'Only the first step': NSW says yes to bushfire inquiry recommendations, but where's the money?

The New South Wales bushfire inquiry report was handed down last week, with a promise from the premier, Gladys Berejiklian, that she would implement all of its recommendations.

She received general applause for her statement, but was does it actually mean?

The NSW Rural Fire Service Association (RFSA), which represents the volunteers, has warned that without a clear funding commitment many of the inquiry’s recommendations can’t be implemented.

“While it’s encouraging that the government says they support the inquiry’s recommendations, this is really only the first step,” the RFSA president, Brian McDonough, says.

Related: ‘Next fire season is already upon us’: NSW to adopt all recommendations of bushfire inquiry report

With the 2020-21 bushfire season upon us, many firefighters will be returning to their old trucks, with outdated equipment for this summer. Many systems have not yet been reviewed even though the report says they are urgent.

There is also concern that the huge financial injection into the RFS – both through donations and investment from the RFS trust, and new government money – is not being fully realised among brigades on the ground.

“We’ve seen some funds allocated for improved communications and the reports that I’m getting is that a small amount of that has been implemented, and some new trucks have been purchased, and some have been retrofitted … that’s just addressing the damage that happened to the fleet during the last fires,” the Greens MP David Shoebridge says.

“I think there’s a compelling case publicly to undertake an immediate audit of the readiness of the RFS and publish that information.”

The RFS acknowledges that the recommendations are “ambitious” and says agencies are still “working through them to fully understand how they can be implemented and in what timeframe”.

The government is yet to commit the funds and take actions that are within its remit.

First the good news. According to the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Research Centre’s Australian seasonal bushfire outlook, compiled in July, “January to June 2020 saw more normal rain patterns return to much of southern and eastern Australia”.

“This rainfall has eased short-term deficiencies in many areas, especially in the south-east of the country,” the hazard note said.

There are problem areas: south-west Western Australia continues to suffer a dry spell and the Northern Territory, which is already experiencing fires, has had a second dry wet season. Grass fires also pose a risk this year on the east coast.

But the outlook is more benign, especially in NSW.

Immediate steps

The report outlined at least three measures it said should happen before the 2020-21 fire season commences.

These included recommendation 59 that the NSW RFS implement the integrated dispatch system to ensure faster response to triple-0 calls.

A spokesman for the RFS says it is “due to be operational this fire season”.

But other urgent recommendations are still a work in progress.

Recommendation 49 called for better management of heavy machinery, such as bulldozers, including by putting GPS tracers on all equipment and installing new software so RFS could better manage the fleet.

That was to be done by the start of the fire season.

“A number of training workshops are anticipated to be run later this year to upskill existing heavy plant operators,” a spokesman for the RFS says. “The NSW RFS is already investigating the use of a national dispatch and tracking platform to assist with deployment of resources.”

Related: Counting the cost of the bushfires: Australia's summer of dread

Recommendation 13 called for the NSW and Victorian governments to progress and finalise a multi-agency memorandum of understanding on resource sharing.

That agreement was to be in place before the 2020-21 fire season but that looks increasingly unlikely.

When asked whether the agreement between his government and Victoria was ready, the NSW emergency services minister, David Elliott, referred questions to the RFS.

The RFS says the commissioner is “seeking support from his Victorian counterparts to finalise this agreement as a matter of priority” and in the meantime informal arrangements will continue.

But the failure of Victoria and NSW to share information such as fire warnings and resources in border regions was highlighted as one of the lessons to be learned out of the last fire season.

Better, safer trucks

One of the key recommendations in the report was that volunteer firefighters in the RFS should have far better personal protective equipment and better, safer trucks.

Labor’s Trish Doyle, the shadow emergency services minister, says she is still fielding calls from RFS brigades complaining that they remain without critical equipment as the next season approaches.

“I’m having firefighters call me from all over the state, saying: ‘Actually, we are waiting on replacement uniforms, still, and the higher-ups have told us there’s no likelihood of them arriving before the start of the season because they’re being made overseas’,” Doyle tells the Guardian.

“Someone else is saying ‘our old pumper which is 20 years old is still in with the mechanics’. So it hasn’t even had some of the defects and problems from the last fire season fixed, let alone retrofitted for what is required coming into the next season.”

Related: ‘Postcode lottery’ hindered bushfire aid for residents on NSW-Victorian border, inquiry hears

The RFS spokesman says the NSW government has allocated $32.4m for firefighting appliances, logistics and support vehicles this financial year, and that on average, more than 120 new firefighting appliances are constructed and delivered to brigades.

In May 2020, the NSW government announced additional support for the NSW RFS including an additional $34.4m to upgrade the NSW RFS firefighting fleet, the spokesman said.

“This means more than 230 new fire trucks and 152 refurbished appliances will be provided to volunteers across the state,” the RFS spokesman says.

But with more than 6,000 vehicles and appliances in the fleet, at this rate the renewal will take decades.

“Recommendations like improving safety systems on tankers will go a long way to keeping volunteer firefighters safe, but it simply won’t happen without significant investment from government,” McDonough says.

Celeste Barber fundraising

A key and much-publicised source of new funds to the RFS ahead of the looming fire season is the $51m raised by the comedian Celeste Barber over the summer, from donors here and abroad.

The fate of the money, raised by Barber for the “RFS and Brigades Donation Fund trust”, prompted a court battle earlier this year, which eventuated with a ruling that the funds must be spent on the RFS and not for other purposes, such as helping affected communities or wildlife charities.

About $90m from the trust is thought to have been allocated for spending on equipment and support for fire brigades.

Shoebridge has since introduced a bill to NSW parliament seeking to allow the $51m to be spent in a more flexible way.

An inquiry into the bill last month recommended that the unallocated donations from the campaign be used to create a benevolent fund, which would support firefighters and their families.

The Guardian understands that Labor is seeking amendments to Shoebridge’s bill, which, if agreed to, would have the numbers to pass.

The RFS says it is already establishing such a fund and using $15m from the trust to contribute to volunteer welfare programs.

Despite the commitments, it remains unclear what has happened to the Barber money specifically.

Shoebridge says the situation is absurd.

“The whole approach of the government and the RFS is that it’s theirs and they won’t brook any discussion about it going to the community,” he says. “It puts the public’s goodwill at risk.”

Aerial firefighting

The report also highlighted the need for important firefighting enhancements, including getting the right mix of aerial firefighting assets; and increased aerial night firefighting.

But there are unlikely to be many changes for this fire season, as contracts for the aircraft are already locked in.

Indeed, Covid-19 is posing new problems for the National Aerial Firefighting Centre, which coordinates the hiring and deployment of firefighting aircraft across Australia. It is responsible for leasing aircraft while states also have their own fleets.

NSW has 32, including the large air tanker, Marie Bashir, which was bought in 2019.

The NAFC’s general manager, Richard Alder, says it has 155 planes under contract but will incur additional costs and logistical challenges in getting the foreign-based aircraft and crews here due to the need to quarantine. The first large aircraft arrived last weekend in Queensland, he says.

One of the recommendations is for NSW to trial an early deployment system for aircraft. This has been operating in other states, such as South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia, for some years, with arguably strong results.

This involves pre-determining the conditions when aircraft will be sent to fires, rather than introducing the human element of decision making, in order to speed up deployment.

Under the early deployment system a state is divided into zones, pre-conditions such as wind and temperature, and any fires are attended to automatically once the preconditions are met.

Aircraft might even be sent up preemptively if fires were expected. The downside is the system potentially ties up resources and costs more.

NSW has not adopted this system and it is unlikely to be in place for this fire season.

The report also recommended changing the mix of aircraft to include more medium-sized planes, but that too will take time.

One tender for helicopters for Victoria has already been postponed due to Covid-19 pressures.

A trial of using Australian Defence Force Hercules C130s equipped with roll-on, roll-off water tanks, also identified in the report, will also take time.

Communications networks

A critical failing identified in the royal commission was the loss of mobile coverage for thousands of Australians both during and after the emergency.

Evidence suggests roughly 1,400 telecommuni­cations facilities were directly or indirectly affected between December and January, the peak of the devastating fire season.

The cause of outages was overwhelmingly a loss of mains power to towers, according to an investigation by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

More than half the affected towers were out for more than four hours. The average outage was three-and-a half days, and the longest was 23 days.

The royal commission heard there were significant problems with information flow between the big telcos, energy companies and government during the crisis.

Earlier this year, the communications minister, Paul Fletcher, convened a roundtable of Australian telcos – including Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, NBN Co and TPG, among others.

The telcos agreed to form a working group to better coordinate and communicate during bushfire crises, in an attempt to reduce the impact of power outages on mobile connectivity.

Related: More than a third of NSW rainforests found to have been hit by Australian bushfires

The government has also pledged it will ensure mobile base stations have more backup power, including through satellite backup systems owned by NBN Co, Optus and others, when the terrestrial network is down.

“There may be other possibilities,” Fletcher wrote in May. “Could we use satellite to provide a ‘failover’ service to support Eftpos if the mobile network stops working, for example?”

Telstra says it is working with energy providers to improve information sharing on mains outages, including by undertaking testing and power failure simulations. It is also improving backup power systems at some of the impacted sites.

“Internally, our focus is on providing resilient infrastructure, removing single points of failure, replacing end-of-life equipment, and increasing automation,” a spokesman says.

“This work is designed to enable faster recovery times and minimises customer impact should an incident occur.”

A spokeswoman for Fletcher says that, since the fire season, the government has worked closely with industry to provide greater emergency power generation to help network resilience and quickly replace or rebuild damaged infrastructure.

She says the government has invested $37.1m to improve network resilience, and is now better prepared for the coming fire season.

Volunteer numbers

The horror bushfire season coincided with a massive upswing in RFS membership last financial year.

The RFS accepted almost 8,500 new members in 2019-20, bringing the total volunteer force to 76,319.

Significant increases have been recorded in younger age brackets, too.

Volunteers aged 16-17 have increased 11%, while the number of volunteers aged 18-25 and 26-34 have increased 7% and 13.5% respectively.

The numbers show that, though questions remain about RFS resourcing, there is no shortage of Australians willing to help.