It has been nearly seventeen months since the communities of Lismore and the Northern Rivers were dealt a devasting natural disaster blow. A blow that still has many parts of the community on the ropes taking punches as recovery solutions are still being sought and a NSW Government re-set is being formulated.

The Lismore App sat down with Member for Lismore Janelle Saffin to find out what lessons have been learned since February 28, 2022.

Ms Saffin is working through a document that will be presented to the NSW Government and Simon Draper the head of the NSW Reconstruction Authority that can be incorporated into existing NSW Disaster Management Plans.

Ms Saffin said she probably has about 50 points that she is working through, here are the key points:

• The Resilient Homes Program: They should have just adopted the Queensland model and I said that as far back with Dominic Perrottet in March. The way they do it is with local councils. Local councils have Flood Management Plans. Yes, they might be a bit delayed. Queensland is better at decentralisation than NSW. The way they engage with communities and the way they operate local government.

• NSWRA Can Herald Change: We had nothing when the flood happened, we didn't even have the bushfire recommendations implemented. We've still got people displaced on the South Coast. Out of the Grantham, Lockyer Valley, Toowoomba disasters gave birth to the QRA so for us, in a sense, we've been the guinea pigs for NSW. I have confidence because we have the legislation which is modelled very much on the QRA model.

• The existing local council Voluntary House Purchase and Voluntary House Raising Program had about $2 million in it could be revamped and go through local councils. Anyway, that wasn't the model that was adopted. They adopted their own model that would go through the NRRC.

• House Buybacks: It should be those most physically at risk and psychologically at risk and I would have case managed it. That would have been zone by zone, street by street. I would offer the whole street a buyback if I thought that was where it should be and say we'd really like you to accept this purchase because it's unsafe etcetera etcetera. In the beginning, we should promise less and deliver more while going for more all the time through advocacy. You have to be really cautious because everyone was psychologically disturbed by this event.

• More Money In Back Home Grant: I asked for $50,000 for the Back Home Grant because I felt that was a better spend and given that we were always going to do things on a voluntary basis with house purchase and raising I thought that fitted that model better. Have community intact, have community social cohesion.

• Hire A Cultural Planner: It's like a Social Planner so a person that understands local government, they understand neighbourhoods, they understand localities.

• Living On-Site At Home: We should put people on their land in caravans. If they're renters talk to the landlords and ask them if the renters can be there in caravans or pods. They are in their own space which takes them out of emergency accommodation. The longer they're away they may never want to be back.

• Resilient Homes and Resilient Lands Program: They should have been rolled out together. If you've got to slow it down, well slow it down or speed up the Resilient Lands Program even if it's a couple of parcels of land, the simple ones.

• Communication: Should be a weekly update on what's happening. All the NRs members said to the ministers we don't even know where our people are. We should know exactly how many people are out of their houses in each locality, broadly, where they might be just so that we understand what we're responding to. I think it's important for me, as a local member, to have as much information as possible because we're not in business as usual.

• Public Policy Debate: Public policies were being designed and implemented but we haven't seen that public policy debate. So, the Resilient Homes Program is public policy deciding if you'll either get a buyback or nothing. That's got a lot of thorns on it and that hasn't been debated with the local community.

• Managing Expectations: I think everybody who was flood impacted now believes or feels that something should happen for them, that never happened in the past. This event was different, I get that. So, there are different expectations, but they were allowed to believe that through the whole NRRC process, and I'm not sure that was ever the whole policy design from the government.

• Service NSW To Handle All Grants: They need to be more upskilled, and up-resourced to make that happen. None of it's perfect but they do it better than others and instead of having one department here and one there I think it would be better to go through one channel.

• Better Coordination: We've got recovery support services in different localities and places and neighbourhood centres and they need to be coordinated in the way we responded with mental health early on. DCJ (Department Communities and Justice) housing were not involved in the beginning with the pod villages. Our services need to be geared up to deal with events like this. They engage with people, they're engaged with the community. It just makes sense.

• Appoint A Recovery Coordinator: When any big event happens, you've got to appoint someone and generally someone who is a particularly skilled person or someone who's got police, army or something similar experience so we don't have to workshop an idea across five different departments. We need someone in charge.

As the Lismore and Northern Rivers lessons are learned and documented we can only hope that when the next natural disaster hits a small city or town in NSW that the Disaster Plan is much more detailed and much more effective than it was for our communities.

To that point, I asked Ms Saffin that if we had another major flood five years from now would we be ready to deal with it more effectively.

"If it's five years away, yes. If it was two years, yes, because as NSWRA rolls out, we'll have a state mitigation plan, we'll have local adaptation plans, we'll have councils more involved. Simon Draper's already said they've got to be involved at every level and we also need our councils to be very front and centre of our vision for rebuilds but resourced to do it and backed to do it."