An eight-year investigation by Victoria's anti-corruption watchdog has found serious and concerning conduct by senior government figures — including ministers, MPs and public servants — during a bitter industrial dispute with the state's firefighters union, but has stopped short of making any finding of corrupt conduct.
The long-awaited report from the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC), known as Operation Richmond, was tabled in parliament on Wednesday after years of delays, including an unsuccessful legal challenge by United Firefighters Union (UFU) secretary Peter Marshall that pushed back its scheduled release from the end of June.
The investigation, which began in 2018 and examined conduct stretching back to former premier Daniel Andrews' first term in office, centred on the way pay negotiations were handled with the UFU alongside the establishment of Fire Rescue Victoria and enterprise bargaining agreements with both the Country Fire Authority (CFA) and the Metropolitan Fire Brigade (MFB).
How Marshall gained extraordinary influence
IBAC Commissioner Victoria Elliot delivered a pointed assessment of how government processes broke down during the negotiations, finding that senior members of government acted contrary to established policies, procedures, codes of conduct and conventions in striking a deal with Marshall without the knowledge or involvement of the responsible minister, agencies and departments.
"By doing so, the government placed itself in a position where Mr Marshall was able to exert extraordinary influence over the negotiations for both the CFA EBA and the MFB EBA," Commissioner Elliot said in opening the report.
The report further found that Marshall was afforded privileged access to senior members of government — access that was in many cases not disclosed and was to the exclusion of other key stakeholders.
While IBAC stopped short of a corruption finding, it issued a stark warning about the risks such behaviour creates, noting that it raises the likelihood of corrupt conduct taking root in government. The report stated that the investigation "highlights how government leaders, including ministers and the Premier, can undermine established checks and balances when they fail to model high integrity standards and act as stewards of good governance."
The political flashpoint: Jane Garrett and the CFA dispute
The CFA pay deal became one of the most divisive political controversies of the Andrews era. When Andrews came to government after the 2014 state election — having campaigned on a promise to respect firefighters, boost their numbers and overhaul Victoria's fire services — he appointed Jane Garrett as emergency services minister.
Garrett resisted the UFU's demands, and the stand-off came to a head in 2016 when Andrews intervened directly to end the impasse. The move effectively forced Garrett from cabinet; she resigned as emergency services minister over her disagreement with the government's decision to accommodate union demands. The episode fuelled widespread allegations of a so-called "sweetheart deal" with the UFU.
Garrett, who later died from cancer in 2022, became a central figure in the controversy and her resignation remains one of the most-cited examples of union influence on the Andrews government during that period.
The UFU, under Marshall's leadership, had previously run a concerted campaign against the then-Coalition government during 2014 over pay and conditions, setting the scene for the tensions that followed Labor's election win.
Current premier distances himself from findings
Current Victorian Premier Ben Carroll acknowledged the seriousness of the report's findings but was quick to distance himself from the events under scrutiny.
"This was a report that was 10 years in the making, I was not in the cabinet when all of these matters began," Carroll said, describing the conduct identified in the report as "poor behaviour" that was "intolerable".
It is understood the IBAC investigation involved interviews with Andrews and a number of senior ministers, though witnesses are legally unable to confirm or deny whether they were spoken to under IBAC's confidentiality provisions.
What the findings mean for accountability
The decision not to make a formal corruption finding will be scrutinised given the length and scope of the inquiry, but IBAC's framing of the conduct as creating the conditions for corruption represents a significant rebuke of the way Victoria's government operated during the period in question.
The report's message is essentially that when powerful figures — whether union officials or government ministers — operate outside established governance frameworks and away from the scrutiny of responsible agencies, the integrity of public administration is placed at serious risk. In that sense, Operation Richmond serves as a case study in how institutional checks can be quietly dismantled, not through a single corrupt act, but through a pattern of behaviour that normalises the bypassing of proper process.
The tabling of the report in parliament closes a formal chapter in the inquiry, though the political and reputational consequences for those involved are likely to continue to be debated. For those interested in how power, influence and access intersect in public life, the findings offer a sobering account of what can happen when accountability mechanisms are sidelined.
