Gregg Borschmann: When it comes to fire they are, in their own words, the best fire fighters on earth.

Shane Fitzsimmons [archival]: We've got the best fire fighters in the world, they are second to none. The…[gets emotional]…

Gregg Borschmann: Rural Fire Services Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons struggles with his emotions. It's October 2013. In the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, on one terrible day, more than 200 homes had just been lost.

Shane Fitzsimmons [archival]: We can only be proud of what's unravelled in the last 24 hours. The thing that always worries me is that fire fighters beat themselves up, they absolutely regret that they're not able to save everything but the reality is under these sorts of conditions you simply can't.

Gregg Borschmann: The NSW Rural Fire Service, the RFS, has grown into what it says is the largest volunteer fire fighting force in the world. Like volunteer fire fighters in other states, these men and women are considered heroes in the community.

Woman [archival]: Well, we're very proud of the work they did, they're just absolute heroes, just so wonderful.

Man [archival]: We came along to thank them for saving our house. We almost lost a house in Illawong. We just had to see them, you know?

Reporter [archival]: And does it feel good to be able to thank them in person?

Man [archival]: Yes, it does, it's great, it really is.

Gregg Borschmann: That was a tickertape parade in Sydney after disastrous fires in the summer of 1994. More than 80 bushfires burnt for three weeks along the eastern seaboard. Those troubling and deadly fires were a catalyst for the creation of the RFS, centralising and taking over the uncoordinated and under-resourced bushfire brigades that had been run by local government.

But almost 20 years later, has the RFS become an untouchable empire?

Hello, I'm Gregg Borschmann, and this is Background Briefing. Today, the story of fire, ever more expensive bushfire fighting, a turf war over who controls the front line, a struggle for who gets the accolades, and questions about accountability.

In New South Wales, the bushfire heroes are facing challenge and scrutiny, and the discontent and frustration comes from within, as much as without. It happens especially after a big fire.

Bill Shields: One of the problems that I've always witnessed is that there is never really any constructively critical debriefs after these events. Everybody wants to pat themselves on the back and say 'we did a great job' and avoid looking at the process and how it can be improved. The mechanisms aren't there to critically review.

Gregg Borschmann: That's Bill Shields. For 52 years he's been a bushfire volunteer and commander. He resigned last month as an RFS Group Captain, exasperated, fed up.

Today we'll hear from experienced fire fighters in three New South Wales agencies: the RFS, Fire & Rescue NSW, and the National Parks and Wildlife Service. Each service represents a very different firefighting culture. The two biggest agencies are the RFS, they're the ones with the orange trucks, and Fire & Rescue NSW in the red trucks. They've been fighting each other for years.

Jim Casey: There's two central problems here. One is the duplication of services and duplication of support structures. There's really no compelling argument to actually have two fire services in New South Wales.

Gregg Borschmann: Jim Casey, Secretary of the Fire Brigade Employees Union of NSW. He represents the paid professional fire fighters who work for Fire & Rescue.

Jim Casey: We need to have specialisation inside the fire service, we need to have people who are better with urban work and better with rural work, but having two separate management structures is wasteful. It's as simple as that. The second problem is because of the turf war which exists between the two agencies, we have a situation where the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing. Now, that cannot be good for fire ground operations and it can't be good for either fire fighters or the people of New South Wales.

Gregg Borschmann: Jim Casey tells a story that would shock residents of the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, communities which are still recovering from the worst fires New South Wales has seen in the past decade.

As the crisis was unfolding on that first devastating day in October 2013, Casey claims that the RFS tried to pull rank, tried to prevent Fire & Rescue from being on the fire ground. It happened in the lower Blue Mountains, around Winmalee, where 195 homes were ultimately destroyed.

Jim Casey: Now, both the RFS and Fire Rescue Management will undoubtedly deny this, but it's a matter of fact that the RFS did their level best to make sure you didn't have a Fire & Rescue deployment into Winmalee in particular. And the basis of that was about visuals, the colour of the trucks that the media was going to see, were they going to be red or were they going to be orange. That makes sense if you're running an empire, that makes sense if you're trying to build a profile in order to get a greater budget share, it makes no sense at all in terms of firefighting operations. Now, thankfully that didn't happen, thankfully we saw Fire & Rescue deployed up there, not because it was Fire & Rescue because it was simply fire engines and they needed them. That kind of basic blurring between the operational needs and the political needs, that's at the heart of this issue.

Gregg Borschmann: Background Briefing sought a response to Jim Casey's claim from senior management of both the RFS and Fire & Rescue.

RFS Commissioner, Shane Fitzsimmons rejected the notion of a turf war and said that he wasn't aware of any such an incident around Winmalee in the 2013 fires.

Shane Fitzsimmons: Not at all, and as a matter of fact I would expect those comments maybe decades ago, but not today. The reality is we had local management teams at all our fire affected areas. We had state-based teams. All the agencies are represented on those teams.

Gregg Borschmann: A written statement supplied to Background Briefing by Fire & Rescue Commissioner Greg Mullins said in part:

Reading: If any concerns were raised during the planning process, they were resolved by agreement.

Gregg Borschmann: Commissioner Mullins pointed out that Fire & Rescue were 'first on the scene' at the Winmalee fire, and ultimately were joined by about 90 other Fire & Rescue trucks and crews.

The Commissioner also said:

Reading: A joint incident management team was subsequently formed...this planning resulted in the largest commitment of Fire & Rescue NSW resources to a single event in the organisation's history on 23 October 2013.

Gregg Borschmann: Both agencies—Fire & Rescue and the RFS—were out in force, working cooperatively. But union secretary Jim Casey claims that the RFS effectively calls the bushfire shots, and this comes at a price that's never been questioned.

Jim Casey: When you look over the last 20 years, the amount of the emergency services dollar which has gone to the RFS, it's quite stark. You look at some of the infrastructure they've built as well…and in some ways I admire the politics of it, they've built an organisation which has got a high media profile, which is well-placed in the centre of town, which is the go-to place if you want to know about what's going on with fire and emergency. And on the back of that, they've been able to successfully, I think, leverage for more and more money. So, you know, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. They get bigger. Do they get better? Now, that's the question which has not been answered.

Gregg Borschmann: Today, for the first time, Background Briefing tells the story of how the 'turf war' that Jim Casey speaks about recently played out on the fire ground. In the scheme of things, it was a small fire, but with big consequences. It was late spring last year, the first day of November, the hottest day of 2014 in Sydney since the previous summer. By late afternoon, radio, TV, news sites on the web and social media were alight with an all too familiar story.

Journalist [archival]: Two homes have been destroyed and a third seriously damaged as fires rage in the Blue Mountains. Katie Silver has more:

Katie Silver [archival]: A fire, which is six hectares in size, has ravaged Cliff Drive in Katoomba. The blaze is described as being out of control with dozens more homes still under threat…

Gregg Borschmann: Less than an hour later, it was clarified that only one house had been destroyed.

Fire Officer One: It's an absolute disgrace we lost that house. It was totally avoidable.

Gregg Borschmann: Those are the words of a decorated and experienced fire fighter with Fire & Rescue. The fire fighter agreed to talk to Background Briefing on the condition of anonymity, so we'll call him Fire Officer One.

In the context of the turf war, the bitumen strip of Cliff Drive running around the escarpment in south Katoomba is the dividing line. The bushland and cliffs on one side is RFS territory, and the houses on the other are the responsibility of Fire & Rescue.

The fire (suspected to be arson) started near Cahill's Lookout on the RFS patch, but later destroyed the house on the Fire & Rescue side of the street.

An actor has re-voiced what Background Briefing was told by Fire Officer One about the debrief back at the Fire & Rescue station when it was all over.

Fire Officer One: All the crew wanted to know was, 'How the fuck did that happen?' They were more than frustrated. There's no doubt that fire should have been extinguished. We ceased containment because whatever we were hosing, the RFS were bombing with water, they had aerial support, two choppers, including the big crane, for a fire the size of a tennis court or two. It was contained. We left and thought it was all over.

Gregg Borschmann: That was late in the morning. Back at the station, the crew even got a pat on the back from their Inspector.

But even though the RFS and Fire & Rescue had worked together on the fire—literally in each other's patch—the Cliff Drive fire exposes unresolved tensions in the chain of command and responsibilities for firefighting in New South Wales.

Five hours after the fire was officially declared 'contained', Fire & Rescue at Katoomba got a phone call from the RFS requesting assistance again. According to Fire Officer One, that call came through on a mobile, not logged on official communication channels.

Fire Officer One: Clearly something had gone horribly wrong in the intervening five hours. The crew said they nearly lost the appliance to the fire. It wasn't the size of a tennis court, it was coming up from below, on a lateral spread of 150 metres. They were deployed to the lookout, but the fire was crowning, they had to back-pedal, they were running scared back up the road with their hoses. It was chaotic. When you lose control like that, it's very hard to regain it.

Gregg Borschmann: The Incident Controller for the fire was RFS Superintendent David Jones. He told Background Briefing the fire had dropped below the lookout onto a ledge. Smouldering material was later picked up by the wind and reignited the fire.

David Jones: We couldn't get firefighters down onto the ledge. It just wasn't safe for them to get down there in the winds that we had at the time. There were some natural control lines in place, and everything was more or less locked in on that area.

Gregg Borschmann: It was 12 days before the Cliff Drive fire was formally declared out. David Jones is preparing an official report. It's called a Section 44 report, named after Section 44 of the Rural Fires Act. That section allows the RFS Commissioner to declare a localised state of emergency under severe fire conditions. Importantly, this triggers Commonwealth and State natural disaster funding.

I asked David Jones if his report would be a public document.

David Jones: No, I don't believe it is. It's a report I give to the Commissioner.

Gregg Borschmann: So Section 44 reports on major fires are never made public?

David Jones: They're at the discretion of the Commissioner to make public, is my understanding.

Gregg Borschmann: Do you think there should be an open or a public inquiry on this fire?

David Jones: That's up to the coroner to make a decision on that. I'm unable to comment whether I believe it should be or not.

Gregg Borschmann: I'm just trying to get a sense from you. You're the Incident Controller of this fire. For five hours it is officially listed on your website as contained, it then flares up. A house is lost. Do you acknowledge that something went seriously wrong with this fire?

David Jones: The fire definitely took a run, there's no question about that. I believe that all of the strategies that were executed were valid ones at the time based on the facts that were in front of the crews at the time.

Gregg Borschmann: Across the other side of the wild and rugged Grose Valley, fire fighter Bill Shields is not fussed about any turf war. As a local RFS commander, he's got on well with Fire & Rescue and the National Parks and Wildlife Service for decades. But he does question the drama that he's seen created in recent fires, especially the 2013 Blue Mountains fires.

Bill Shields: It seems to me that there are times when things get beaten up to a much larger degree than is necessary. There are always risks, and I think those risks should be clearly enunciated, and sometimes my vision of what the risks are and the vision that comes out, or the noise, the information that comes out, are extremely different, and one wonders why, one wonders whether if we keep it in front of the public they'll be more tolerant to spending a bit more money.

Gregg Borschmann: Bill Shields surprised me by suggesting a possible link between fire and money. He'd spoken out on TV at the height of the 2013 fires, very deliberately hosing down the alarm. His main concern is too much fire, lighting up unnecessarily big back-burns. Back-burning is the widespread firefighting practice of lighting up bush in front of an oncoming fire, to burn back and stop the main fire.

Bill Shields: I believe that to contain a fire, you need to use the least amount of back-burning that's possible to achieve the outcome. Introducing more fire than is necessary into an environment actually increases the risk of the fire escaping, so it's a balance. It's a balance between burning or not burning, and is the risk of not doing anything greater than the risk of burning?

Gregg Borschmann: You've seen that many times over in recent fires?

Bill Shields: Yeah, I have. I must admit I've seen it a number of times where I believe that the fire could have been contained to a smaller area. Again, those decisions in a sense are ultimately taken out of your hands, and you say, 'This is going to happen.' And I don't necessarily agree that was the correct decision.

Gregg Borschmann: So you said many times that modern fire is increasingly about the drama, the show. What do you mean?

Bill Shields: Well, I'm not sure why it needs to be dramatized to the degree that it does. I mean, we've been having fires here…I've been through six or eight major fires in Bilpin, and it's almost as if people have just realised we're having fires. I don't know whether there's a political will there to ensure that the budget keeps getting increased or whatever, but certainly the fires this time were no worse or no better than the fires we've had in the past.

Gregg Borschmann: So what are you saying the equation is? What's going on here? Big fire, big drama, big money. Is it as simple as that?

Bill Shields: Yeah, look, that's probably a simplistic sort of assessment of the whole situation. I don't claim to know what goes on much beyond my own community, but it would seem, yeah, that was an obvious conclusion you could come to.

Shane Fitzsimmons: Well, it surprises me to hear that from Bill. I've known Bill for a long time. I'm not aware of any correlation with big budgets and big fires.

Gregg Borschmann: RFS Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons.

Shane Fitzsimmons: As a matter of fact, quite the opposite, I would suspect that our focus is spreading our money around mitigation, around response. It is actually about an integrated approach, a multi-faceted approach to making sure that we've got investments in reducing the incidents as much as we can, as well as providing a timely, effective response to limit the growth and impact of fires, particularly on the built community

Gregg Borschmann: The claim that at times there is too much fire and orchestrated drama is also made by an experienced fire manager with the National Parks and Wildlife Service. Over the past 20 years, this officer has helped fight more than 200 fires. Like Fire Officer One earlier, our source fears being targeted for speaking out, so we'll call this fire manager Parks Officer One. What he told Background Briefing has been re-voiced.

Parks Officer One: I've seen fires that were contained, or could have been knocked down, and, for whatever reason, they weren't. Instead we get more fire, with days of drama, thousands of volunteers and tankers, Strike Teams out in force, rather than having the fire out at its source, or before it becomes an even bigger threat.

Gregg Borschmann: Commissioner Fitzsimmons flatly rejected the comments.

Shane Fitzsimmons: Well, it does surprise me to hear a comment like that because it doesn't stack up with the available evidence. If you look just at recent years where there has been a very deliberate focus on early intervention, aggressive intervention, particularly in remote areas, we're trying to get to fires early and quickly to avoid them becoming fairly large fires. That's a pretty significant achievement, and it flies in the face of your source that suggests we don't take getting onto fires seriously, because we do.

Gregg Borschmann: What Shane Fitzsimmons is talking about is known as RAFT, that's R-A-F-T, remote area firefighting teams. It's another element of the 'turf war', the clash of cultures when it comes to fire fighting.

The RFS is increasingly developing its RAFT capabilities. But our National Parks source, Parks Officer One, says the key defence of the RFS still overwhelmingly relies on vehicle based firefighting.

Parks Officer One: It's more than an Achilles heel, it's the weakness of their entire model. They are incapable of walking away from a tanker. The RFS have built their strategies on what they can do, what they have, and that means they don't have a very broad capacity. If they can't give it a good spray from the tanker, they're really limited as to what they can do.

Gregg Borschmann: Remote area firefighting was developed in the early days of the National Parks and Wildlife Service, in the 1970s, in places like Kosciuszko and the Blue Mountains. Walking or winched in by helicopter, it's dangerous and difficult work for the crews, away from the resources and the security of trucks and water tankers. Even though they get little or no public credit for it, the parks service prides itself on its remote firefighting ability. They have to be good at it.

Richard Kingswood is area manager of the Blue Mountains National Park.

Richard Kingswood: If you look at a ten-year average, we'll have more than a third of the fires in national parks are started through lighting ignition. When you get the situation whereby you have the classic summer storms come through, you might find that you'll have hundreds if not thousands of strikes right throughout a broad area within the state. Any one of those lighting strikes could start a fire. We've had situations in the past whereby we've had multiple ignitions, dozens of ignitions, in the Blue Mountains or elsewhere occur all at the one time, and you've got to have the capacity to try and deal with putting out a lot of remote fires all at the one time, or one after another, and doing it very quickly.

Gregg Borschmann: Richard Kingswood told Background Briefing about two fires in the Blue Mountains that occurred at the same time and in the same weather conditions as the Cliff Drive fire mentioned earlier, but where a very different story played out. And unlike the Cliff Drive fire, the media and the public knew nothing about these other two fires, which were put out with a minimum of fuss. One was at Little Crater in the Sydney water catchment, and the other on the spectacular Mt Solitary to the south of Katoomba. Both of the fires were started by lightning strikes.

Richard Kingswood explains what happened, first at the Little Crater fire, attended by Parks remote area firefighting teams and a couple of helicopters rigged up with water buckets.

Richard Kingswood: That fire was pretty well done within a day or two. It still takes a bit of time, but a day or two. So bucketed it out the first day, crews out on the ground just to make sure things were pretty good on the second day. I actually flew it on the third day and it was pretty hard to find.

The Mt Solitary fire is another example. We had some good heavy air support available to us immediately. We were able to deploy two heavy aircraft. We followed it up very soon after that afternoon with the catchment remote area fire team. They pretty well went around the edge again and did the laborious checking to make sure there's nothing hot and left to burn, and then the following day we put other remote area teams in, just to check and make sure that things were tidy and mopped up appropriately.

Gregg Borschmann: So a pretty simple story, a couple of days each at the most, a couple of RAFT crews, some aerial support, and less than a hectare for two fires, is that right?

Richard Kingswood: Yeah, in summary. You're looking at a day or two per ignition, and yeah, I think each were listed at less than a hectare.

Gregg Borschmann: It frustrates many in the Parks service that's its success and skills with remote area firefighting are by and large not recognised.

This is an email Background Briefing received from one senior staff member within the Parks service:

Reading: Interesting to note that two-thirds of our fires are kept to less than 10 hectares! This is a result that people neither register or understand. When you consider every catastrophic fire starts as a baby one, people need to understand that in 2013-'14 the National Parks and Wildlife Service put out 302 baby fires, any one of which could have caused untold damage. Talk about unsung heroes.

Gregg Borschmann: On RN, you're listening to Background Briefing. I'm Gregg Borschmann.

The origins of the current tensions between remote area firefighting and tanker-based back-burning were dramatically illustrated almost a decade ago.

In November 2006, two fires started by lightning strike outside the national park became a serious threat to towns and villages on both sides of the Grose Valley. Back-burns that jumped containment lines made the fire bigger and more difficult to eventually contain.

There was public criticism of the strategies from the community, and also former fire managers. After the fire, their concerns were outlined in a full page notice in the local Blue Mountains Gazette, on December 6, 2006.

This is a reading from that notice:

Reading: We support well planned back-burning as a very useful tool. However, we are concerned that large-scale back-burning in severe conditions can also be a hazardous option, spreading the fire, placing more lives at risk, swelling costs and risking wider damage to property and the environment.

Gregg Borschmann: The community wanted a 'thorough independent review'. What they got was a one-day forum.

Ian Brown, ex Operations Manager for the Blue Mountains National Park, was at the forefront of the campaign.

Ian Brown: There's certainly a tendency when a big fire happens for the organisational machine to take control and there tends to be a reliance on very big back-burn strategies and that type of thing.

Gregg Borschmann: So what happened as a result of that campaign? You said all it did was annoy people. Why?

Ian Brown: Well, you know, firefighting is a bit of a sacred cow and there's a lot of powerful interests involved and they tend to close rank, and that's what happened.

Gregg Borschmann: All stakeholders—including fire chiefs, local government and conservation groups—were at the forum. But another significant meeting happened 10 days later, on February 27, 2007. It's never been publicly disclosed.

Six senior and experienced local bushfire commanders—a superintendent, two group captains, captains, and a deputy captain—were deeply troubled by what happened on the fire-ground the previous November. They meet in the RFS brigade shed at Bilpin.

I asked RFS Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons how he reacted to the public criticism at the time.

Shane Fitzsimmons: In regard to what?

Gregg Borschmann: In regard to the handling of those 2006 fires in the Blue Mountains. It was the first time that the service had been so publicly criticised for the way it was managing fire. What do you think that criticism was all about?

Shane Fitzsimmons: I'm not aware of the criticism you're referring to.

Gregg Borschmann: Well, after those fires, six senior commanders in the Blue Mountains who believed those fires had been poorly handled with too much extra fire and back-burning, they met and produced a short report, the notes of that meeting saying: 'We need to change the way we do business, especially in the first 48 hours.' Did that call for change make it to your desk? And if not, does it concern you that you didn't get that feedback?

Shane Fitzsimmons: Look, I get lots of feedback, and I get lots of notes, so if you're happy to provide me that document, I'm more than happy to have a look at it and let you know if I received it.

Gregg Borschmann: Background Briefing has supplied a copy of the meeting notes to the Commissioner, and we will put a link to any response on our website.

Bill Shields was a Group Captain at the time, and present at the meeting. He says there was agreement that the 2006 fires had been 'badly managed'.

Bill Shields: Yes. It was an agreement that was of all the people there. It was a consensus view.

Gregg Borschmann: So what happened? You put the report up through your command structure, were you ever invited to discuss its recommendations or the issues?

Bill Shields: Yes, I discussed it at a district level, but it never went beyond that.

Gregg Borschmann: So what has changed? Has anything changed, or do those problems that you identified seven years ago remain embedded?

Bill Shields: I think they remain embedded, and I think the problem has become larger because it seems as if key decisions are being made further and further away from the fire ground without any local input or with very little local input.

Gregg Borschmann: Background Briefing has also confirmed the details of the meeting with former RFS Superintendent Mal Cronstedt. He was also present.

So I asked Commissioner Fitzsimmons for his reaction to the broader concerns.

Shane Fitzsimmons: Routinely after every fire—small, medium and large—we run very open review processes involving all firefighters, all crew leaders from all agencies to make sure we get the input and opinions of everybody. It doesn't surprise me in our organisation that we've always got views and opinions that will vary from one another, which is one of the beauties of this organisation, that it takes all types, and everyone's got a different perspective.

Gregg Borschmann: Two experienced, long-term volunteers, both former long-serving group captains for the RFS, have told Background Briefing the service does not have constructive or critical debriefs.

Shane Fitzsimmons: That's not true.

Gregg Borschmann: Background Briefing has spoken to another long serving RFS Captain and former Group Captain who also expressed frustrations about the internal review process.

Jim Crowther: This is just the same thing every time they have a large fire and they have a debrief. We all say what went wrong and the hierarchy pat themselves on the back and say what a great job everybody did, especially us. But nothing much changes down at the bottom of the pecking order.

Gregg Borschmann: Jim Crowther is Captain of the Shipley RFS Brigade in the Upper Blue Mountains. He's been a bushfire volunteer for 50 years.

Jim Crowther: This happens all the time. In fact if you speak to any other Captain that goes along to a debrief, they say, 'What's the point in coming to this damn thing, because every time we go to it we say what's wrong and nothing changes.'

Gregg Borschmann: Jim Crowther gave Background Briefing a specific example of what he saw as a problem on the fire ground that had not been properly addressed by the official RFS debriefing processes.

It involved the Mt York fire in the upper Blue Mountains of October 2013 that eventually burnt out more than 9,000 hectares, much of it World Heritage wilderness and national park, and it also destroyed 10 houses and damaged a further three. Jim Crowther says that fire should never have got away.

Jim Crowther: In my experience this could have been controlled very, very easily. But what happened was the water was closed off on that bottom left-hand corner. The brigade that was down there had turned their water off, and that's when it took off. So I questioned them: why did you turn your water off? They said they had a hole in the hose. Well, that to me was…they should have had live reels out there.

Gregg Borschmann: So have you talked about this with other volunteers and other firefighters who were at that fire? What was the feeling after it got away from you? You've obviously talked about it since.

Jim Crowther: Oh yeah, the same thing. Those who saw what had happened had agreed that that was the problem, that if we had of stopped that south-western corner from burning, if we had of concentrated on that, it would not have got away.

Gregg Borschmann: And you're feeling is that it shouldn't have got away?

Jim Crowther: Exactly. It should not have got away.

Gregg Borschmann: A coronial inquiry will examine both the October 2013 Mt York and Links View fires in detail. The five-day hearing is to begin in June this year.

I asked Commissioner Fitzsimmons if he was concerned about Jim Crowther's claims, especially given that 10 homes were later destroyed.

Shane Fitzsimmons: Well, it concerns me that the Captain feels his views haven't been captured because I'm aware of local debriefs, or After Action Reviews as they're called in the contemporary language, occurring at a brigade level, at an officer level, at a captain's level, and indeed at a multi-agency level and through the incident management team. All those views and opinions should be captured, and if they're not I'm more than happy to have them.

Gregg Borschmann: Since speaking to Commissioner Fitzsimmons, Background Briefing has been told by one Commander that he doesn't know if his key concerns about the 2013 fires have been noted or acted upon.

Jonathan Mallin was Commander of the Blackheath Brigade when it attended the start of the Mt York fire. This is the fire that Jim Crowther was talking about earlier.

Jonathan Mallin: I honestly thought we had it pretty well wrapped up and I was sort of surprised to see it get over that containment line, but you know, you can't control where a small ember would go and we sort of got to it as quick as we could, with other brigades. There was quite a few brigades on site by that stage.

Gregg Borschmann: Jonathan Mallin claims that once the fire got away, there were problems over subsequent days with his brigade and others not knowing what they were meant to be doing.

Jonathan Mallin: There was probably a sense among a lot of people that we weren't sure, you know, what was happening.

Gregg Borschmann: What do you mean?

Jonathan Mallin: Just what was the strategy, in terms of like…overall I guess this fire went for a number of days, and so we needed to…we sort of weren't aware exactly what we were supposed to be doing, we were sort of lacking a lot of information as to what the plan of attack was. So it wasn't just our brigade, it was a number of people that I'd heard that from.

Gregg Borschmann: Jonathon Mallin says RFS volunteers want to know more about what happens after major fires.

Jonathan Mallin: The management probably needs to communicate that out to brigades and to members, that this was found from the After Action Review, just so that we know that something's been done, rather than just these After Action Reviews happening and we're not sure whether actions are being taken and lessons are learnt.

Gregg Borschmann: As the organisation has grown over the past 17 years, RFS budgets have also risen substantially. The revenue largely comes from three sources; the insurance industry, local government, and Commonwealth State natural disaster funding. In 1999, they provided $66 million of revenue to the RFS. By last year, that figure had climbed to more than $407 million.

So I asked Commissioner Fitzsimmons if the bigger budget meant the community was safer.

Shane Fitzsimmons: Absolutely, we've seen a demonstrable return on that investment. We know conservatively that volunteers are giving more than a billion dollars worth of their time to the community in New South Wales every year. It behoves us all to make sure that we're investing in the equipment, the infrastructure, the systems and the support and the technologies to make their job safer and more effective. I think we're seeing some of the results on the ground when it comes to looking at fire history in New South Wales and fire events of the last couple of decades.

Gregg Borschmann: Out on the flat grazing and cropping country of western New South Wales, until last year Bogan Shire Mayor, Ray Donald, was a member of two key RFS and bushfire co-ordinating committees. He's long been critical of what he calls the extra 'bureaucracy and paperwork' within the RFS.

He agrees with the Commissioner there's been an understandable investment in the 'protective area' of firefighting, making it safer for the volunteers. But Ray Donald challenges whether a lot of other spending is actually helping activities on the ground. And he says that's driving a blowout in costs.

Ray Donald: Where I think the blowout has to be questioned is in areas that you might say doesn't directly contribute towards that extra protection. And that's where increased bureaucracy, excessive adherence to management plans and other administrative areas that have increased has to be questioned as to whether or not it's fulfilling the goal, which is to give better protection to the volunteers.

Gregg Borschmann: Ray Donald has been a volunteer with his local bushfire brigade since he left high school 50 years ago. He self-deprecatingly calls himself an 'old fuddy-duddy'. He's certainly seen the old days and the new ways. In some respects, he says the old system was better.

Ray Donald: It was far simpler, far more direct, and I suppose the attitude there was that with insurance coverage and equipment we went to the fires, put them out and went home again. Since then it's been difficult to get complete harmony because there's been an increasing cost every year to local government, confusion about how it really operates and runs, an escalating labour force in the Rural Fire Service. I think of more recent times there's about 900 fully employed RFS people, full-time employees, 200 of them work out of the head office in Sydney. And once you start seeing a very big bureaucracy in any institution, and local government from a fairly stressed financial situation has to pay towards that and doesn't have a lot of input into what happens particularly at the state level, then, you know, the ice is pretty thin in the relationship.

Gregg Borschmann: It's not just local government that's questioning the funding model. The Commonwealth is currently reviewing joint Federal State natural disaster funding, which helps pay for bushfire emergencies. The insurance industry doesn't like it because it claims insurance premiums are being bumped up by an average 23% by the existing emergency services levy.

Jim Casey, from the Fire Brigade Employees Union, predicts change is coming.

Jim Casey: I wouldn't pretend that it's a perfect system, but the New South Wales government are putting up an alternative which I think is far less perfect, which is simply that we put a new tax on houses. Now, they're being pretty coy about how that tax would look. Would it be a flat tax? Would it be graded on the basis of property value? They appear to be favouring a flat tax, which again I think really, when you think about it, being hit up with an extra $300 a year for a service that you already get through your taxes, for mine, is a little bit cheeky. So yes, that's where the debate's at. I imagine that the reason why we're not hearing much about it at the moment is because of the election. I think post the election, Premier Baird, if he's returned, will be raising the question again.

Gregg Borschmann: Jim Casey.

Background Briefing sought an interview with the NSW Police and Emergency Services Minister, Stuart Ayres. He initially agreed to an interview, but had to cancel and was then unavailable. We've put a series of questions to the Minister and will post any response on our website.

Background Briefing's co-ordinating producer is Linda McGinness, research by Anna Whitfeld, technical production by Joe Wallace. You also heard the voices of actors Chris Burke and Jamie Oxenbould. The executive producer is Chris Bullock, and I'm Gregg Borschmann.