Editorial: Fire Service too hot to handle

Problems shelved always return. The difficulty of financing the Fire Service has been shelved for seven years. It is that long since a man from the insurance industry, through which the Fire Service is financed, tried to make better use of its time and got his fingers burned. Firefighters fought back with all the public support they could muster and made the National Government retreat from the brave plans of its appointed Fire Service Commission chairman, Roger Estall.

The Labour Party came to power later that year and dared not return to the Fire Service problem - until now. On Monday Internal Affairs Minister Rick Barker stepped tentatively into the embers to announce that the Government is looking for a new way to organise and finance the service. He talks of a single organisation covering professional urban and rural volunteer brigades and sounds ready to end the long-standing funding of firefighting through levies on property insurance.

"We need to make it fairer," he said, and the Insurance Council enthusiastically agrees. "The Fire Service is funded entirely by New Zealanders who are insured but used increasingly by New Zealanders who are not insured," said the council's chief executive Chris Ryan. But this has come about because the service is under-employed and now attends all sorts of emergencies besides fires. Road accidents and floods, for example. Motor vehicles are frequently under-insured and floods find about half the prone population have little or no insurance.

The minister, meanwhile, is concerned at the inequality of urban and rural services. He believes it generally "unacceptable to New Zealanders that the same range and consistency of services are not available to all communities". That sounds like the beginning of the end of the volunteer fire brigades that have been part of the fabric of smaller communities. The Professional Firefighters Union welcomes the minister's comment about "uneven" services and all that it implies. But something of the nation's life would be lost with the volunteer brigades.

Already it sounds as though the financial burden will be transferred to taxpayers. If that seems "fairer" it would also be less efficient. Firefighters, some of whose shifts can be so quiet they can sleep while on pay and hold down a second job, would no longer have the Insurance Council looking over their shoulder, trying to lower its costs and extract more value from their paid hours. They would have less pressure to busy themselves on the fire prevention programmes Mr Estall wanted, or perhaps to attend the range of emergencies for which they have been turning out.

The danger is that with straightforward funding from taxation they would become state servants with a defined responsibility and do nothing else. If this is the direction the Government favours then it must define the role of the service very rigorously. This may be the moment to do away with a dedicated fire service and formally reconstitute it as the comprehensive emergency service it is becoming. It could indeed by given overall operational responsibility for civil defence.

Mr Barker, no doubt mindful of what happened seven years ago, is saying little more about his plans until the union and others meet to hear them within a few weeks. He says he wants a consensus, as does the Insurance Council and the union no doubt. But insured property owners are taxpayers too. Nobody outside the Fire Service would gain anything if it is transferred to the public teat and left to grow fatter and lazier there. A consensus can be too comfortable for the public good.