🔥🤝 “Handshake has occurred”: Operation Richmond, Part 1 🤝🔥

In 2016, the Andrews government settled a bitter, years-long dispute with the firefighters’ union in a hotel room, then spent the next two years pretending it hadn’t.

In August, Victoria’s anti-corruption commission IBAC tabled its special report on Operation Richmond. It made no findings of corrupt conduct and found no evidence for the blackmail allegation that started the investigation.

But most of its 120 pages are about something else: what happens to public servants when a Premier wants a problem fixed, and fixed quietly.

In Part 1 we follow Tony Bates, nine weeks into a Deputy Secretary job at DPC, as he’s told to keep it “very tight”. We cover the secret negotiations, the champagne photo, the staged handover of a “UFU proposal” that wasn’t really a union proposal, and the Cabinet submission written by the people who negotiated the deal.

Along the way:

• why Victoria’s fire services had a governance problem before any of this started
• what a 400-page log of claims looks like
• Treasury being told to “facilitate agreement today not spear it”,
• and IBAC’s answer to the squish between serving the Premier and the Code of Conduct (“comply with both”). Is that answer any use in the room?

Next time: the Fair Work Commission, the long tail, and who ends up holding the secret.

📄 IBAC, Operation Richmond special report, August 2026.

Corrections: Women made up 2.9% of the CFA’s career firefighters (31 of 1,082), not 3.7% as we said on air. And Peter Marshall handed the “UFU proposal” to an advisor from the Premier’s office during his meeting with the Premier, not to the Premier himself.

This podcast was recorded on Kaurna land, and we recognise Kaurna elders past and present. Always was, always will be.

Now for some appropriately bureaucratic disclaimers....

While we have tried to be as thorough in our research as busy full time jobs and lives allow, we definitely don’t guarantee that we’ve got all the details right.

Please feel free to email us corrections, episode suggestions, or anything else, at [email protected].

Thanks to PanPot audio for our intro and outro music.

'Til next time!