The Politics of Fire Protection : The Post-1996 Debate on Urban Building Regulation Reform in Australia

The development of neoliberal politics has substantially affected the development of fire prevention in Australia. The principal impact has been on the shift from prescriptive regulation to performance-based regulation, ostensibly on the grounds that the latter promotes innovation and cost optimisation. In turn, this has opened up the grounds for a range of intersecting conflicts that are now shaping fire protection in fundamental ways. On the one side, developers promote a minimalist regulation that focuses on the need to evacuate occupants in the event of fire. Additional protection, they argue, would best be provided through market mechanisms as owners identify optimal standards for their particular needs. Against this, insurers, fire brigades and local governments argue for a set of more stringent standards that would protect the building against damage and, as fire brigades point out, would better protect the firefighters. Both sides invoke 'community' demands and expectations, and deploy economic arguments about where the costs of protection should lie. In this light, fire protection seems shaped more substantially by political struggles in a neoliberal environment than by technical developments in fire control