Victoria’s anti-corruption watchdog has found staff members at the state’s Metropolitan Fire Brigade hacked emails of executives and were “motivated to misuse” the information they uncovered “to further the interests” of the firefighters union and its state secretary, Peter Marshall.
The Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (Ibac) tabled its investigation into the leaking of information at the MFB – dubbed Operation Turton – on Wednesday.
It uncovered five incidents where MFB employees accessed or disclosed information without authorisation between April 2018 and May 2019.
“In incidents that Ibac identified, individuals involved were motivated to misuse MFB information to further the interests of the Victorian branch of the United Firefighters Union (UFU) or its secretary, Peter Marshall,” the report reads.
“In addition to accessing other employees’ email accounts, Ibac found individuals shared sensitive MFB information directly with the UFU without permission.”
Among the five incidents was the leaking of a PowerPoint presentation to Marshall which detailed a plan by the MFB to purchase fire incident response simulation software.
The Ibac report found Marshall – who believed the MFB was seeking the software to reduce firefighter and fire truck numbers – passed the document on to the then minister for emergency services, Lisa Neville, “without authority”.
At a March 2019 meeting with the MFB’s chief executive, Neville referred to the software and told them, “You can’t have it.”
The chief executive told Ibac they believed Marshall had “influenced the minister …with the intention of stopping MFB purchasing the software”.
In another instance, Marshall was provided with information about executive contract extensions, which he also passed onto Neville. The minister, who sought to have some direct references to her removed from the report, retired from parliament in 2022 due to health challenges.
The Ibac commissioner, Victoria Elliott, said the union’s “influence” over the day-to-day operation and decision making of the MFB “presented challenges and often hindered the effective administration of the organisation”.
She said the investigation identified “weaknesses in MFB information and data security practices and policies which were ongoing” and made four recommendations to tighten information security and improve culture at the new agency, Fire Rescue Victoria. FRV was created in 2020 from the merging of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade with the paid staff within the Country Fire Authority following a long-running and bitter pay dispute for professional firefighters.
A second long-running Ibac probe relating to the fire services – codenamed Operation Richmond – is focused on the 2016 EBA negotiations between the Victorian government and the UFU. The former premier Daniel Andrews was interviewed as part of the investigation.
In a statement, Marshall and the UFU, which attempted to block the Operation Turton report from being published, described the investigation as a “four-year witch hunt” and a “work of fiction”.
Marshall accused Ibac of being “more interested in investigating how a firefighter union secretary was provided information that was relevant to the fire service, than investigating the significance of the issues themselves”.
He also said there had been “regular leaks” about Ibac investigations since 2019, leading to “hundreds of news items”.
“It is ironic that an organisation supposedly investigating the inappropriate use of information, took no steps to investigate the improper use of its confidential material to the media,” Marshall said.
