Hi there. I’m Adam, a current Councillor on Lismore City Council and am seeking to be re-elected at the 14 September council elections. Like thousands of others in our region, I was personally impacted by the 2022 disaster and have since advocated for a genuinely fair flood recovery that is community led and protects our most vulnerable. 

Why is this important?

Since the devastating flooding and landslips in 2022, our community is still struggling.

The slow and inadequate roll-out of flood recovery has left our community fractured and traumatised. 

Rather than showing genuine leadership, the current council majority squibbed its obligations to lead a future vision for our community post-flood, and are now scrambling to catchup. 

A genuine flood recovery that allows us to heal and thrive must be community led and look after the most vulnerable. 

It involves the community in creating this vision, deciding where and how we relocate and build new housing, and the types of flood mitigation solutions we pursue to protect people and our environment. 

Very early on I called for such a Vision process (eg. citizen's assembly) to start developing a plan of looking to the future post-flood. This involves conducting genuine community led consultations to create a vision for the future of Lismore post-flood, in order to provide a fair transition from high risk flood areas to safer locations. It's not just tick and flick consultation or recommendations from a select advisory panel, but a genuine community led process that involves time, patience and trust that our community knows best. The Living Lab has done a lot of amazing work in this regard and should be supported.  

Flood-free land is key to our future growth, which is why we urgently need access to lands using the $100 million Resilient Lands fund to enable the affordable relocation of flood impacted houses and new affordable and social housing for our diverse housing needs. While some lands have been acquired late in the process, it won't come online for some time, and none of this provides genuinely affordable lots to enable people to relocate their homes. 

While this process takes too long, in the interim we need to protect flood impacted homes from demolition until a plan is made to preserve them for their best use as housing before considering salvage or recycling. A home is a home and while there is a housing crisis we need novel and innovative housing solutions that reduces homelessness and improves safety.

We need to streamline and fast-track planning mechanisms to enable house relocations to be affordable and genuinely feasible. Part of this would be to engage contractors to on-scale relocate suitably identified houses to flood free lands.

In the meantime we should be supporting occupation until relocation. Many of the bought back houses were safely restored post flood and are suitable for habitation. Priority should be given to assessing flood impacted houses for restoration and use as temporary accommodation (including key workers) to be managed by housing providers so these houses don't fall into disrepair and neglect. The longer they sit abandoned risks them being damaged and narrows their chances of being relocated. 

We need sensible flood mitigation that takes a catchment-based approach and prioritises nature-based solutions - not expensive levees, dams or dredging. 

Every post-flood disaster report says the same: preparedness is key which we need to invest more in. Flood preparedness and education allows our community to be better prepared for floods in the interim to transitioning from high-risk areas to flood free locations. This involves better warning systems, evacuation plans and routes, and lighter ways of living on the floodplain until we transition to higher ground. 

The floods highlighted how vulnerable our food systems and transport routes are to such shocks. We therefore need to integrate food security solutions into response and recovery plans so that we build resilience in our vulnerable food systems and not leave it to volunteer community members to feed us during disasters. Thanks to the wonderful charities and organisations like the Koori Mail who fed us throughout the long recovery!

An apparent gap in our flood recovery has been the absence of support for residents in the steep parts of our community impacted by landslip. In response we need to establish a landslip buyback stream to address the currently unfunded gap in flood recovery which leaves too many in our community in harm's way and no safe options for relocation.

Finally, we need to invest in innovation, in order to explore options for housing that is flood resilient, temporary or capable of housing people on the floodplain in a low impact, safe and ecologically sustainable manner (eg. floating homes, moveable homes, minimal impact housing etc). Unless we relocate every home and business off the floodplain, people will remain there, so we need safer options than just leaving people to their fates.

Already there are some 3000 residential lots identified in council's Growth Management Strategy zoned or capable of being zoned for housing in our Local Government Area. Rather than leaving it to developers to landbank these areas or determine when and how this land gets developed, government intervention is urgently required. 

How can we make it happen?

This proposal is part of the Lismore Greens' Local Government Election campaign platform, but we can't make it happen without getting elected on 14 September. We have a ticket of outstanding community champions determined to act in the public interest of our community. 

On the Councillor ticket, Vote 1 Greens above the line.

On the Mayoral ticket, Vote 1 Vanessa Grindon-Ekins. 

https:/greensoncouncil.org.au/lismore/