Bendy, right now. 2221, I am no more than 2 minutes from the station and we can put a tanker on the road with 5 firefighters, intimately familiar with the local area, within five minutes.
A “professional” force is going to have to be based in regional locations with a minimum of 30+ professional firefighters running a roster to give coverage of one tanker - and that by definition is going to be 20-30 minutes from the fire ground.
Where I am, I have six volunteer brigades - Six tankers within 20 minutes or less. The volunteer model is basically to be able to “swarm” a fire really fast, from multiple locations. A “professional “ service can’t do that because you can’t station dispersed individual tankers - they have to be centralized which slows response.
Now add to that the problems of false alarms, barbecue flare ups, etc. and your professional centralized model is utterly inefficient.
To put that another way, most fires are small, lightening strikes, illegal burn offs, campfires, etc., not the catastrophic stuff you have recently seen. A monolithic professional structure is utterly useless for the majority of fires and we can replicate that if needed anyway through the use of strike teams, etc.
To,put that another way, command and control, numbers of firefighters, etc. has not been a problem in NSW or Victoria, since by definition, you cannot set numbers based on the catastrophic fire case.