A review of Victoria’s country and metropolitan fire services has found a dysfunctional and bullying culture at all levels of the organisation, and recommends merging the Country Fire Authority with the Metropolitan Fire Board to improve the situation.
However the emergency services minister, Jane Garrett, said while the government would be adopting 18 of the report’s 20 recommendations, a merger between the organisations was not on the cards.
“What this report shows is decades-long, entrenched and endemic approaches to how people are doing workplace management, how they’re dealing with the way in which our workplaces are structured,” she said, launching the report on Wednesday.
“There are issues between management and the union, there’s issues between the union and the volunteers association, there’s issues between firefighters themselves. We want to stamp out what has become a dysfunctional culture and this report is a really important step to doing that.”
But she did not agree with the report author, former Tasmanian emergency services minister, David O’Byrne, that amalgamation was the way to achieve change.
“These are two very different organisations,” Garrett said.
“There is plenty of work that needs to be done within our fire organisations to fix these endemic problems. Smashing together both boards without that work having been done is not something I’m willing to countenance at this point.”
She rejected any suggestion that she was refusing to merge the organisations because it was politically difficult.
Garrett launched the review of the resourcing, operations, management and culture of fire services in July, citing deep concerns about workplace culture and adversarial relationships. As part of the review, senior figures within the fire services and their unions were interviewed. There were also 180 public and private submissions made to the review, the majority which came from firefighters.
“The review heard descriptions of a bullying culture in both the Country Fire Authority and Metropolitan Fire Board, at all levels of the organisation,” the report found.
“The review also heard consistent stories of claims regarding poor or bullying behaviour being badly managed.”
The review found the fire services needed a contemporary governance model to improve cohesion within the organisation and the emergency sector more broadly.
“The review recommends that a single board be established as the governing body for both the Country Fire Authority and Metropolitan Fire Board, replacing the existing boards,” the report said.
“A single board would ensure that the appropriate mechanisms are in place for the fire services to work as one with the emergency management sector in line with the sector’s vision. The single board should help bring an end to siloed decision-making.”
Fire services commissioner, Craig Lapsley, said the review’s recommendations would be key to modernising fire services and ensuring transparency in the way they operated. Currently, the country and metropolitan fire services used different appliances, equipment, training, systems and procedures, which should be standardised as much as possible to allow the services to operate together seamlessly, the report found.
But Lapsely said merging the services was not the way to modernise outdated work practices, saying “we have to be really careful we don’t destroy what we’ve built”.
No lives had been lost during the current bushfire season, Garrett said.
The secretary of the United Firefighters Union, Peter Marshall, told the ABC that firefighters had been treated “extremely badly” over a long period of time, and called on the boards of both the metropolitan and country fire services to resign.
“What’s the point of a review if the government doesn’t act on the recommendations as specified, in particular that one about the board,” he said.
“That is just so important.”
