Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden told a Governance and Administration Select Committee hearing on 17 June 2026 that she was "shocked" by how loosely government agencies had approached public accountability over the years. She singled out the Department of Internal Affairs' oversight of Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) as a particular problem.

Van Velden said the DIA had failed repeatedly in its monitoring role. As the department responsible for overseeing Crown entities — government-owned organisations that operate at arm's length from ministers — it should have been more rigorous. But the pattern of missed oversight, she told the committee, had not met her expectations.

This criticism comes as van Velden faces a second, more politically sensitive issue: FENZ's own restructure proposal and the levy system that funds it. A day before the hearing, The Post reported that van Velden had publicly criticised FENZ's spending and announced a major overhaul of the fire and emergency levy — the annual charge she described as unfair.

The levy is collected mainly from property insurance premiums. Commercial property owners have complained for years that the formula disadvantages them relative to household owners. Any substantial change to how FENZ is funded would require changing the Fire and Emergency New Zealand Act 2017 and directly involves DIA, as the responsible department.

So van Velden has put herself in an awkward position: attacking both the agency she oversees and the department supposed to keep it accountable.

Select committee hearings like this one are standard in New Zealand's MMP system. Ministers and their departments appear before the relevant committee outside formal budget cycles to answer questions. These hearings differ from budget scrutiny sessions, which can be adversarial. But select committee hearings are on the record, and when a minister criticises her own department's past performance in this setting, it carries weight — especially when reforms are already under way.

Van Velden's comments about the DIA's poor historical performance are significant for what they imply ahead. By distancing herself from past monitoring failures, she is setting a standard against which her own stewardship will later be measured. The FENZ levy reform, if it goes ahead, will test whether the department can now deliver the kind of sharp policy advice she says was missing before.

FENZ was created in 2017 by combining the New Zealand Fire Service, the Rural Fire Authority, and numerous volunteer rural fire organisations. Since the merger, the organisation has faced repeated questions about its cost structure. The restructure van Velden has criticised sits within that longer history of difficult post-merger changes.

What van Velden has not yet disclosed is the specific scope of the levy reform or when it will happen. The kind of change — whether it adjusts the split between residential and commercial insurance, sets a cap on the levy, or introduces a completely different way of collecting money — will determine how disruptive the reform is and who benefits or loses. Those details will determine whether the intervention is genuinely substantial.

The political position is clear for now: van Velden has publicly put both FENZ and DIA on notice, with the select committee record as evidence. Whether the reform she has announced actually produces a fairer levy system or simply a different one is a question the committee and the people affected by the levy will want answered.