It is not the job of fire fighters to "reflect the community they serve"

It's to fucking put out fires Poindexter! As I said here in relation to policing, I couldn't give two hoots whether or not the local fire brigade is culturally and linguistically diverse. It's completely unimportant to what they do. Which is to put out fires in often extremely dangerous and physically demanding circumstances. The only thing I want to know is that they are trained to do this and capable of doing it. Nothing else matters. If that means we have a brigade composed only of women from Inner Mongolia, fine. I could not care less. From Andrew Bolt: Their job is to fight fires, not change society: But the launch controversy is part of an increasingly hostile climate at the MFB, one of Melbourne’s most important institutions, which is attempting to change its overwhelmingly white male workforce. Only 56, or 3.2 per cent, of its operational workforce are women. The MFB recently applied for an exemption from the Equal Opportunity Act to give preference in pre-training to indigenous people and ethnic minorities, while the gender plan was trying to boost the number of women firefighters. The MFB says it wants to better reflect the community it serves ... Can anyone be remotely surprised that most firefighters are male?  Or, indeed, that most nurses are women? And can anyone honestly deny that firefighting often demands physical strength? Only in Victoria. UPDATE Reader BG puts it better: It’s not their job to ‘reflect the community’. It’s their job to haul heavy hoses around, bash their way through walls with sledgehammers and carry unconscious people out of buildings. If you are a big fit strong female who can meet the same requirements as men to do that, then that’s awesome. But if you can’t meet the same entry requirements then you are a danger to same ‘community’ you are trying to ‘reflect’.

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