Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden told a Governance and Administration Select Committee scrutiny hearing on 17 June 2026 that she was "shocked" by what she described as a historically relaxed approach to public accountability by government agencies, with the Department of Internal Affairs' monitoring of Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) squarely in her sights.

Van Velden told the committee that DIA advice had repeatedly fallen short in its oversight role, and that the pattern of monitoring failures she had encountered was not what she expected of a department with responsibility for Crown entity stewardship. The comments came as the minister faces a parallel, politically live problem: FENZ's own proposed restructure and the levy system that funds it.

The day prior, The Post reported that van Velden had publicly criticised FENZ's spending and launched a major reform of the fire and emergency levy, which she described as unfair. The levy — collected primarily from property insurance premiums — has long drawn complaints from commercial property owners who argue the formula places a disproportionate burden on them relative to households. Any structural change to how FENZ is funded would require amendment of the Fire and Emergency New Zealand Act 2017 and touches directly on DIA's role as the responsible department.

Together, the two developments put van Velden in the unusual position of attacking both the agency she is responsible for — FENZ — and the department that is supposed to keep it accountable.

The scrutiny hearing is a standard MMP-era accountability mechanism: ministers and their departments appear before the relevant select committee between Estimates and financial review cycles to answer questions outside the formal supply process. That setting matters. Scrutiny hearings are not adversarial in the way Estimates can be, but they are on the record, and a minister's characterisation of her own department's historical performance carries weight — particularly when live reform work is under way.

Van Velden's framing of the DIA's past conduct as inadequate is notable for what it implies about accountability going forward. By distancing herself from historical monitoring failures, she is, in effect, setting a benchmark against which her own stewardship will eventually be judged. The FENZ levy reform, if it proceeds, will be a test of whether the department can deliver the kind of robust policy advice she says was absent before.

FENZ was established in 2017 by merging the New Zealand Fire Service, Rural Fire Authority, and dozens of volunteer rural fire entities. The organisation has faced recurring scrutiny over its cost structure since amalgamation. Its current proposed restructure — the one van Velden has criticised on spending grounds — sits within that longer history of difficult post-merger adjustments.

What the minister has not yet made public is the specific scope of the levy reform or its timeline. The shape of any change — whether it recalibrates the split between residential and commercial insurance, caps the levy rate, or introduces a different collection mechanism altogether — will determine how disruptive the reform is and who gains or loses. Those details will define how substantive the intervention turns out to be.

For now, the political picture is clear enough: van Velden has put both FENZ and DIA on notice, in public, with the select committee record to back it up. Whether the reform she has announced produces a fairer levy system or simply a different one is a question the committee, and eventually affected levy-payers, will want answered.