Conspicuously absent from The Age’s revelation yesterday that the CFA had engaged the services of notorious union-busting US law firm, Seyfarth Shaw, was any consideration of the possibility that Jane Garrett was complicit.
The article points out that the report, dating from March 2016, was commissioned during Garret’s time as minister, but concludes: “It is understood that Ms Garrett had no knowledge of the report.”
How did they reach that understanding? Who told them that, and would that person have a vested interest in concealing the truth? We don’t know, and they’re not telling us.
Also conspicuously absent from this article and virtually every article from The Age on this dispute is any analysis or even mention of the revelation of the October 2015 report of the Fire Services Review that:
From media reports at the time and information received by the Review, it is clear that the previous government deployed a deliberately ideological attack against the UFU and effectively encouraged CFA and MFB to go to industrial war with their respective workforces.
So yesterday’s well-deserved public vindication of firefighters’ uncompromising opposition to the stance of the former senior management of the CFA ought to have come way back in October. But it didn’t. The revelation that the CFA engaged a union-busting law firm under Jane Garrett’s watch is potentially the smoking gun that confirms the suspicions many firefighters hold about Garrett’s activities in relation to the Fire Services Review.
How Jane Garrett Spun the Fire Services Review
As I discussed in previous articles (The Age’s Parallel Universe and Aggressor or Defender?), Garrett suppressed the report’s release and soon begun spinning its findings around diversity and bullying, finding an eager mouthpiece in The Age’s Richard Willingham, and soon after, in every major media outlet. Comments about diversity and bullying were carefully juxtaposed — whether by Garrett or Willingham, we don’t know — with Garrett’s decision to bring in the Victorian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commissioner, Kate Jenkins:
“In 2015 it is just not acceptable that there are so few women in our fire services,” Ms Garrett said.
“There are clearly concerns about the workplace culture in our fire services, that is why have asked Kate Jenkins to get involved.”
In so doing, the issue of diversity was linked with bullying in ways that do not reflect the findings of the Fire Services Review. Moreover, the clear implication is that firefighters are to blame for both. How does Garrett think that firefighters have any responsibility for the recruiting decisions made by the corporate arms of the fire services? Willingham didn’t bother asking.
Who were the perpetrators and who were the victims of bullying? Again, the question was not asked, by The Age or any other outlet, because the intended message is that firefighters are sexist bullies. (Although one firefighter did slip through the armaments and emotionally explain on air on 3AW why she felt bullied by Jane Garrett.) In actual fact the secret report Garrett was refusing to release noted that the Review “did not receive sufficient information to comment on the prevalence” of bullying, but did note that dissatisfaction and negativity caused by bad treatment by senior management was felt “consistently by old and new employees alike.”
Throughout December, January and February, Garrett continued to appear in the media making comments about diversity and bullying in the fire services that suggested firefighters were in the wrong. During this period, the MFB under Garrett’s watch moved to lower recruitment standards, purportedly in order to recruit more women. Female and male firefighters understandbly objected and the union disputed the matter. Uncoincidentally, as a result, Garrett found further opportunities to smear firefighters. The Age was thoroughly on board Garrett’s crusade, going to the extent of misrepresenting comments made about a culture of gendered bullying in volunteer CFA brigades as applicable to career firefighters. (Incidentally, one of The Age’s sources was Elissa Jans, Executive Committee member of VFBV District 13.)
After months of spinning its contents, Garrett finally released the report of the Fire Services Review on the 16th of March 2016. As firefighters had hoped, the report reflected what had actually been going on: morale had been driven to its “lowest in decades”, due to a “fundamental disconnect between the senior management and operational firefighters” that had become an “almost uncrossable chasm” in the case of the MFB. While acknowledging that there was blame on all sides, the Review pointed the finger squarely at the abovementioned “deliberately ideological attack on the UFU” as the driver of hostilities and destroyer of morale.
The contents of the report seemed to confirm firefighters’ suspicions that Garrett had suppressed the report because she didn’t like what it had to say. Surely, now, firefighters would be vindicated in the media.
But that was not to be. The spin that Garrett had spent months putting on the report had stuck. Garrett’s comments in the wake of its release made sure that was the case:
“This report requires everybody to look in the mirror and say we all take responsibility for why the fire services are in the state they are in today,’’ Ms Garrett said. “And everybody has a responsibility and no one more than Peter Marshall, who has a huge role to play in stepping up and taking the findings of this report … and just changing.”
Coverage of Garrett’s comments from The Age’s Richard Willingham again appeared, through juxtaposition, to associate the diversity issue with a culture of hostility, and to lay blame with firefighters and their union:
She said it was a deep concern about what is happening off the fire ground.
“We want to stamp out what has become a dysfunctional culture.”
Ms Garrett again took a swipe at the UFU for trying to block efforts to recruit more women into firefighting ranks.
The same article reports that Garrett and senior management had reiterated her call to scrap the consultation provisions currently in place between the union and senior management. It would appear to have entirely escaped Willingham’s attention that the Review identified just this push — via the so-called Termination Case — as a key front in the MFB’s “industrial war” on its firefighters, and a prime driver of spiralling morale and the “almost uncrossable chasm”.
Far from acting to end the “deliberately ideological attack on the UFU”, initiated by the coalition government, it appeared to firefighters that Garrett had elected to continue it. The Review was critical of the war on firefighters, so she suppressed the report, and spent months spinning its contents, doing precisely what the Review had complained of: generating publicity that was “clearly inflammatory and designed to portray firefighters in a poor light.” The spin stuck even after the review was released.
The Smoking Gun
Were firefighters just paranoid to think that they had been deliberately targeted by Jane Garrett’s ideological anti-unionism? Didn’t the Review’s findings only apply to the period prior to Garrett’s ministership? The media would appear to think so, judging by its uniformly unfavourable coverage and refusal to look at the Review’s findings of an ideological war on firefighters.
But we now know that under Jane Garrett’s watch, the CFA engaged the services of Seyfarth Shaw, so well-known that it is covered in the ‘Antiunion Law Firms’ entry of The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Business, Labor and Economic History. The report contains many concerning recommendations, of a nature which the CFA (and perhaps Jane Garrett) no doubt expected. The Age advises that the report recommended thwarting the union presence in the organisation, including a move away from collective bargaining and a push to retrospectively dock pay for industrial action (despite all UFU work bans having been approved by Fair Work Australia as protected industrial action).
Most damningly, and most relevant here, the report recommends the CFA work to ‘erode public confidence in the union agenda’. That is, to continue exactly the same kind of deliberate propaganda war the Fire Services Review found it was already engaged in.
Was Garrett Involved?
Was Jane Garrett involved in the decision to seek advice from an internationally notorious union-busting law firm? I am not suggesting she was, but it is certainly a question that must be asked, given that she was the Minister in charge at the time.
This is a question that must be asked, and thoroughly investigated. If true, it’s the smoking gun. If true, it strongly suggests that the suspicions raised above are also true: that Garrett has been running an anti-firefighter propaganda campaign since October 2015, if not earlier. If that is the case, everyone — including media commentators — whose opinion about the CFA dispute has been influenced by her spin ought to re-evaluate their stance.
What’s the government’s position on Jane Garrett’s potential complicity? Such a hawkish anti-union stance is surely incompatible with Labor values. Labor MP Harriet Shing has already grilled former CFA CEO Lucinda Nolan about the Seyfath Shaw scandal, accusing her at a Parliamentary Inquiry of having been heard to say words to the effect of ‘well then we’ll just destroy the union’. (Nolan denied it.) Another couple of Labor MPs have indicated their displeasure with the CFA’s actions on Twitter:
They are unhappy with the prosecution of an anti-union agenda, but are they willing to look at whether Jane Garrett was complicit? Tim Pallas should be interested: after all, his response to claims of leaking were that Garrett should resign if she’s “not contributing to the cause”. But it’s not political revenge I’m interested in.
What I really want to see is firefighters vindicated.
Only yesterday I heard an SMS read out on ABC 774 that labelled firefighters as “misogynist, racist thugs”. The link between this opinion — a form of hate speech — and Jane Garrett’s neatly spun message of firefighters as the perpetrators of diversity-related bullying, could not be clearer.
Opinions such as this are dead wrong and very hurtful, but just as importantly, they damage the political prospects for firefighters to win their battle to improve safety, both their safety at work and the safety of the public.
The damage so caused to the workplace rights of firefighters, and indeed to the public good, stems directly from the propaganda campaign waged by the likes of Jane Garrett, the Liberal Party and the Herald Sun, as a part of their deliberately ideological war on firefighters.
It is the social duty of everyone who votes, and especially, everyone with the power to influence voting patterns — journalists — to recognise such propaganda when they see it, to interpret it critically and avoid giving it undue exposure. At the end of the day, it’s about firefighter safety, and your safety.
