: a premier (who made a big deal of the record nine women in his first ministry) told another man to go behind her back to strike a sweetheart deal with the belligerent leader of a union fighting to block affirmative action.
In the report, we learn that then treasurer Tim Pallas, believing Garrett would have to resign or be sacked if she didn’t yield, counselled her to endorse the deal the premier had instructed his special minister of state Gavin Jennings to negotiate with Marshall without her knowledge.
Countless ministers have swallowed their pride when the boss overrules them. Garrett would not. She believed the deal would cost an obscene amount of money and hand over far too much power to Marshall and his troops at the expense of the volunteer-driven Country Fire Authority.
She had been fighting Marshall since 2015 when she says he demanded she intervene in a disciplinary dispute with a senior firefighter allegedly caught with porn and racist material on his work computer.
From that charming start, it got personal. She testified to IBAC that Marshall subjected her to a “huge torrent of abuse”, threatening to “bring hellfire down on the government”.
Marshall was “notoriously difficult to deal with,” she told the commission, possessed a “very violent temper” and was “very relentless … very abusive, very threatening”.
Marshall, still running the union a decade later, disputes all this, saying his texts to Garrett were “direct and to the point” but “can in no way” be considered abusive.
Two months after Garrett resigned her ministry, she said she’d lodge a formal bullying complaint against Marshall, who has always denied claims he once threatened to put an axe through her head.
By then Pallas was saying bluntly on the record she should think about quitting, after an emotional caucus meeting in which Garrett was accused of leaking.
Sure she had – but who wasn’t back then? Garrett was always a divisive figure, a factional player willing to fight her corner, make enemies and burn bridges. Reporters’ phones buzzed constantly.
She was a close ally of Adem Somyurek in his warlord heyday – before The Age exposed his branch-stacking operation – when he swung her into an upper house seat in 2018 after she walked away from the battle to hold the seat of Brunswick.
In 2021, the anonymous but union-affiliated Twitter account EBAtruth was still dedicated to trolling her as a “rat”, “liar” and “psychopath”. She called this out when the government claimed it couldn’t release a report into bullying and sexism in the firefighters’ unions that she commissioned in 2015 – because they could not find a copy.
By then Garrett was enduring the return of the breast cancer that would kill her in 2022. She’d been fighting the illness since 2016.
Four years on, we finally get the report exposing the ruthless way her objections were dealt with by a premier who never brooked dissent.
Garrett’s family welcomed the report, noting in a statement how they had “witnessed the enormous pressures she endured during the incredibly stressful time that she was minister for emergency services”. They wished she was here to see the findings.
It is a pyrrhic victory: she lost the battle and the war, and the Country Fire Authority’s entire leadership was sacked to make way for the demands issued by Marshall. He is still running the show.
Victoria’s newest premier, Ben Carroll, swears he’ll do things differently. On Tuesday, he rolled out what is essentially the sixth ministerial reshuffle under Labor. New faces, new promises.
How many of those new ministers will read the Richmond report as a cautionary tale about what happens if you get in the way?
Michelle Griffin is federal bureau chief for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. She was The Age’s state editor in 2016.
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