This coming weekend the Annual General Meeting and Conference of the United Fire Brigades Association will take place in Wellington. It will be the largest such gathering in the organisation's 145-year history, with more than 600 delegates and observers attending.

The United Fire Brigades Association represents the 86% of New Zealand's urban and rural firefighters who are volunteers. While Fire and Emergency New Zealand is the operational body responsible for the delivery of fire and emergency services, it is heavily reliant on the volunteers. Volunteer firefighters cover 93% of New Zealand’s land mass, including virtually all the area that has been at risk from recent adverse weather events.

To put the contribution of volunteers into perspective, 567 of New Zealand’s 647 fire stations are crewed entirely by volunteers, and a further 34 stations are crewed jointly by volunteers and employed firefighters. Only 46 fire stations, mainly in the four main centres, are crewed entirely by employed staff. The UFBA also represents airport fire services and other urban search and rescue services personnel.

I have the privilege of chairing the United Fire Brigades Association. However, by way of disclaimer, the comments in this column are my own views, and do not necessarily reflect those of the UFBA.

As the country recovers from the aftermath of the recent Cyclone Lola, and with the memory of the damage wrought by Cyclone Gabrielle earlier in the year still raw for many people, it is worth remembering that the bulk of the emergency response work to those events was carried out by firefighters, the vast majority of whom were volunteers.

This is not new – firefighters have been the primary responders to civil emergencies for many years. In 2014 New Zealand's firefighters received a United Nations' commendation for their response to the 2010 and 2011 Christchurch earthquakes.

Yet the myth persists that there is a vast network of separate civil defence workers out there who step into the breach whenever an adverse event occurs. Government agencies like the old Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management, and the National Emergency Management Agency which replaced it, perpetuate the myth. There is no such standing civil defence army.

As we saw with the cyclones in the north and east of the North Island earlier this year, it was primarily firefighters – overwhelmingly volunteers – who responded to the civil emergencies affecting their communities. And it is volunteer firefighters who are often the first responders to other emergencies – like road accidents. Attending structure fires now accounts for only about a fifth of the incidents firefighters attend.

When, as Minister of Internal Affairs, I amalgamated the old Rural Fire Service and the New Zealand Fire Service into a single organisation – something first recommended by a Royal Commission in the wake of Ballantyne’s fire in Christchurch over 75 years ago but ignored by successive governments – I deliberately named it Fire and Emergency New Zealand to reflect the wider role firefighters have today.

Yet within the bureaucracy there has always been a belief in the need for some sort of overarching emergency structure to provide co-ordination in the event of a national disaster. Hence the retention for many years of the position of director of Civil Defence, now replaced by the National Emergency Management Agency, as an autonomous agency within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. NEMA’s role is to provide “leadership and support around national, local and regional emergencies” and to provide information to local authorities to assist them in their own disaster preparedness.

But both NEMA and the local authorities lack any personnel capability to respond effectively to a national or local emergency. That is where firefighters come in. Under the changes I made in 2017, Fire and Emergency New Zealand has nationwide statutory responsibility for fire safety, firefighting, hazardous substance incident response, vehicle extrication and urban search and rescue. There is no need to invent another wheel to run alongside that.

Firefighters already provide the emergency response capability the country needs to deal with the range of adverse natural events that might befall it. We have seen that at work in the responses to the cyclones we have endured this year. The clear message from these has been that the speed of the response has been most critical, and the value of local knowledge was of paramount importance. Local need, not national bureaucratic leadership, drove the community response to what was happening.

What our emergency response services, especially our volunteer fire and emergency services need now is adequate resourcing and training to deal with the challenges increasing adverse weather events brought on by climate change are posing to the resilience of local communities. FENZ is best placed to respond to those challenges, but it must be adequately resourced to do so.

Bureaucrats locked away in the Beehive bunker, “providing leadership and support” in a time of emergency are all very well. However, a far more practical and productive use of their time would be ensuring that our firefighters, urban and rural, volunteer and employed – those who do the real work – have the resources and expertise they need, so that they can continue serving their communities the way they have done for the last 145 years.

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