TL:DR:  Come to the rally this Saturday, 11 AM at the Lismore Transit Centre  to share your voice, connect, and hear solutions and strategies to the ongoing issues with the NSWRA recovery programs! Leave with a sense of connection, and empowerment to take more action.

* * * * ** * * * ** * * * ** * * * ** * * * ** * * * ** * * * ** * * * *

The recovery since the catastrophic climate disaster of 2022 has been bureaucrat, politician, and business-led.  Not community-led. That’s why there are so many issues with it.  The community-led part of the recovery was the joyful, connecting, life-saving and united response in the hours, days and weeks after the weather event(s).  
If the community still had the agency to lead, would the recovery look, sound and feel the way it does now?

The demolition of perfectly good houses taking place now (although they have eerily paused - unofficially) is just the loudest and most blatantly wasteful aspects of the NSW Reconstruction Authorities actions. Let’s list a few other issues:

•  Leading on 1000’s of shocked residents that they would receive a buyback, house-raise or $50,000 resilient retrofit money, only to dispatch Service NSW cold-callers to phone people (cruelly multiple times even) with the bad news - ‘you have not been successful’.
•  Offering basically nothing to the renters of the floodplain, that previously made up 30 % of the population, whilst property speculators with multiple properties cashed in
•  Awarding huge and nontransparent contracts to John’s Lyng group to retrofit houses that were then bought-back
•  Making the bureaucratic hurdles to relocate a house potentially as traumatising as the flood itself
•  Setting up emergency accommodation Pod Villages (at huge financial reward for Hutchinson’s builders - something like $400,000 per pod), and allowing them to be run like authoritarian regimes. (Imagine growing a pumpkin plant only to have it removed because it is ‘unauthorised’. True story, East Lismore Pod Village May 2025)
• And many more - on this Saturday will be a chance to hear them

The community could have led the flood recovery, and still could.  Coming together is one way we build our collective power to influence the decisions made by the government.  

Come along this Saturday at 11am to the Lismore Transit Centre and share your voice, hear other’s stories, connect and be part of a community led flood recovery!