Recent changes to an ABC news article only serve to compound the impression of a deliberate agenda to defame firefighters.
On March 6th, ABC reporter Richard Willingham jumped on board a fake news narrative initiated by the Herald Sun, with the undisclosed involvement of Liberal MP Brad Battin. Willingham repeated, without attribution, the Herald Sun’s headline lie: that under a new Enterprise Bargaining Agreement, firefighters could access 196 days off every year (Internet Archive link: 7th March version).
The next day, MFB firefighter Chris Cleary tweeted a direct message from Herald Sun reporter Matt Johnston, which revealed that a combination of three distinct counting errors had contributed 94 days of the 196-day total. It beggars belief that Willingham (or AAP/Guardian, or the dozens of broadcast outlets that also made the ‘196 days’ claim) independently assessed the EBA and arrived precisely the same incorrect three-digit figure. The logical conclusion is that the ABC, AAP, Guardian and all broadcast media acted as an uncritical echo chamber of Herald Sun fake news.
Following a social media backlash and complaints to ABC Audience & Consumer Affairs, on March 29th the ABC ‘corrected’ the story. (The timing is interesting: 8:39pm on the night before Good Friday, when firefighters were distracted by the marathon Legislative Council debate on fire service reform.)
Unfortunately this is a Clayton’s correction. The revised story claims that some firefighters will be entitled to ‘more than 130 days leave in a year’, later making a clearer claim of ‘133 days leave for some staff who have served for three years and have not taken any personal or sick leave.’
Immediately it is clear that Willingham is using a ruse to mislead the reader: ‘every year’ was altered to ‘in a year’ to allow for the fact that his hypothetical firefighter is using three years’ worth of banked personal and sick leave in a single year, thereby counting three times the year-on-year allocation! Through this artifice, Willingham adds 36 spurious days to his calculation.
Clearly, Willingham is seeking to twist the figures and his language, in order to falsely defame firefighters. Once poles apart, the ABC is now on a par with the Herald Sun, in terms of its agenda-driven fake news ‘journalism’.
But tripling the personal leave allocation is not the only problem with Willingham’s figure. It also includes 10 days of community service leave, neglecting the fact that many EBAs, including Willingham’s ABC EBA, include unlimited paid community service leave. In fact, this is mandated by the National Employment Standards, although it may be unpaid. Willingham also includes 4 days of pressing necessity leave, which is generally used to allow firefighters to cut a shift short to attend to a family emergency. Pressing necessity leave is very rarely used, and community service leave almost never, but Willingham includes them because he wants to maximise the reputational harm caused to firefighters.
Willingham also mistakenly makes direct use of the “65 days” annual leave figure stipulated by the MFB EBA. The “65 days” are calendar days, not work days. It is incorrect to state that firefighters have 65 days off due to annual leave, in the same way that is incorrect to represent an ordinary worker’s 4 weeks of annual leave as 28 days off, by counting Saturdays and Sundays. The reality is that firefighters are allocated 32.5 shifts off for annual leave, and most years have 28 shifts off. For example:
So here is another 32.5 days spuriously included in Willingham’s ‘corrected’ claim of 133 days off each year, on top of 36 spurious days of sick/personal leave and 14 dubious days of community service and pressing necessity leave.
So what is the truth about firefighter leave?
A fair person would approach that question by asking: how much time is spent working each year by firefighters, compared to a nominally typical worker, after accounting for annual leave (the only leave that can be taken without a demonstrated special need)? The calculation is best done on the basis of hours, not days, because every night shift straddles two calendar days. I’ve done that calculation and published the details. The result is this:
I published the details of that calculation on the 9th of March and alerted Willingham to them. He knows the truth, but he chooses to continue peddling falsehood. He does this even though he is well aware, through my social media badgering, of mass testimony proving the existence of serious crisis of morale and mental health caused by the public lies of politicians and media outlets, told in order to vilify firefighters.
It’s a disgrace. It shouldn’t happen at any media outlet, and especially not at the once-great ABC.
