Pakuranga Fire and a Cheap Shot

Matua Kahurangi
Just a bloke sharing thoughts on New Zealand and the world beyond. No fluff, just honest takes.

Fire and Emergency New Zealand bosses have blamed ongoing strike action for delays responding to a blaze in Pakuranga, while the firefighters’ union has pushed back, saying FENZ was meant to have contingency plans in place. As always, when something goes wrong, fingers start pointing and responsibility gets blurred.

Volunteer firefighters stepped up, as they always do. They ran towards danger while most of us watched the smoke from a distance. Businesses were disrupted, workers were shaken, and a community was left dealing with the aftermath. No one disputes that part.

ACT MP Brooke van Velden took to X to thank the volunteers, acknowledge the impact on the community, then pivoted to a familiar political refrain. Enough is enough, she said. The Professional Firefighters Union needs to stop gambling with people’s lives and safety and stop these strikes.

And this is where it veers into nonsense.

I am an ACT voter. I make no secret of that. But this tweet was a bit bullshit.

Firefighters are not striking for the hell of it. They are not doing it because they enjoy headlines or want to inconvenience communities. They are asking for fair pay for a job that quite literally involves running into burning buildings, attending fatal crashes, responding to medical emergencies and dealing with trauma most people would last about five minutes handling.

Calling that “gambling with lives” is a cheap shot.

If the government can find tens of millions of dollars, year after year, to send overseas to Ukraine, it can find the money to pay firefighters properly here at home. That is not an extreme position. That is not radical unionism. That is basic prioritisation.

The people saving lives in Pakuranga are not asking for luxury. They are not asking for outrageous salaries or gold-plated conditions. They are asking to be paid fairly for skilled, dangerous, essential work. The kind of work politicians love to praise in a crisis and forget about when it comes time to sign the cheque.

If FENZ failed to plan for strike contingencies, that is a management failure. If response times suffered, that is on the organisation responsible for ensuring cover, not on workers exercising the few levers they have left after years of underpayment and being ignored.

Thank the volunteers. Support the affected businesses and workers. Absolutely.

But spare us the moral grandstanding about firefighters “gambling with lives” when the real gamble is a system that underpays essential services while happily burning money elsewhere.

They are not asking for much. They are asking for fair pay. And in my humble opinion, they deserve it.

This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.