Two organisations stand out from the crowd, however. St John and the NZ Fire Service are so professional and utterly reliable that many people probably don't appreciate the extent to which they rely upon volunteers. Indeed the Order of St John is a charity pure and simple. It employs a small minority of paid staff but most of those who respond to life and death emergencies are volunteers, and the money that keeps their ambulances on the road does not include taxpayer support.
The Fire Service is not in quite the same boat. It does receive funding, but outside the main centres the men and women who respond to emergencies are volunteers, who, like volunteer ambulance officers, often give at considerable personal cost.
The Fire Service knows its volunteer base is in trouble. It's begun looking for ways and means of rewarding its volunteers, perhaps by reducing the council rates they pay or subsidising tertiary education costs. The most effective response to a deepening crisis could be to recognise the sacrifices made by the people who employ volunteer firefighters, because that is where the pressure really seems to be building.
The great bulk of volunteer firefighters in the Far North work for their living. They do not sit at home waiting for their pagers to activate, but leave their places of employment, often for lengthy periods of time. Employers who are struggling to make ends meet can hardly be criticised if they are beginning to think that hiring a volunteer firefighter is a luxury they can't afford.
The will to give remains powerful within the firefighters themselves though; the common tale in the Far North is that crews are hard to find during working hours. Volunteers are happy to give their own time, but in many cases aren't finding it as easy as they once did to give their employers'.
That might seem a little odd given the Far North's level of unemployment, although that isn't always seen as a source of salvation. Some years ago this newspaper editorialised on the apparent unwillingness of people who effectively had nothing to do all day to offer their services to the Kaitaia brigade, and was gently chastised by a senior member who suggested that that was not the sort of person he was looking for. Understandably, perhaps, the best volunteer firefighter was regarded as someone who had plenty to do, plenty of responsibility in other areas, and would transfer the attitudes that had brought success in other endeavours to the brigade.
If that attitude is prevalent then some of the Far North's brigades really do have a problem, one that is highlighted once again in today's Northland Age.
Kaikohe's CFO, Bill Hutchinson, who knows how difficult it can be to get away from work when the siren sounds, speaks of his concerns again after the fire that destroyed Kaikohe's ABC early childhood centre last week. The brigade had struggled to dispatch two appliances, a problem which had no real impact on that occasion, but might well do "next time".
He also warns the brigade might not be as quick to respond to emergencies in the future as it has been in the past, given that some volunteers are travelling up to 35 kilometres to the station.
The community did not seem keen to address that issue though. An open day at the station and an appeal for recruits published in school newsletters that collectively went to more than 1000 homes produced not one response. Mr Hutchinson, who has a roster of 22 volunteers but should have 30, with around 15 available at any given time but at times has five or six (10 are needed to man two appliances), has made it clear he would welcome reinforcements from the unemployed, providing they meet the brigade's criteria.
Kawakawa's CFO Wayne Martin faces a similar dilemma. He says he struggles to get one crew away during the day, and it can take 10 minutes to get an appliance out the door thanks to the distances some volunteers have to travel.
The Bay of Islands Vintage Railway Trust knows how hard it can be to enthuse locals to give their time to a good cause, even if it doesn't quite foot it with saving lives and property. The trust has been scathing in its criticism of a community with high unemployment but which refuses to answer its calls for new blood, its greatest successes in recent times being in attracting people who live nowhere near Kawakawa.
Ironically it seems we are unwilling to give for the common good at a time when many people have more time on their hands than any generation before them.
It is difficult to escape the view that we have become selfish, and accustomed to letting others do the job rather than asking how we might help.
Whatever the answer to that, we may need to brace ourselves for a future where we will need to take more care of ourselves, even in life and death situations, than we have been used to. And there will be little point in looking to the state to fill the gaps. No future government will be able to find the enormous sums of money that would be needed to provide an ambulance service on the scale of St John, or to increase funding for the Fire Service to the point where volunteers are no longer needed.
Far North District Council routinely makes the point that volunteers enrich our lives and make the Far North a better place in which to live.
Indeed they do, but it goes beyond that. Volunteers go beyond doing things that make life more pleasant. Some provide vital services that we take for granted, and might one day have to learn to live without.
Bill Hutchinson says the brigades' dwindling pool of volunteers will end in tears, and he might well be right.
Perhaps communities will only respond when people begin to die in situations where the quick response of highly-trained volunteers is now regarded as a given.
