You need to distingish from what circumstance your volenteer comes from.
Those that are in the public service have good access to time off for fire fighting.
Most large businesses have arrangements to allow time off for staff to go away and fight a fire.
But generally those that are first response are the local farmer,retired or self employed and they find it harder nowdays to blend into the "new" firefighting organisations.
A decade ago the residents of a particular area in a particular set of circumstance may have been happy to let a area of land burn to reduce to fuel but nowdays when any fire is sighted it is extingushed.
This has made a rod for our backs as the amount of fuel that has accumulated now makes any fire a major one.
The management of land and of fires has been changed so much over the last two decades that many in the country are only happy to stay in their own area.
Volenteers could be voting with their feet and not going to fires because of the percived failure of land and fire management and the unwillingness to take on increasing responsibilites of fighting a fire.

David Ritter,

Briefly:

Article looks great, but am too tired to read it carefully right now.

I was going to quote from "The Shock Doctrine" but I found you already had in your article. I thoroughly recommend the book. It would be well worth the price even if it cost twice the AU$32.95 RRP. The main section of the book excluding notes and index is 466 pages and it a contains a wealth of frightening facts about how the world's neo-liberal shock doctors subvert democracy both covertly and overtly in order to achieve their depraved ends.

No-one will ever look at current events in the same way again once they have read this book. It is hard to praise Naomi Klein's book too highly.

I agree David but we have just had an election where both the main parties very clearly supported neo liberalism. We need to get Rudd, Gillard and co to read Klein.

Gavin Mooney