The New South Wales government is facing calls to consider further professionalising its firefighting force as the unprecedented bushfire crisis gripping the state stretches volunteers to their limit.

A day after blazes some Rural Fire Service members described as “unfightable” claimed the lives of two volunteers south of Sydney, attention has again turned to the resourcing of the firefighting effort amid concerns about the scale of the emergency.

With catastrophic fire danger warnings again in place across swathes of NSW on Saturday, the federal opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, called for volunteer firefighters to be compensated through tax breaks, one-off payments or special leave entitlements saying the fires in NSW were “not businesses as usual”.

“These are extraordinary fires ... but we need to do much better right now as well,” he said. “We need to do more to make sure that people aren’t out of pocket, that they’re not in a position of choosing whether to go out on another run, or whether to have to go to work and provide for their family.”

Those comments come amid ongoing scrutiny about the resourcing of volunteer firefighting units and reports of scenes of “chaos” from some volunteers posted at firegrounds across the state on Thursday.

“There’s a really bad feeling among some of us at the moment, it doesn’t really feel like we can trust the instructions we’ve been given at times,” he said.

Bob Callow, the sub-branch secretary for the outer-western Sydney Fire Brigade Employees’ Union, was one of hundreds of professional firefighters who joined the RFS in battling the Green Wattle Creek blaze where two volunteers fighters were killed and some 40 homes in the towns of Buxton, Balmoral and Bargo were destroyed.

He told Guardian Australia that on Thursday he’d seen RFS units sent from Orchard Hill in western Sydney to Milton about three hours drive south before being redirected back another two hours north to help battle the blaze in Bargo.

“The RFS is a volunteers organisation, they’re not really designed to sustain these long campaigns,” he said.

On Thursday, Callow joined the union’s secretary, Leighton Drury, in calling for the state government to increase funding to lift the number of professional firefighters in NSW. The union estimates the force is about 400 officers short, based on population growth over the last decade.

He said relying on volunteers for such an extended period of time was unsustainable.

“They’ve got to eat, they’ve got to sleep, and they’ve got to eventually go back to their normal jobs,” he said.

“You know you can’t just keep flogging a resource. People have said they want to be there. They don’t want to be there, they’re compelled to be there. Anyone who volunteers has an immense drive and it’s not they want to be there but they feel they should be there.”

Mick Holton, the head of the volunteers firefighters association and a vocal critic of the government’s resourcing of the RFS, agreed and said he believed the government should consider merging both the RFS and NSW Fire and Rescue.

“Volunteers have to earn an income,” he said. “They’ve got jobs or they’ve got to run a business, like I do. There’s a lot of fantastic employers picking up the tab for a lot of volunteers and good on them but it’s not sustainable. It’s not up to businesses to pay the state’s firefighters.

“And the thing on top of that is we’re not even looking the ones we have. We’ve already seen firefighters crowdfunding for their own respiratory protection.”

Holton said heard a number of reports that coordination of the fires was “all over the shop, which does put people’s lives at risk”.

“To me the time has come for us to start thinking about whether we should all be wearing the same badge. It doesn’t necessarily mean professionalisation but it could be opportunities for volunteers who want to be paid firefighters,” he said. “Surely it’s time to rip the Band-Aid off and say, ‘wait a minute, maybe we need to rethink this’.”