Fighting Fires With Bureaucracy

Since the 2019 inferno, Victoria’s emergency services spending has soared — but not on trucks, managed burns or boots on the ground.

By Michael Newman

If we spent more time on biopsies in journalism, there would be fewer autopsies.

After the devastating bushfires of 2019–2020, I was asked to give a presentation to a group of Executive Master of Business Administration students on the critical need to ensure emotion did not override objectivity when examining data in order to make sound decisions. The proposition to the students was simple: climate change. I suggested that everyone was entitled to their beliefs — but asked them to objectively observe published facts. I implored them to look at the observed empirical data to see whether it was consistent with their beliefs.

The media made much of the crimped budgets that had supposedly impeded the brave fire brigades and their ability to fight the devastation. The data revealed a totally different picture. Budgets had actually risen by over $1 billion in the three years prior to the bushfires across eight state fire agencies. No state missed out. But a lack of controlled burning was self-evident.

Scrolling forward to 2023–24, the combined budget for Fire Rescue Victoria (FRV) — which absorbed many of the full-time employees from the Victorian Country Fire Authority (CFA) in 2020 — has climbed to $1.57 billion, up from $850 million a decade ago. Over the same period, full-time staff within FRV jumped from 1,859 to 4,741. Administrative staff numbers also climbed, from 338 to 743.

Employee costs as a percentage of total annual revenue at FRV have climbed from 71 percent to 82 percent over the last decade. By way of comparison, Fire and Rescue New South Wales (FRNSW) has remained static at 76 percent.

Since the bushfires of 2019, employee expenses at FRV have surged from $421 million to $929 million, on a headcount of 4,741. Post-absorption, the number of Victorian CFA staff has declined from 2,834 to 1,288. The CFA budget has been cut from $865 million to $451 million post-restructure, while FRV has seen its budget grow by the difference — plus an extra $200 million.

So the rural communities in Victoria have every right to feel aggrieved at being whacked with a steep surcharge in the emergency services levy from July 1. While the Victorian government claims the new Emergency Services and Volunteers Fund (ESVF) is needed to meet rising demand from climate change and population growth, the unspoken driver is the ballooning cost of the union-dominated FRV. The levy has sparked widespread rural backlash because it sharply increases charges based on property value.

New South Wales has over four times the bushland area to control, yet operates a combined firefighting workforce that is 46 percent larger than Victoria’s, on a budget only 10 percent higher. NSW also has almost double the number of fire trucks compared to its southern neighbour.

Looking at the data, the number of fire trucks at the CFA’s disposal has remained static in recent years at around 1,900. Water carriers have fallen since the bushfires, from 42 to 37, and pumpers have fallen from 281 to 218. Over the past decade, the number of volunteers for the CFA has declined from a peak of 59,700 to 51,949.

Many might recall numerous former fire chiefs saying that the fires were caused by climate change — something they had supposedly made very clear for many years.

Yet an examination of a decade’s worth of annual reports — arguably the most appropriate documents in which to raise concerns about future risks and opportunities — shows that fire chiefs across several of the eight Australian state fire services rarely mentioned climate change. The New South Wales Rural Fire Service (RFS) and the South Australian Country Fire Service (CFS) made no mention of it in the eight years prior to the 2019–20 bushfires. The Victorian CFA omitted it for seven years, Tasmania’s TFS for six, Fire and Rescue NSW for five, and Queensland’s Fire and Emergency Services (QFES), Western Australia’s Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES), and the Metropolitan Fire Brigade (MFB) in Victoria for four years. To be fair, Queensland did make multiple comments in the year prior to the bushfires.

Perhaps the most interesting statistic from an FRNSW perspective was the frequency of “climate change” or “global warming” mentions depending on the party in government. Under NSW Labor, those terms appeared 89 times. When the Liberal–National Coalition took office, during their 12 years in power, “climate change” was mentioned just five times. “Global warming” was not mentioned at all. Since the election of the Minns government in 2023, “climate change” has already appeared eight times. Draw what conclusions you like.

At the very least, in 2019, “where practicable, FRNSW fire crews were encouraged to turn off all non-essential lights from 8:30 pm to 9:30 pm” for Earth Hour.

Mentions of hazard reduction or fuel load, on the other hand, hardly rated a mention over the same period. Targeted burns missed half their targets in the decade prior to the disaster. But examining a decade of data, mentions of “diversity and inclusion” surged across all fire services — from 41 to 198 in the lead-up to the bushfires. As of 2023–24, the latest annual reports reveal little change in that priority.

While no aspersions are cast on the bravery of those who serve in fire brigades — whether paid or volunteer — it seems that virtue signalling and bloated administration are taking precedence over rational operational requirements and sensible equipment procurement.

Perhaps the Victorian government needs to look at responsible budgeting, rather than expecting rural taxpayers to shell out more to protect themselves (which many do gratis), while allocating more resources to a heavily unionised metropolitan branch that has clearly breached trust with its CFA colleagues.