Just very quickly, I find it interesting that in light of this article appearing to be very brigade/group specific, the response from some people has been "Well, my brigade is fine, thus there is hardly an issue".
This is part of the problem. We are all part of the larger organisation and we ALL need to push to fix this for EVERYONE. All these people here claiming that YES! There are problems, are any of you actually doing anything about it? Are any of you writing letters? Any of you doing anything beyond whinging and making threats like "We're going to drive down to parliament!"
Come on. It's time to band together and get this state wide problem fixed. Yes, Stirling may not need, nor be able to crew 5 trucks, and it harks back to the days of council funding and empire building, but there are still massive issues in terms of the age/work ratio of 4/5 of those trucks. Barker has huge Rescue risks, should they and all other Rescue brigades have airbags regardless of how often they may actually get used? YES! Time to put aside the snarky Brigade/Group rivalries and stand together no matter what you think of certain individual brigades.
Comrades, lets DO something to fix this problem!