Some question the increased use of helicopters to fight forest fires. Photo: Supplied / Paul McIntyre
Wildfire specialist skills and capability risk being lost, even as climate change escalates the hazards.
Now, a new stocktake is about to start, in the shadow of a looming levy change for forest owners and amid disagreements highlighted by disruption at a firefighting conference.
It's a multimillion-dollar debate over how much forest and farm might burn in future - foresters claim a doubling in the razing rate since 2017 - and how best to save it.
Figuring out how deep the country's skills, and its ranks of firefighting, choppers and dozers run is one thing - deciding how they are used and paid for is another.
That discussion disrupted a big firefighting conference in Christchurch just last month.
"I know how it happened," said forest-firefighting veteran Alan Thompson.
"What I'm completely uncertain about and do not understand is why that important session - and a session critical to issues around management of fire and forest - was removed."
In April, he arranged for four experts to debate aerial firefighting at the national conference on fighting rural and forest fires in July, but it was canned.
Thompson blamed Fire and Emergency, whom he said - at the very top - threatened to pull funding and ban its people from attending, if the panel went ahead.
He said he would have stepped aside if that had helped - Thompson, of Lower Hutt, is among a group of rural firefighters that have been disseminated strong opinions and research for a long time, questions if FENZ is getting value for money.
'No pressure placed on us'
FENZ rejected his account.
"Chief executive Kerry Gregory made no such request and had no such conversation," it told RNZ. "The conference organisers made the decision to cancel this panel."
Gregory was asked to comment, but didn't.
Former Minister of Internal Affairs and head of FENZ Peter Dunne said he pulled the plug himself.
"I can assure you there was no pressure placed on us by Fire and Emergency," he said.
"We, the United Fire Brigades Association, were about to enter discussions with Fire and Emergency about the whole role of aviation and firefighting," said Dunne, who chairs Tangata Matatau, the non-FENZ brigades body that hosted the conference.
"I didn't think it was timely to have a separate discussion taking place."
Consequently, a panel debate designed to shed light on the likes of how FENZ's bill for helicopter firefighting had doubled to more than $7m a year, in the end, only generated more questions around the stressed partnership between land management groups and government agencies.
An email at the time the panel was dumped, seen by RNZ, stated that FENZ told Dunne it was "requiring the session's withdrawal".
Dune said the email was wrong, but the organiser who wrote the email - Murray Dudfield - said the email was not wrong.
For its part, FENZ added it worried the panel might compromise commercial matters around its new contracts for aerial firefighting and this was why it called Dunne.
'A doubling in the areas lost to wildfires'
In a fraught situation, clashes over who got to speak at a conference could gain extra significance.
"There are some questions as to whether we're getting good value from this increasing expenditure on aircraft," said Thompson.
In an article he was working on, Dudfield used a winter 2021 wildfire near Kaikōura to illustrate the point - a small number of ground crew fought the fire.
"The four helicopters arrived on the fire site more than five hours after the fire started," he said.
The core point from critics was that the balance of firefighting had gotten way out of whack - groundcrew versus aerial, urban versus rural, who pays how much versus who does not.
Overall, capabilities to tackle wildfires were falling, they said.
Sean McBride, chair of the Forest Owners Association and Farm Forestry Association fire committee, told RNZ in March that fires were burning through twice as much forest as before FENZ was set up.
"So, effectively, a doubling in the areas lost to wildfires," he said.
FENZ's establishment ended a host of separate rural firefighting brigades and groups, who had deployed resources largely as they saw fit. Now, they fit within FENZ's overall budget that has risen inexorably towards $750m, twice what it was.
Meantime, foresters' own annual firefighting costs have topped $20m - half on insurance for a third of forests, half for assets like dozers and training.
"As costs go up, forest companies will have to decide if they carry on investing in that capability," McBride's fire committee warned a parliamentary select committee in March.
McBride told RNZ forest owners would make that decision over the next 12 months, a deadline set by a new levy mechanism due in mid-2026 that would cost them each tens of thousands of dollars.
Key changes included a proposed rise in the overall levy of just over five percent and the removal of some exemptions for foresters.
'We need to benchmark'
Dunne said he pulled the plug on the panel due to new discussions he had begun with FENZ.
He refused to detail the issues to RNZ, other than to say it was "about getting the right balance between aerial firefighting and traditional firefighting methods".
"[What] I don't want to see is a situation where we put all all our eggs in one basket, so there are some sensitivities, they do need to be worked through carefully and I just didn't think that having a public hearing... was a very sensible thing to do."
Thompson, Dudfield and McBride had not heard about these talks. McBride said forest owners would like to take part.
The foresters and farmers have called for ages for an overall review of whether FENZ is set up the right way and performing for rural people. While there was no sign of one coming, a stocktake was.
This move has buoyed McBride up.
"We had a meeting of representatives from the different land management organisations and FENZ earlier this week, where we've actually put together the strawman of what a good collaboration looks like," he said.
A stocktake of skillsets and assets "to remedy any deficiencies" should be ready by year's-end.
"We need to benchmark really where we are currently.
"There's been quite a few retirements of experienced rural fire personnel from both forest companies and FENZ over recent years, so we just need to make sure that we're replacing them with capability."
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