Sustainable Buildings and Contemporary Fire Protection Regimes in Australia

There is a long-term politics of regulating fire protection for the built environment in which the principal adversaries have been building developers - and often their government supporters- on one side, and the insurance industry and fire brigades on the other. Underlying such politics have been questions about the short-term versus long-term costs and benefits of fire protection with an emphasis on safety and security if life and property. In this struggle ‘green' issues were regarded as merely a matter of customer preference rather than regulation. Over the past decade or so, environmental questions have emerged as a focal issue in fire protection. Ostensibly, general agreement has been reached promoting the idea of environmentally sustainable buildings with respect to fire prevention, albeit with disputes over the best means to produce such sustainability. While the fire protection industry promotes a vision of these differences being reconcilable through technological progress, this paper argues that the current politics reflects long-term political and economic divisions and scarcely reconcilable understandings of fire protection that go to the heart of what ‘sustainability' is in the built environment