Summary: Evidence shows the VEOHRC inquiry into the fire services is a political stitch-up that willfully avoids addressing the real issues: vilification and bullying by former senior managers, politicians & the media.
A kind of propaganda equivalent of Newton’s First Law applies to media coverage of the Victorian fire services, as shown last week.
The law of propaganda inertia would state: a media narrative, unless disturbed, will continue proceeding in a fixed direction, indefinitely.
The inertia of media narratives is extraordinarily high, making them almost entirely impervious to disturbance by any amount of evidence or reasoning.
So it is that journalists last week adhered to a narrative set in motion by Jane Garrett almost three years ago. Firefighters knew this narrative was false and malicious from the outset. Since then, evidence confirming what we knew has emerged on several occasions, including last week’s the disturbing denial by Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission Kristen Hilton that firefighters have suffered serious harms as a result of vilification.
Garrett’s false narrative
The anti-firefighter narrative of the week last week was this: firefighters are misogynists and bullies. The context of its re-emergence was Thursday’s Court of Appeal decision to prohibit the Victorian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission from publishing a report on its Independent Equity and Diversity Review of the CFA and MFB. Predictably, without evidence, many news stories framed the United Firefighters Union’s actions to block the report as confirmation there was a culture of sexist bullying and harassment among firefighters that the UFU was trying to hide: precisely the narrative Garrett created in 2015.
In late 2015, tensions had erupted between then-Minister Garrett and the UFU over negotiations regarding a new Enterprise Bargaining Agreement for the CFA.
Around the same time, Garrett received the report of the Fire Services Review. The Review made damning findings around the conduct of senior managers towards firefighters, concluding that they had gone to industrial war with the workforce in service of the Napthine government’s ‘deliberately ideological attack against the UFU.’ The actions of senior management were excoriated at length by the Review and blamed for causing plummeting morale, partly through actions that were ‘clearly inflammatory and designed to portray firefighters in a poor light’.
Ironically, Garrett’s reaction to this report was to deploy a media campaign that was clearly inflammatory and designed to portray firefighters in a poor light. Garrett showed no interest in the Review’s finding — at the time, kept from the public and (presumably) the media — that a ‘fundamental collapse in trust and goodwill eroded the capacity of the existing management team to turn the [MFB] around’, or its conclusion with regards to both CFA and MFB that ‘significant change is required and a new chapter should be launched.’ Instead of taking action to replace the senior management of CFA and MFB, who were responsible for spiralling morale and toxic workplace relations, Garrett declined to release the report and took to the media to denigrate the victims of the Coalition’s deliberately ideological attack: career firefighters.
Garrett’s propaganda narrative relied on the juxtaposition of two unrelated claims. The first was the well-known fact that women are heavily underrepresented in the operational career workforce of the CFA and MFB. The second was a claim that the Review had uncovered a culture of bullying. Media reports combined these claims to imply that sexist bullying had driven women away from the fire services. For example, an AAP story stated:
She said submissions to the review revealed a culture of widespread bullying and discriminatory practices, as indicated by the low number of female firefighters.
The media failed to scrutinise either claim or the supposed link between them. Had the media been able to access the report of the Fire Services Review, they would have known that it warned the Review ‘did not receive sufficient information to comment on the prevalence’ of a culture of bullying. So much for ‘widespread’. Nevertheless, Garrett’s claims were widely reported as factual, gaining further perceived credibility by Garrett’s announcement that she was requesting an inquiry by the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission.
In comments made to The Age in response to Garrett’s claims, MFB Leading Firefighter Emily Trimble said she and other female firefighters were ‘flabbergasted’ at the decision to call in VEOHRC, and stated:
If there is a culture of bullying it is not among firefighting ranks but with management and politics.
LFF Trimble followed up the next day with an emotional phone call to 3AW, stating that a phone hookup of 70 female firefighters — out of CFA and MFB’s combined female operational career workforce of approximately 100 — had unanimously endorsed her comments to The Age. Emily went on to to state that Garrett was knowingly telling untruths to serve a political agenda, thereby causing severe distress to firefighters. (The recording of this call is compulsory and compelling listening for anyone who wants to understand this topic.)
As I stated earlier, firefighters knew this narrative was false and malicious from the outset.
We knew. Unlike anyone else, including Jane Garrett, we were in a position to authoritatively know it was false. Alas, the brave testimony of a female firefighter — endorsed by her female colleagues — lost out to Garrett’s propaganda, which was adopted consistently by the media for framing and narrative purposes. That felt like yet another slap in the face for firefighters. We took this as a sign that we had been so effectively defamed that we were now less trusted even than politicians. Garrett’s narrative was now set in motion and had gathered unassailable inertia.
From this point on, the media’s adherence to the narrative ensured that Garrett would be portrayed as the heroic rescuer of vulnerable women from the villainous misogynists and bullies who made up the career firefighting workforce of the CFA and MFB. Scores of media stories in the years since have spoken of culture of sexist bullying among career firefighters as if it was a fact. Each such story is followed by a flood of social media comments displaying a belief in Garrett’s false narrative, proving that she has succeeded in maliciously defaming career firefighters.
Both the Herald Sun and The Age spawned new chapters in the narrative. The Herald Sun’s approach centered around anonymous malicious sources, including ‘former senior employees,’ who purportedly provided material related to the VEOHRC inquiry. The Age relied instead upon falsely implicating career firefighters in allegations of misconduct at CFA volunteer fire brigades and among non-operational CFA staff, who do not work at fire stations. Neither of these groups share a workplace culture with career firefighters. The second instance is of particular concern because it sparked major coverage across numerous media outlets for several days. Coinciding with a preselection ballot involving Jane Garrett, the question must be asked whether The Age was wittingly or unwittingly involved in the fallacious defamation of career firefighters for political purposes.
VEOHRC: a vehicle for the anti-firefighter agenda
Because firefighters knew Jane Garrett’s narrative was false and malicious, naturally we were highly suspicious that the VEOHRC inquiry Garrett had called for would not be conducted in good faith. Our fears were apparently confirmed last week, but let me first explain why we doubted the motives behind the VEOHRC inquiry.
My reasoning process, and that of firefighters I spoke with at the time (all rank-and-file UFU members, incidentally, none UFU office-bearers), was as follows.
It was clear to us that Garrett’s purpose was pure theatre when she announced she was calling in VEOHRC. Doing so asserted to audiences that her concern was genuine and serious, strengthening her positioning as hero and ours as villains. Given that her allegations were actually false, would she risk having her narrative undermined when VEOHRC investigated and handed down findings that contradicted it? We doubted that. VEOHRC’s perceived credibility was what attracted her to announcing that she was calling it in. The same perceived credibility would ensure that contrary findings would damage her narrative. We felt she would only have called in VEOHRC if she could be confident its findings would support her false narrative. Therefore, we suspected the VEOHRC inquiry was a politically-motivated stitch-up.
Lo and behold, last week that suspicion was proven correct.
From the outset we knew that Jane Garrett’s allegation of a culture of widespread sexist bullying was false, but we also knew that we faced other issues that ought to be on VEOHRC’s radar. At this time firefighters continually complained to each other that they felt vilified by politicians and the media, and bullied by senior management. Emily Trimble raised these issues in her comments to The Age, discussed above.
Jane Garrett knew about both these issues, because both were discussed at length by the report of the Fire Services Review. Despite referring to the Review to justify bringing in VEOHRC, Garrett failed to mention either issue. This added to our suspicions of a stitch-up. Because these issues positioned firefighters as victims, not villains, they were not helpful to Garrett’s propaganda agenda. She wanted to portray firefighters as bullies, not bullied.
In the months following the commencement of VEOHRC’s inquiry, firefighters faced vilification in and by the media with ever-increasing frequency. This had increased to a fever pitch by June 2016. Nineteen of the Herald Sun’s thirty front pages that month vilified firefighters through the ‘hostile union takeover of the CFA’ false narrative, which the Herald Sun had launched the day after the confirmation of a federal election. (It is likely that key lies underpinning that narrative are traceable to Jane Garrett.)
The Herald Sun’s fake news campaign drove unrelenting, saturation coverage across all media outlets, without exception conforming to the same narrative. This vilification campaign is credited with swinging 2–3 seats at the election to the Coalition, which went on to govern with a 1-seat majority. This represents a clear perversion of democratic process.
Worse than that, from our perspective, was that this false narrative shattered what remained of firefighter morale and fractured the working relationship between career firefighters and volunteers, upon which CFA’s integrated response model depends. Career firefighters experienced this campaign as vilification. In the public’s eyes, and in the eyes of volunteers we needed to work with, as a result of this vilification we were perceived as ruthless megalomaniacs, recklessly pursuing self-interest and power at the expense of the common good. Nothing could be further from the truth, and these lies hurt us badly.
Extensive evidence of the severe mental health and morale harms of this vilification campaign became available in 2017. A select committee of Victorian Parliament conducted an inquiry into the government’s proposed fire service reform bill. Because the structural aspect of that reform would help mitigate the harms of the divisive, inflammatory ‘hostile union takeover of the CFA’ narrative, career firefighters and their loved ones inundated the inquiry with submissions. Many wrote passionately about the psychological injuries they suffered as a result of vilification by the media and politicians. I urge non-firefighters to read every word of the 100-odd excerpts I compiled, to understand the magnitude of what took place in 2016. They are harrowing but essential reading.
There is no doubt that career firefighters and their families suffered severe vilification on the basis of employment activity and industrial activity, both protected attributes under Section 6 of the Victorian Equal Opportunity Act 2010. This absolutely should be a matter of concern to the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commissioner Kristen Hilton.
In an act that serves to strongly confirm firefighters’ suspicions of a politically-motivated stitch-up, in an interview with Rafael Epstein on Thursday Ms Hilton denied that firefighters had been vilified:
It simply beggars belief that Kristen Hilton would not know that firefighters have been vilified. The fact that firefighters still rank highly in public trust ratings is irrelevant to the question of whether vilification has taken place. A mountain of testimony on the public record attests to the fact that firefighters and their loved ones feel vilified and suffered severe harms as a result. It is an absolute disgrace that the Commissioner would deny the suffering that victims experienced as a result of the very type of mistreatment she is charged with addressing.
It is profoundly upsetting for the victims of vilification to have their suffering publicly denied by such a prominent figure. Kristen Hilton must apologise or resign.
Why would the Commissioner enter into vilification denialism? I can find no plausible explanation other than this: like Jane Garrett, Hilton denies we were vilified because acknowledging it would position firefighters as victims, whereas her political or ideological mission is to portray them as villains.
Prior to making these comments, Ms Hilton was asked about the UFU-commissioned University of Newcastle study of discrimination, bullying and sexual harassment in the CFA and MFB. Hilton chose to highlight a finding that 95.3% of the 885 UFU members who responded to the survey agreed with the following statement:
As a firefighter / fire service officer I have had enough of this negative environment and simply want to work in a safe, harmonious and supportive workplace where my efforts are acknowledged and there is clear and fair accountability.
Hilton characterised this as ‘very worrying’, without indicating what firefighters understood by the question’s reference to a ‘negative environment’. Because this part of the conversation was immediately preceded by discussion about sexism, the listener was left to infer that 95.3% of firefighters were fed up with sexism.
This is a complete mischaracterisation of the finding. The ‘negative environment’ refers to bullying by senior management and to media vilification. Immediately prior to this question, survey participants were asked whether they agreed with the following:
The industrial disputes during the term of the previous government, particularly the CFA Recruits Case and the MFB Termination Case, have had a profoundly damaging effect on morale.
90.1% agreed with this statement. Immediately following the question about the ‘negative environment’, participants were asked whether they agreed with the following:
The recent media coverage of the Enterprise Agreement has had a profoundly damaging effect on morale.
95.5% of respondents agreed with this statement.
The ‘negative environment’ question and the question preceding it both derived directly from the wording of the industrial disputation section of the report of the Fire Services Review, discussed earlier. This section highlighted the morale effects of disputation and negative media coverage. It blamed spiralling morale on the the involvement of senior management in a ‘deliberately ideological attack’ that had been ‘clearly inflammatory and designed to portray firefighters in a poor light.’ The report of the Newcastle study makes this connection clear:
Clearly, the 95.3% agreement with the ‘negative environment’ question shows that firefighters were fed up with being attacked by their own management and vilified in the media as a result. It does not indicate, as Ms Hilton implied, that firefighters are tired of a culture of sexism and bullying within their immediate work environments.
Why would Ms Hilton represent this finding in such a misleading manner?
Again, the most obvious explanation is that an accurate representation of the result would portray firefighters as victims, not villains, and this is unacceptable to Hilton’s propaganda mission.
In the light of Ms Hilton’s denial of firefighter vilification and her misrepresentation of findings on negative workplace culture, in my mind, there is now no doubt: the VEOHRC Inquiry was a politically-motivated stitch-up. The UFU was right to attempt to block the release of its report to the media, in order to protect the mental wellbeing of its members. Serious questions must be asked about the political independence of VEOHRC and the ethics of its conduct.
