The secret union deal in Victoria

The Guardian reports:

Former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews has defended the actions of senior members of his government, whom the state’s anti-corruption watchdog found engaged in “serious and concerning” conduct in their dealings with the leader of the firefighters’ union.

A long-awaited report by the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission, tabled in parliament on Wednesday, stopped stopped short of making any findings of corrupt conduct.

But it found senior members of the Andrews government engaged in “serious and concerning” conduct in their dealings with Peter Marshall – the secretary of the United Firefighters Union (UFU) – when negotiating pay deals for the Country Fire Authority (CFA) and Metropolitan Fire Brigade (MFB), and their later amalgamation into Fire Services Victoria (FSV).

Basically they did a secret backroom deal.

This included “actions contrary to policy, procedure and codes of conduct, deliberate attempts to conceal and mislead, and the misuse of information”.

The findings led the Victorian opposition to claim the state is being led by a “gangster government”.

An example:

Ibac’s report said Jennings, Bates and Marshall, accompanied by a small team of UFU negotiators, held negotiations over four days in April, “with the first sessions held at a rented meeting space, and the final session on 12 April held in a hotel meeting room”. An unnamed federal Labor senator also attended as an intermediary.

So these were not meetings in ministerial offices. They were secret meetings.

Ibac’s report also raised concerns about the way the 2019 bill that amalgamated the MFP and paid parts of the CFA into the FRV passed parliament. It found Marshall had sought to secure the support of a crossbench MP by hiring their relative days before it was due for a vote in the upper house.

In another intercepted phone call in June 2019, Marshall told a friend the MP was “100 per cent behind us … just to make sure we just employed [their relative].”

This is how Australian unions operate.