Fire and emergency talks on as city burned
While some politicians apply blame, others look ahead to a new, streamlined fire service. reports.
Where were you on the night of the Port Hills fires? Christchurch was packing its bags or nervously checking updates on its phone or, in a few stupid cases, driving to the Port Hills to catch a view of the inferno. Christchurch had nothing else to think about but the moving fronts of those fires and the ominous red glow on the hills.
By pure coincidence, a small group gathered in central Wellington on the same evening to talk about fires and the people who fight them. The Fire and Emergency New Zealand Bill was having its second reading in Parliament and just a few MPs had stayed late to debate its merits.
It could not have been more timely or more meaningful. The evening’s star was Peter Dunne, leader of UnitedFuture and veteran MP from Ohariu. The dominant Dunne narrative this week was about whether or not an agreement between Labour and the Green Party could tip him out of his seat in September. It was all the newsroom drama of ‘‘dirty deals’’ and fights to the political death. But watching Dunne in action showed you another side. Here was a thoughtful politician getting something done.
The bill was Dunne’s as Internal Affairs Minister. He explained in a YouTube clip posted on UnitedFuture’s social media accounts that it is about ‘‘bringing together rural, urban, volunteer and paid urban firefighters into one national organisation for the first time’’. The new Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Fenz) will mean ‘‘a much better standard of service delivery, a much better deal for our rural and volunteer firefighters and a much better deal for New Zealanders’’.
He referred to fires burning in Christchurch and Hawke’s Bay, where ‘‘rural firefighters, volunteers and paid staff are collaborating to put those fires out and to restore a sense of order’’. From July 2017, the new Fenz agency will co-ordinate all that firefighting activity and ‘‘bring a much higher standard of service and effective delivery to New Zealanders’’.
Dunne has promised it will be ‘‘more co-ordinated and better integrated’’. A Budget allocation of $303 million will be spent on merging the New Zealand Fire Service, the National Rural Fire Authority and ‘‘the fire functions of 40-plus rural fire authorities’’, Dunne said in 2016. Of that sum, $112m will be spent on creating the new organisation during four years and the remaining $119m will address funding gaps in rural fire services, create local committees to ensure needs of communities are understood by the new organisation and provide more support for the approximately 12,000 fire volunteers.
‘‘There will no longer be any poor relations within the fire services of this country,’’ Dunne told Parliament this month.
Urban and rural services will be brought together by repealing two pieces of legislation from the 1970s, the Fire Service Act and the Forest and Rural Fires Act, to create one entity.
Again all this was timely, given the blame-storming that was starting to be applied by Civil Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee.
The response in Christchurch suggested an uncoordinated system. Who should have called a state of emergency and when, exactly? Why, Brownlee asked, were the rural fire services leading things?
‘‘I’m perplexed as to why you’ve got the Selwyn District or rural firefighters running things inside Christchurch City Council district boundaries,’’ he said.
Some disliked Brownlee’s bluster but he did have a point. Was the response slower than it could have been and was that confusion of territorial agencies at least partly to blame?
On the ground in Christchurch, Brownlee’s position seemed more mild and conciliatory.
Yes, ‘‘they could have moved more quickly’’, but he said he was really having a crack at the legislation. Dunne’s new law should go some way towards fixing the problem.
The idea was proposed almost 70 years when the Royal Commission into the Ballantyne’s fire that killed 41 people in Christchurch in 1947 made a number of recommendations.
Dunne said there were 16 previous, unsuccessful attempts to create a national service over the past 20 or so years. This one has gone the furthest.
When the votes were counted, only NZ First was opposed to moving this legislation on to the next phase. ‘‘I’ve been trying to keep myself calm,’’ MP Clayton Mitchell claimed. He came bearing statistics. He said that 83 per cent of the nearly 14,000 fire workers are volunteers. There were 5400 structure fires last year. There were 10,300 medical emergencies that fire workers attended. They were also at 5100 vegetation fires, 4815 car accidents and 3245 hazardous material call outs.
Mitchell’s point, of course, was that fire workers are busy and the vast majority are unpaid. Two reports from Australia have convinced him that mergers of urban and rural services favour the urban culture at the expense of rural. Do we risk driving the rural volunteers away?
His other beef was with the new fire levies on non-residential commercial property. The rate will be 7.6 cents for every $100 insured. A $1m commercial property will have $7600 in fire levies.
‘‘People are going to underinsure their property,’’ he said.
Others worried about the levies on museums and galleries that will impose what Curran calls ‘‘significant financial hardship’’. Paying tribute to Dyson, Green MP Jan Logie seemed to strike just the right tone: ‘‘Her experiences from the earthquakes add a lot to the committee’s consideration of legislation such as this’’.
And while they may have been talking about legal abstractions in an empty room, Logie identified the world beyond. ‘‘My heart really does go out to the people of Christchurch. It just feels wrong that they’re having to go through another crisis and disaster. It really seems too much.
‘‘But it does make this debate all the more poignant. It reminds us that what is at the heart of this is trying to ensure our fire and emergency services are able to respond and that all of those people working in those services in paid and voluntary capacities are well supported.’’ For one or two moments, politics seemed positive, even inspirational. Before that disappeared again like smoke.