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Fire and Emergency New Zealand's truck crisis runs deeper than officials admit, requiring a full-scale investigation into the agency's governance failures.
A parliamentary inquiry heard damning evidence Wednesday that FENZ has botched asset management so badly it may never have merged urban and rural fire services in 2017 if the true costs were known.
Ray Deacon from the Taxpayers' Union called FENZ's asset management "astonishing" in its incompetence. "Failures to control expenditure, failure to efficiently construct rural fire stations, failure to efficiently manage assets, all suggest a major failure of governance by the board and Department of Internal Affairs," he told MPs.
FENZ claims it inherited worse trucks than expected from rural brigades during the 2017 merger. Deacon isn't buying it. If true, why didn't cost-benefit analysis flag the problem beforehand?
"Would the merger actually even have gone ahead had the actual costs that have been incurred subsequent to merger been known at the time? I very much doubt it," he said.
The consequences aren't just financial. Wellington firefighter Alan Collett, representing the Professional Firefighters' Union, linked truck failures directly to deaths at the 2023 Loafers Lodge fire that killed five people.
When the Newtown station's long-ladder truck broke down, a replacement with a shorter ladder couldn't reach people jumping onto the building's south-side roof. "Options got more and more limited as time ticked by," Collett said.
He pointed to an unreleased internal FENZ review showing "systematic inconsistencies" in training — another sign the problems spread beyond trucks.
Submitter Adriana de Souza, who witnessed firefighters battling a 2024 Parnell lodge fire in Auckland, put it simply: they deserved better equipment.
Multiple submitters demanded a wider investigation beyond trucks. The evidence suggests they're right — this looks less like teething problems from a 2017 merger and more like fundamental management failure that's putting lives at risk.
The inquiry continues.