Not even in that world would that happen. In reality the government has no way to accurately provide appropriate budgets for these services because there are no prices to tell them how to allocate. All the emergency services departments would have been arguing that they needed more money and it looks like the fire service didn’t have as good arguments (or more likely political clout) than the other departments.
No, it's because governments in Australia are all about generating fake surpluses for political reasons and are not interested in evidence-based policy making and budget decisions.
Here's the basic strategy - we run down publically funded services by cutting funding incrementally (or radically) every year. Occasionally for political reasons you give some funding back and announce that is "hey we listened and are building 1 new hospital or school" while in reality we keep cutting funding across the board. As hospital waiting lists grow we can then blame it on immigrants and population growth. We then can argue that "public doesn't work" and privatise by selling these public enterprises to our mates in the private sector, but continuing to make it lucrative by subsidising these services with government funding - the so-called "PPP's", "Public/Private Partnerships". After we retire from parliament our mates reward us by giving us lucrative consulting jobs associated with the industries we just corrupted and sold.
A more egregious example at the last election was giving Clive Palmer his new mine in return for him funding Clive Palmer party candidates in QLD electorates and funneling preferences back to the LNP, winning a bunch of QLD seats and retaining government for ScoMo. That was $50 mill of political advertising well spent by Clive - he had no intention of winning seats.
