Who is on your Fire Truck?
New Zealand’s Fire and Emergency workforce is made up of around 11,832 volunteers, 1,807 paid firefighters and 1,138 support staff. Volunteers represent 86% of the frontline Fire and Emergency NZ workforce.
Questions have been raised over the level of public awareness of the scale of volunteerism in the FENZ emergency response. Statements have also been made around the public being ‘indifferent’ to how these crews are staffed, and finding it ‘irrelevant’, so long as crews are capable of providing the response needed. We thought we would find out whether this was really the case.
Research First conducted a nationally representative survey in June 2024 and found that awareness differs by brigade type. The majority of people in communities served by volunteer brigades are aware that their response is powered by volunteers from their community. It is in career brigade and composite brigade areas where awareness drops.
The level of awareness of local volunteer response would indicate that those in volunteer resourced communities outside of the major metro centres have noted that there is a distinction between who is on the trucks. The fact that they’re more likely than not to know that it is vollies on their truck means the distinction must be relevant to provincial New Zealanders.
For further information about this survey contact liz@ researchfirst.co.nz