With the fire services threatening to become topical during the forthcoming Victorian election campaign, it’s time for some clarity on the topic.
This primer is intended to assist politicians, journalists and interested members of the public to better contextualise and fact-check comments made in the political arena about the CFA dispute and fire service reform. Obviously I can only give you the facts as seen from the perspective of a UFU rank-and-file member, because that’s what I am. I understand that UFU members (i.e. 98% of professional firefighters) are viewed with suspicion by members of the political class, but you will find my claims verifiable by the independent and authoritative sources I have linked to. (Links are underlined. Sorry, but I will not link to News Corp stories. You can find those yourself if you want to fact-check me.)
Yes, it’s rather long. I think you’ll find it twenty minutes well spent, particularly if you are a journalist writing on the topic, but for the skimmers I have highlighted in bold some key points that are frequently absent from media reporting.
This primer is divided into five sections: How Victoria’s fire services are structured; The Baillieu/Napthine years; The CFA EBA dispute; Fire service reform; and Anti-firefighter propaganda.
How Victoria’s fire services are structured
There are a number of fire service organisations operating in Victoria. The disputes mainly pertain to the Country Fire Authority (CFA) and the Metropolitan Fire Brigade (MFB).
The MFB is responsible for fire and emergency response and prevention in the metropolitan fire district, which covers about 40% (by area) of metropolitan Melbourne. MFB’s firefighting workforce are employed full-time.
The CFA is responsible for fire and emergency response in the ‘country area of Victoria’. That is, that part of Victoria which lies outside the metropolitan fire district, but does not include any forest, national park or protected public land. CFA engages both volunteers and full-time employees as firefighters. Roughly equal proportions of CFA incidents are attended by professionals only, volunteers only, and both professionals and volunteers. CFA is comprised of 1180 semi-autonomous fire brigades, and a further 40 coastguard and forest industry brigades.
Representation and advocacy is largely provided by the United Firefighters Union (UFU), Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria (VFBV) and Victorian Volunteer Firefighters Association (VVFA).
The UFU Victorian Branch is a union of ~98% of employed professional firefighters in the CFA and MFB. It also has members who are non-operational employees and employees of other fire service organisations. All office-bearers of the UFU are professional firefighters. A small number of CFA volunteers are UFU associate members who are represented by the union but do not have voting rights. UFU’s funding is provided by membership dues.
VFBV is a representative body for CFA brigades. Membership is by brigade — individual memberships are not available. The CFA Act provides VFBV with consultation rights and with four seats on CFA’s nine-seat Board. VFBV also administers a welfare fund and conducts Championships — a kind of sporting contest modelled around firefighting operations.
The VVFA is a representative association offering memberships to individual volunteers. VVFA was formed in 2016 by CFA volunteers who were unhappy with VFBV’s stance on the CFA dispute.
The Baillieu/Napthine years
The Ballieu/Napthine government unleashed a series of attacks upon firefighters, their safety, conditions and pay. According to the report of the 2015 Fire Services Review, 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.”
At a cost to the public of at least $21 million, the government aggressively pursued attacks on the CFA and MFB EBAs that the Fire Services Review found to be “clearly inflammatory and designed to portray firefighters in a poor light.” CFA firefighters faced an attempt to renege on provisions relating to staffing levels, while MFB firefighters faced an attempt to terminate their EBA in its entirety, taking along with it all provisions relating to safety, other conditions and pay.
The MFB cited the inflexibility of so-called ‘veto’ provisions as the reason for its application to terminate the EBA. In fact, those provisions did not provide a veto at all, but rather provided the union with the option to refer disputed decisions to independent resolution in the event of disagreement. The Fair Work Commission concluded that these consultation terms played an important role in protecting firefighter safety. That fact, along with the unfair bargaining advantage the employer would gain through the termination of the EBA, led the Fair Work Commission to reject the MFB’s application:
The Napthine Government’s $21m+ war on firefighters nominally failed on both its key fronts, but still did considerable harm to firefighters and hence to public safety. The Fire Services Review noted that these actions had a “profoundly damaging effect on morale”, in the case of the MFB leading to an “almost uncrossable chasm” between firefighters and senior management.
The costs of defending the government’s “lengthy and legally aggressive” litigation placed a strain on UFU finances, leading many firefighters to believe the cases were intended to bankrupt the union. To this day, on top of the usual union dues, firefighters are paying an additional litigation levy.
These attacks were “clearly inflammatory and designed to portray firefighters in a poor light,” that is, they constituted a propaganda war aimed directly at harming the reputation of firefighters. The Fire Services Review found firefighters were “offended by what they viewed as a management-prompted negative media campaign against them, portraying them as greedy or lazy,” which further contributed to the spiralling of morale.
Although the Fire Services Review stopped short of accusing senior management of bullying the workforce, in relation to firefighters being “treated badly”, it remarked:
There will always be a proportion of staff who verbalise their dissatisfaction from time to time. However, to have the negativity and dissatisfaction so widespread and felt so consistently by old and new employees alike indicates to the Review that the situation has reached an unacceptable level.
In parallel to all of this was the unfolding revelation that senior management at both the CFA and the MFB had knowingly exposed firefighters to unnecessary risk, by illegally withholding information about contamination at the Fiskville training centre, and in the case of the MFB, ordering recruits and recruit instructors to attend the centre despite the UFU’s concerns about contamination. (The MFB deemed consultation unnecessary on that decision, yet would shortly claim to the Fair Work Commission that the UFU had veto rights over every decision!) The explosive findings of the 2016 Fiskville inquiry are too extensive to cover in this primer, but here is an illustrative selection:
These assaults, in addition to job and budget cuts to the CFA and failure to negotiate new EBAs after the 2010 agreements had expired, led firefighters to campaign at the 2014 state election to “put the Liberals last”. In the years that have followed, many Coalition MPs have levelled blame at the UFU for their loss, and have accused the UFU of politicising the fire services. Every firefighter I know is angered by that suggestion: we were viciously attacked by politicians before we appealed to voters to kick them out. They politicised the fire services, not us.
The CFA EBA dispute
By late 2015, it became apparent that the election result had not delivered what was hoped for: an end to the industrial war on firefighters. Minister Jane Garrett was shaping up in the media for open war (see section ‘Anti-firefighter propaganda’, below) and negotiations for a new CFA EBA had stalled. The matter was referred to the Fair Work Commission for conciliation commencing in November 2015.
Leaked notes from a briefing held for Labor MPs by Garrett and her advisor, believed to date from February or March 2016, record that “members [are] getting tired of dispute (will turn on leadership),” suggesting that Garrett was pursuing a union-busting strategy. Around this time, the CFA engaged an internationally notorious union-busting law firm, Seyfarth Shaw, to provide advice on its industrial strategy. The briefing notes also record a false claim that “7 paid firefighters clause will smash volunteering.” As we will come to below, this false claim went on to play a central role in the public arena.
On the 20th of April, the dispute erupted into the media, with a front-page story in the Herald Sun authored by James Campbell and Matt Johnston. Although the firefighters I knew failed to make the connection at the time, the timing of this is conspicuous. It was the very next day after Malcolm Turnbull had confirmed that he would be contacting the Governor-General to request a double dissolution of federal Parliament, setting the date of the election for the 2nd of July.
Although the dispute had received sporadic coverage in the months preceding, the April 20 story took a radically new angle. Instead of focussing on pay rates, it brought in two new false claims against the union’s position on EBA: firstly that the EBA would hand the union “veto” power; and secondly that it would “marginalise volunteers” through its requirement to send “seven paid firefighters to every CFA-area fire ground, no matter how small.” Both these claims were false, and both referred to clauses that are strongly justified on safety grounds.
These false claims would go on to underpin the argument of anti-EBA voices as the dispute erupted to involve politicians and volunteers over the next few months. The “veto” claim was as false then as it was in 2014 when the Fair Work Commission rejected it as a basis for the MFB’s requested termination of its EBA. The consultation provision in the CFA EBA was of the same form as the MFB’s: it included a right to refer a dispute for independent resolution, not a right of veto. On the basis of extensive evidence presented by the UFU, the Fair Work Commission found in 2014 that this form of consultation was important for firefighter safety.
The 7-firefighter claim, which the leaked notes discussed above would likely indicate originated from Jane Garrett’s office, was also false. (Weeks later, Garrett would be accused of leaking to Herald Sun journalist James Campbell, after a bungled text message. Garrett’s announcement later that day of her intention to make a bullying complaint stole the lede of the already-published Age story.) Within days of the Herald Sun telling the 7-firefighter lie, UFU Secretary Peter Marshall commented to the media that the provision only applied in the vicinity of those stations with paid staff: 32 of CFA’s ~1200 fire brigades. To the best of my knowledge, only a single outlet reported this: the Warrnambool Standard. The refutation fell on deaf ears and this false claim was repeated hundreds of times in the media and at polling booths by politicians, volunteers and journalists over the months that followed.
At some point the lie was embellished to include an assertion that volunteers who arrived on scene before career firefighters would have to stand and watch the fire spread until seven union members arrived. This version of the lie was devastatingly defamatory, falsely implying that professional firefighters are narcissistic and megalomaniacal to the point of recklessly endangering the public. This lie continued to be repeated even after the CFA debunked it on May 20th, and after the Fair Work Commission provided the text of the relevant clauses, with clarified wording, on June 1st. It featured prominently in Herald Sun columns by Matthew Guy (5th June), Tony Abbott (21st June) and Michaelia Cash (22nd August). No effort was made by any journalist or federal politician (of any party) to debunk this lie during the long weeks of the election campaign.
The actual 7-firefighters clause only mandated the dispatch of seven career firefighters, in areas where career firefighters are stationed. The purpose of the clause is to implement a crucial fireground safety protocol relating to working in environments that present an immediate danger to life and health, particularly, inside burning buildings. The quickest means to understand the reason for it is to watch the video shown here.
Three days after the Herald Sun launched the “hostile union takeover” / “marginalise volunteers” narrative, Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria rallied at Parliament to protest the EBA. VFBV CEO Andrew Ford repeated the claim that the EBA would “marginalise” volunteers. An unconfirmed rumour claims that VFBV’s engagement on the issue was facilitated by John Schruink, who was a VFBV-appointed CFA Board member, long-term Liberal member, and is the Liberal candidate for Monbulk at the 2018 election. On April 28th, the Liberal Party registered a website titled Hands Off The CFA.
On the 1st of June the Fair Work Commission made a Final Recommendation to finalise an agreement based on a list of changes it detailed. The Commissioner noted:
Based on my long experience in the matters in contention I am confident that at this stage there is no capacity for agreement to further amendment and that this Recommendation offers the best prospect for resolution of this long running dispute.
It is at this point that the CFA dispute exploded to become a major news story across all outlets. Daniel Andrews indicated he was prepared to accept the Final Recommendation, while Jane Garrett and the CFA Board rejected it. The Herald Sun strongly framed Andrews’ reaction as a “capitulation” to the UFU, rather than what it actually was: accepting the umpire’s decision, which the Commissioner offered in his expert opinion as the best prospect for resolving the dispute. The Age followed the Herald Sun’s lead, asserting without evidence that Andrews had a secret deal with the union. (Marshall has since made a statutory declaration denying this.) With these two agenda-setting outlets heavily committed to Garrett’s obstructionist position, the rest of the media followed suit, framing all reporting in these clearly misleading terms.
On the 3rd of June, Michaelia Cash announced her intention to intervene in the matter, and Cash and Turnbull addressed a VFBV rally on the 5th of June, with volunteers bearing “Hands Off The CFA” posters. Turnbull labelled the EBA “an extraordinary assault” on volunteerism. A Herald Sun column by Matthew Guy on the same day repeated the “veto” and “seven firefighters” lies to underscore the claim (shown above).
Over the following week, Cabinet resolved to accept the Final Recommendation of the Fair Work Commission, but the CFA Board and Minister Garrett refused to agree to this. Garrett resigned as minister and the Board was sacked. Predictably, once again the media inaccurately framed this a capitulation to the UFU, rather than decisive action, informed by the independent umpire, taken to resolve a protracted dispute.
A statement from the newly-appointed Minister James Merlino cited the damning findings of the Fire Services Review and the Fiskville inquiry as additional reasons for the sacking of the CFA Board, but this argument gained no traction with the media commentariat. When finally released in March 2016, the media reception of the Fire Services Review had failed to reflect the scathing criticism it directed at the senior management of fire services, discussed above. I suggest this is because five months of contrary messaging about the Review by Jane Garrett set the stage for confirmation bias. The damning findings of the Fiskville Inquiry, on the 24th of May, had also failed to achieve the attention they deserved, I suggest because the media were preoccupied with the EBA dispute at the time.
Over the weeks that followed, the federal Coalition campaigned heavily in Victoria on the basis of its promise to intervene in the so-called hostile union takeover of the CFA. The Herald Sun assisted with 19 front pages in June alone and a hand-out of thousands of free “Back The CFA” bumper stickers, which were distributed by Liberal volunteers at pre-polling stations. Front-page coverage abruptly stopped after the election, with only a single front page in the month following.
Herald Sun editor Damon Johnston later stated that the CFA campaign is credited by both Liberal and Labor analysts with swinging 2–3 seats to the Coalition. Considering the election was won with a one-seat majority, Johnston quite reasonably boasted that “our coverage of that campaign probably swung the overall election result in favour of Malcolm Turnbull”. And, considering the campaign was built upon lies, it is surely correct to say the campaign stole the election.
It was not until after the election that significant criticism of the campaign appeared in the mainstream media. On the 22nd of August, in preparation to introduce a bill to amend with the Fair Work Act to ban the CFA EBA, Michaelia Cash repeated the 7-firefighters lie in a Herald Sun column. This was called out by Adam Bandt, and Cash appeared later that day in an interview with Sky News’ David Speers. Finally, the “hostile union takeover” narrative was subjected to journalistic scrutiny, to which it succumbed spectacularly. Both The Age and The Guardian reported on Cash’s failure to explain the “hostile union takeover” narrative during the interview, and confirmed the 7-firies claim was false. But this was the extent of coverage. There was no scandal that the election had been won with lies, that career firefighters had been wrongly publicly defamed, or that the mainstream media had utterly failed to perform its democratic role.
The “hostile union takeover” claim should now have held no credibility in the public arena, but that was not to be. The Herald Sun and The Age still spoke as if it was true — the latter, bizarrely, demanding the matter be referred to the Fair Work Commission — and the rest of the media followed suit. The Coalition’s amendment to the Fair Work Act was passed with the assistance of the crossbench, effectively banning the CFA from entering into any EBA with its workforce. (At this point the VFBV abandoned its Supreme Court action against the CFA, apparently designed purely as a delaying tactic the federal legislation was enacted.)
The fallacious “hostile union takeover” campaign incited and fanned the flames of division between volunteers and career firefighters. Apart from yielding a socially toxic work environment, division is a risk to public safety, because the CFA’s response model is structured around an integrated workforce of volunteers and career firefighters. The hostile attitudes engendered by the campaign were reflected in daily news coverage during the election campaign, and documented in submissions made to the Senate inquiry conducted in relation to the Turnbull government’s proposed amendement to the Fair Work Act. I have argued using excerpts from these submissions, that the “hostile union takeover” campaign deliberately exploited and inflamed the cultural baggage of territorialism and rivalry that persists to this day as an echo of the chaotic fire service turf wars of the 1880s and the 1940s.
To this day the false “hostile union takeover” narrative is widely subscribed to in the community, and even the unambiguously false 7-firefighter lie is heavily entrenched in country Victoria. The failure of the media to disseminate the truth on this topic sets the Liberal Party up for another predatory election campaign in 2018, as discussed in the next section.
Fire service reform
On the 19th of May 2017, the government announced a package of reforms to Victoria’s fire services. The central plank was structural reform: the career firefighters of the MFB and CFA would work for a new entity, Fire Rescue Victoria, returning CFA to its former status as a volunteer fire service. Response in the geographical areas surrounding fire stations with career firefighters would become the responsibility of FRV, with volunteer brigades in those areas invited to remain and continue responding. An independent panel would regularly review the geographical boundary between FRV and CFA to ensure community safety and other values were optimised.
It is not accurate to describe the reform as having the effect of “splitting” the CFA, just as it would not be accurate to describe an electoral boundary realignment as a “split”.
Structural reform solves two issues at once: it provides MFB/CFA boundary reform and it provides breathing space for volunteers and career firefighters who have been led by politicisation to view each other as a threat.
Boundary reform matters because areas that were country when the boundaries were set, decades ago, are now highly urbanised. The CFA have introduced professional firefighters to cater to that change, but the CFA model still depends upon volunteer response, which (through no fault of volunteers) is less reliable.
Recommendation 63 of the final report of the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission specified that a Fire Commissioner should have the responsibility to provide periodic advice on changes to the boundary, but this part of the recommendation was never implemented. The recommendation stems from a submission of Counsel Assisting, Jack Rush QC. Rush found that the change was necessary because there was a “real need to implement a system now which will be capable of coping with Victoria’s changing urban profile and predicted growth in its major regional centres.” On the basis of extensive investigation and analysis, Rush’s submission argued that a review board should have the power to re-align the boundary, “including designating areas which are not contiguous,” including “satellite suburbs and large regional towns”. The reform currently proposed achieves precisely this.
In fact, in terms of retaining the benefits of volunteerism, the proposed reform is better than straight boundary reform, because existing volunteer brigades would continue to operate within the FRV area.
The idea of structural reform for breathing space apparently occurred to many parties simultaneously in wake of the toxic divisions of 2016. Anecdotally, many career firefighters recognised that the “hostile union takeover” narrative, despite being false, had gained lasting currency among volunteers in many locales. “If they want Hands Off, give them Hands Off,” is a phrase I have heard many times. Former MFB President Adrian Nye — historically a staunch opponent of the UFU — offered much the same perspective in comments to The Age in August 2016. A structural separation gives volunteers autonomy and full agency (indeed, ascendancy) within the CFA, and gives career firefighters the ability to negotiate their working conditions without impact, or perceived impact, upon volunteers.
Unfortunately, when structural reform was proposed by the Andrews Government, it did not receive bipartisan support. A select committee was established to conduct an inquiry into the proposed legislation. Jack Rush QC, now retained by the VFBV, offered an opinion entirely at odds with the conclusions he presented as Counsel Assisting the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission. Likewise, in his submission Adrian Nye took a U-turn, remarking bizarrely:
Little did I know that when I spoke to The Age newspaper some months ago suggesting that one way out of the MFB/CFA gridlock would be to quarantine UFU members in the MFB holding pen, that the Government would draft a Bill giving effect to this inappropriate idea.
The reform inquiry received compelling testimony in favour of the reform from senior leaders and firefighters alike. CFA Chief Officer Steve Warrington, former Fire & Rescue NSW Commissioner Greg Mullins and Emergency Management Commissioner Craig Lapsley each urged Parliament to pass the bill, mostly on the basis of the “breathing space” principle discussed above.
Career firefighters and their partners inundated the inquiry with around 1500 submissions. These submissions revealed the truly shocking extent to which morale and mental health were damaged by the fallacious 2016 campaign, and like the verbal evidence of senior leaders, suggested that separating the parties is the best way to ease tensions, allow wounds to heal, and prevent any future outbreak of the same. In addition, submissions from firefighters provided over 100 concrete examples drawn from their own experience of situations when the safety of firefighters and the public have been needlessly endangered by the shortfalls of the current fire service structure.
For the skimmers, here are some highlights:
(NB. In contrast to the rest of this primer, the remainder of this section conveys my opinion, not just the facts. Fire service reform is likely to be an election issue, so the substance and motives of Coalition messaging on this topic are important. In the lieu of any competent analysis of this published in the media so far, here is my take.)
Coalition MPs have claimed that by blocking fire service reform, they have “saved the CFA.” They have been asked, dozens of times on Twitter, “from what?” No coherent answers are forthcoming. Likewise, they have never explained what they mean when they say the reform with “smash up the CFA.” I believe the Coalition’s motives for opposing the reform are twofold, both self-serving and harmful to the public interest.
The first, in my opinion, is to maintain the present fire services structure in order to preserve the opportunity for a repeat performance of the brutally destructive but politically spectactular 2016 campaign in future. Structural reform promises to ease tensions and reassure volunteers of their continued importance within the CFA, rendering them less susceptible to an inflammatory, divisive campaign of fear and loathing. Great for morale all round and therefore great for community safety, but unhelpful politically to the Coalition.
In my view, the Coalition’s second motivation for opposing fire service reform is to leverage, at the 2018 election, the continued buy-in to the false narrative of the “hostile union takeover”. Coalition MPs have deliberately sought to misrepresent the anti-EBA/Hands Off campaign as identical to their anti-reform campaign, even though reform effectively implements Hands Off. No UFU members in CFA brigades, no CFA operational EBA: this is the polar opposite to a union takeover. Coalition messaging on the topic frequently suggests the reform will give the union control of the CFA, when the opposite is clearly true.
This attempt to draw fire service reform and the CFA EBA dispute together into a coherent tale of fire service folly reaches its apex in the opposition’s promise to conduct a Royal Commission into the fire services, if elected. The Liberals know that whilst their own wanton obstructionism and opportunism are the real source of three years of chaos, the media has failed to convey that fact. Therefore, political points can be scored by blaming Daniel Andrews, and that claim can be made with greater apparent confidence by calling for a Royal Commission. In reality, a properly conducted Royal Commission would inevitably make criticisms of the deeply harmful actions of the Coalition that would make the evisceration delivered by the Fire Services Review seem mild.
Anti-firefighter propaganda
In parallel to the “hostile union takeover” lies, a number of other propaganda attacks have been launched to support the narrative of firefighters as villains. Most of these appeared in the Herald Sun and disappeared as rapidly as they were put out. Two campaigns were gained more traction and are worth looking at here, lest they make an appearance during the 2018 election campaign.
The first is Jane Garrett’s campaign to portray firefighters as misogynist bullies. Despite the the Fire Services Review’s statement that it was unable to comment on the prevalence of a culture of bullying, while withholding its release Jane Garrett took to the media to warn of supposedly prevalent bullying. Linking this with the well-known fact that there are few female firefighters, a narrative of a culture of gendered bullying was established, without evidence and with no opportunity for the media to check these claims against the text of the Review. Firefighters felt bullied and vilified by Garrett’s statements, as Leading Firefighter Emily Trimble explained tearfully to Neil Mitchell.
Further vilification came as the Herald Sun repeatedly (28th April and 9th June 2017, possibly more) reported on claims related to the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission inquiry initiated by Garrett, with these stories widely parroted by other outlets. These claims purported to relate to the contents of submissions of “former senior employees” and the forthcoming findings of the inquiry. VEOHRC denied involvement in these leaks, which suggests that other anonymous sources made comment to the Herald Sun with malicious intent.
It is no secret that there is considerable animosity between firefighters and former senior management staff, who the Fire Services Review found were implicated in the Coalition’s deliberately ideological attack upon the workforce, and who the Fiskville inquiry found had knowingly poisoned firefighters and covered it up. It is the ethical responsibility of journalists to consider the motive of sources before publishing.
That the VEOHRC inquiry would be used to publicly vilify an entire workforce already in the grips of a morale and mental health crisis is, in my view, disgraceful. It vindicates the UFU’s decision to challenge that inquiry and raises serious questions about the public interest value of inquiries that are open to exploitation by malicious actors.
The most intense episode of vilification outside of the main Herald Sun “hostile union takeover” campaign came in October 2017. Uncoincidentally (I believe), at this time a ballot was open for Jane Garrett’s preselection for the Western metropolitan region. A multi-page story and front-page splash in The Age aired data and allegations relating to “a culture of bullying and harrassment in the CFA”. Heavy coverage continued in The Age and many other outlets over several days. The trouble was, the data and allegations related to non-operational staff, who share neither a workplace nor a workplace culture with firefighters. Despite this fact, The Age went to extraordinary lengths to falsely implicate firefighters.
The second additional propaganda attack upon firefighters worth mentioning here revolved around a claim that the draft MFB EBA entitles firefighters to an exhorbitant 196 days off every year. A case study in media failure, after appearing in the Herald Sun (6th March 2018), this erroneous, conspicuous three-digit figure was repeated across nearly every media outlet, including most broadcast media, the ABC and The Guardian, without attribution to the Herald Sun.
Communications between firefighter Chris Cleary and Herald Sun reporter Matt Johnston revealed the figure derived from three separate errors, inflating the personal leave allocation by almost sixfold and counting thirteen public holidays, which firefighters don’t get off. Furthermore, in a Facebook slip-up, shadow emergency services minister Brad Battin revealed he was involved in the publication of the story, despite there being no mention of Battin in the byline, in the story proper or any of its dozens of spin-offs at other outlets. In other words, nearly every outlet was consumed for days by what was undeniably fake news that defamed firefighters for political gain.
It is perhaps unlikely that this claim will come up again during the election campaign, but I hope it will serve as an example to the media of how they need to be far more diligent in detecting and calling out malicious propaganda from the Herald Sun or the Liberal Party.
In light of this and indeed of everything that has transpired over the past few years, I implore readers: don’t take what you hear from politicians or former senior managers at face value, and don’t believe what you read in the Herald Sun. Fact check. It’s not hard.
Can you spot anything missing from this primer? Is there something you would like more information on? Send me a Direct Message on Twitter, @ebatruth.
