Who wants to own the NSW Rural Fire Service’s Red Fleet? No one.
Stand-off between councils, RFS, state government and Auditor General.
Stalemate over rural fire fleet
Outlet: The Saturday Paper
Length: 1395 words
Turnaround time: One week
Number of interviews: Four for quoting, two on background only, three who responded with a joint statement, and one who declined to comment.
“It’s very difficult to account for assets that you don’t see, control, didn’t buy, didn’t sell, don’t even know if [they] necessarily exist.”
This feature for The Saturday Paper attempted to make sense of an escalating war of words between New South Wales local governments, the NSW Treasurer, and the NSW Auditor General over who exactly owned more than $100 million worth of firefighting vehicles and equipment – the NSW Rural Fire Service’s Red Fleet.
Idea
I was actually exploring a completely different story when this one fell in my lap. I had heard grumblings about a pumped hydro energy storage project slated for Lithgow, NSW, which was pissing off a lot of locals.
I’d done a couple of interviews to see what that story was about. However it became clear that what I thought might have been greenwashing for a local coal-fired power station was actually not, and nor was it enough of a story to get over the line with a national newspaper.
Shortly after, one of the people I had interviewed got in touch with a tip. It looked like the NSW state government, via the NSW Auditor General, was trying to shift nearly $150 million of depreciation costs of the entire NSW Rural Fire Service’s mobile assets – the trucks and fire-fighting equipment of nearly 2000 brigades – onto local council books.
Councils were fighting this, claiming it would have potentially dire consequences for their bottom line when they were already struggling with the crippling costs of natural disasters. But in refusing to comply with the NSW Auditor General’s direction to put these assets in their financial reports, they were risking getting a ‘qualified audit’ of their accounts, which could mean those councils would be unable to get loans or grants, and could have serious political consequences.
Given the NSW Rural Fire Service is the largest volunteer firefighting force in the world, and is tasked with protecting the lives and property across 95% of NSW, this was worth digging into.
The stoush (love that word) had been covered a bit by a couple of regional newspapers, but nothing in depth.
I didn’t want to go off half-cocked with a vague pitch, so I spoke to someone at Local Government NSW on background – for information only, not for quoting – who gave me a clearer sense of what was going on. I also read of the public statements from councils, the NSW Auditor General and the state government on the issue. It gave me enough to know it was a solid story.
I pitched it to The Saturday Paper editor Erik Jensen, and he asked me to turn it around in one week as a news story.
Yeah, I panicked.
Interviews
As soon as I got the go-ahead, I sought comment from local councils who had been stomping their feet about the issue, the Auditor General, the NSW Treasurer, NSW Minister for Local Government, NSW Minister for Emergency Services, Local Government NSW, the Rural Fire Service itself, and anyone else who I thought might have stake in, or informed perspective on the issue.
While all this was going on, I was also MC’ing the two-day Australian Bushfire Building Conference, surrounded by representatives from local councils and the Rural Fire Service, none of whom I could breathe a word to about the story.
I approached a few local councils for comment, and got on-the-record comments from people at two councils – Parkes and Berrigan Shire – as well as the president of Local Government NSW.
I’d sent an email requesting comment from the NSW Auditor General’s office, but they don’t speak to media.
The NSW Rural Fire Service wouldn’t comment, and instead referred me to the NSW Minister for Emergency Services.
I also approached the three ministers in the NSW state government – treasurer, minister for emergency services and minister for local government.
After a fair bit of back and forth, sending through of detailed questions, I received a single frustratingly useless response from all three ministers that just repeated the legislation and the public position of the NSW Auditor General. They did not directly answer the most important questions I was asking, in terms of their response to the arguments made by local councils.
When I pointed this out, and threatened to hit the big red Did Not Respond To Questions button, they got snippy and insisted they had.
(Side-rant: this is a typical response to almost all media queries to governments and ministers in Australia.
With incredibly rare exceptions, government agencies and ministers will only respond to media enquiries in writing, and in my experience only answer the questions they want to answer – and literally a few minutes before your deadline – so they can spin a response favouring their position or decisions and ignore the hard questions.
It’s bad for democracy, because it means these individuals who are elected by the public, whose salaries are paid for by the public, are becoming less and less answerable to that public. Government has becoming increasingly opaque in my time as a journalist. If journalists can’t interrogate elected officials on their decision-making, that means you are losing a vital way of holding governments to account.)
I did have one stroke of luck. Throughout all these interviews, one issue didn’t make sense – the idea of depreciation costs. Many councils were saying that the depreciation costs of these vehicles – the reduction in their value over the lifetime of the vehicle – would affect their bottom line and mean they effectively had less money to spend. I didn’t quite understand how that worked, but it was key to the whole thing.
Then someone who was extremely knowledgeable about the whole situation contacted me to speak on background only – so no attribution, no quoting – to explain the financials aspects. It made a world of difference, because that person laid it out very clearly and their explanation was confirmed by one of the local council interviews I did.
I also interviewed an expert in emergency services and emergency management law, who had written a legal article about the situation.
Research
This whole complicated argument hadn’t sprung fully formed from the waves like an angry smoke-wreathed Venus. There was a long history going all the way back to the Rural Fires Act of 1997 which established the NSW Rural Fire Service as a statutory body of the NSW government.
Given I didn’t even know what a statutory body was, let alone understand what depreciation costs were, I had a truckload of learning to do in a very short space of time.
This included:
reading the Rural Fires Act to understand what the legislation said about who owned the Red Fleet, who bought the equipment, who was financially responsible for it etc;
trawling through the minutes of council meetings and websites for a heap of NSW councils to see what their arguments were against it;
reading comments made during NSW budget estimates hearings about the issue;
reading the Local Government Code of Accounting Practice and Financial Reporting to understand what that said about local councils’ obligations with respect to reporting Red Fleet assets;
research and understand what depreciation costs are, and whether they actually represent a loss of real income (spoiler alert – they don’t);
and reading the correspondence and statements put out by various NSW ministers, as well as the NSW Auditor General’s office.
Writing
This wasn’t going to be one of those stories where I could just let it flow out of my brain and onto the page.
There were a lot of points I had to hit in not a lot of words. The story had to be laid out carefully to navigate through those points and in the right order so that the whole picture made sense.
Here’s what that looked like:
Aftermath
With political stories like this, there’s always a period of anxiety after publication where you wait for some injured party to come out swinging. (Well, to be fair I get that after every story). But this one didn’t garner much of a reaction, which is both a relief but also a little disappointing.
The stand-off is ongoing, with 43 NSW councils issued qualified audits in 2022 because they did not recognise the Red Fleet assets on their books.
Lessons
I now understand what my accountant is talking about with depreciation costs, although usually she’s talking about a couple of hundred dollars on a computer, not tens of millions of dollars.
It’s always an interesting exercise trying to get to the bottom of any issue that involves politicians. I still hold this perhaps naïve expectation that politicians would want to set the record straight on something like this and argue their case. So I’m always surprised and frustrated when they brush these sorts of questions off and spin out some bland, useless response, especially when it’s on a genuine issue of public importance (as opposed to some gotcha political point-scoring exercise).
One might argue that they don’t owe journalists anything, and that they will answer to the public through institutions like estimates hearings and the ballot box. But without journalists asking questions outside those times, we don’t actually know what issues to take to the ballot box.
Sure, a fight over ownership of the Red Fleet isn’t going to sink a government right now. But when the next deadly bushfires rage – and they will – and the fire-fighting trucks that should have been maintained in good condition haven’t been because no one wants to claim ownership, a qualified audit is going to be the least of our worries.
This is my third post in this series. If you have any feedback, questions or comments, please get in touch!