The Green Party says Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden should have acted on firefighters' warnings about Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) leadership long before today.
"The Professional Firefighters Union has been raising serious concerns about FENZ management for years. It is good that the Minister has finally recognised those concerns, but firefighters should not have had to wait this long," says Green Party spokesperson for Internal Affairs Mike Davidson.
"The news that FENZ leadership withheld information from the Minister for a full year is deeply concerning. If the Minister learned of a serious breach inside FENZ in the last couple of weeks, she should have told the public straight away instead of waiting until she was questioned about it today."
"Through our Select Committee inquiry into the fleet and before, FENZ gave us information that was clearly wrong. I don't know what the matter referred to the Serious Fraud Office is, but it does not surprise me that the Minister now doubts the information she is getting."
"The Minister has known about problems in FENZ leadership for a long time, and she has only changed her position now. She has asked the board to meet, and her recent appointment of a new chair is a good start. She now needs to look at the board as a whole."
"Firefighters do their jobs well, but they have been working with fire trucks that break down, and they have watched fire stations and training facilities close."
"The failures in asset management, the surveillance of firefighters, the breakdown in collective bargaining and the lack of transparency and accountability at the top of FENZ have been on the public record for a long time. These are failures of the executive and the board."
"Firefighters and the communities they protect across New Zealand need to be able to trust the organisation behind them. The Minister should act on the board, and an independent inquiry into the capacity and capabilities of FENZ would give the public a full account of what went wrong," says Davidson.