🔥🤫 “A deal is a deal is a deal”: Operation Richmond, Part 2 🤫🔥

In Part 1, a secret deal was struck in a hotel room and walked into Cabinet as a “UFU proposal”. In Part 2, the deal has to survive contact with everyone who wasn’t in the room. We start at the Fair Work Commission, where the “independent umpire” turns out to have far less power than everyone claimed, and where keeping Peter Marshall on side means 381 text messages in four months. We follow the secret through a minister’s resignation, a sacked CFA Board, a federal law change that kills the CFA agreement anyway, and two more years of pressure on the MFB Board, which is never told where the agreement came from. Along the way: what happens when a government caught between a union and its own statutory boards pushes on the side it can push, a letter of comfort that comforted nobody, and a lawyer dropped because “Peter was like literally losing his mind”. Then we land on IBAC’s verdict on Tony Bates and Chris Eccles, Danielle’s closing argument for the defence, and a genuine disagreement among us about whether IBAC was too harsh. Our conclusion: the most damaging thing wasn’t the original deal. It was a secret nobody went back to retest, which handed leverage to the one person outside government who knew the truth. As IBAC notes, some senior members of government even suspected Marshall had something over the Premier. Several of you asked what happened to the CFA agreement. It never went to a vote. CFA career firefighters stayed on their expired 2010 agreement until 1 July 2020, when they moved to the new Fire Rescue Victoria. It appears FRV still runs former CFA and MFB staff under different terms within a single interim agreement. 📄 IBAC, Operation Richmond special report , August 2026 Corrections: The federal government that amended the Fair Work Act to protect volunteers in August 2016 was the Turnbull government, not the Morrison government. Marshall’s April 2018 “the truth will come out” radio interview was about the MFB appointing a UK candidate as CEO, whom he called a union-buster. Fire Rescue Victoria didn’t exist until 2020, and the Canadian candidate was Marshall’s preferred pick. And Bates called the CFA “clowns” in three texts, not two. 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 thewestminstertraditionpod@gmail.com. Thanks to PanPot audio for our intro and outro music. 'Til next time!