If bullies can’t stand the heat ...

Toughen up. That must be the message following a review into bullying and harassment within Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ). Let’s be clear: the appalling parade of scorn and cruelties exposed in the review reveals a service that has been raddled by true weakness.

What is required is the sort of institutional and personal toughness needed for this organisation, to grow up and grow out of it.

In this respect the report reveals problems not dissimilar to the challenges that the Defence forces have identified and have committed to correct.

The suggestion is that much of the problematic behaviour among firefighters has reflected, at least in part, an honest confusion as to what truly constituted harmful bullying. The service was trying, albeit by wrongheaded means, to develop a culture of physical and mental toughness that the job itself renders necessary.

To the extent we may swallow that, it’s more explanation than excuse. And some of the extreme and sustained behaviour has been intolerable by any reasonable standard.

Some of the accounts in the report suggest a juvenile nastiness. The swaggering machismo of playground boys playing drill-sergeant with extravagant threats of violence – ‘‘If we want something out of you, we’ll kick it out of you’’ – sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic comments made, sometimes at high level, without repercussion.

A culture that winked at humiliations and intimidation to the extent that 45 per cent of people said they had witnessed and/or experiencing bullying or harassment that more than half of them lacked the confidence to report.

FENZ, to be fair, is itself a new organisation after the merging in mid-2017 of almost 40 firefighting branches. These weren’t cookie-cutter identical outfits to begin with.

And there are encouraging signs of a willingness to change, identified within the review itself, written by retired judge Coral Shaw, endorsed by chief executive Rhys Jones, but also – you would like to think tellingly – detected from CultureSafe NZ director Allan Halse, who says that, after 18 months of proactive effort, the service has gone from one he’d rank as the worst employers to one of the best.

It still has a great deal of work to do to live up to the steely commitment to improvement that is being cited. The report itself calls for 33 measures, including a new set of values and code of behaviour and removing barriers to reporting bullying and harassment.

The need for change within the service is now apparent and acknowledged. A degree of momentum towards that end is already coming into view and should be encouraged externally as well as internally.

But culture change cannot always take place without personnel change. Firefighting is tough work. It’s high stakes, skilled, unforgiving and can be deeply upsetting. Firefighters do need to form strong, supportive bonds with one another. But not by close-ranked repellent behaviours.

It’s as they say. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. That was perhaps once a phrase to be used by the bully. Now it’s one to be used against the bully. They’ve been found out and their time is up.

‘‘Firefighters do need to form strong, supportive bonds with one another. But not by close-ranked repellent behaviours.’’