Andrew George, The Nimbin GoodTimes
Three years after the catastrophic 2022 floods and the NSW Reconstruction Authority (RA) are finally getting into the swing of their Resilient Homes Program (RHP).
No flood-impacted people had any say in designing or consenting to the RHP, in blatant disregard of the federal government’s own ‘best practice’ in disaster recovery community engagement principles.
I mean we all want to have a say in decisions that impact our life? Turns out our governments are too afraid or incompetent to even ask us. No surprises there really.
One outcome of the RHP has been the buying back of houses deemed to be in the ‘red zone’ of highest risk in the floodplains of the Northern Rivers. The swampy floodplain, in the case of Gundurimba/Lismore, which should never have been drained and permanently settled if cedar-cutting settlers had respected the Wiabul people of the Widjabul country who warned them of that risk!
Hundreds of homes have now been bought back. Some owners took the offers early, because they reasoned that would be their only chance of moving out of the flood zone, or they waited in the hope they might be able to secure the promised cheaper Resilient Lands and thus relocate their homes. More and more chose, or were forced by circumstances to leave their homes behind. Now, in some streets, the only regular sign of life are the lawn-mowing contractors – disasters bring money to some, usually the owners of the contracting firms, not the workers.
The streets of Lismore and other towns across the NR are now full of buyback houses, hundreds of them empty and boarded. New ecological niches emerge in any major disturbance.
In this case, the niche is buyback properties, many renovated and lived-in post-floods and prior to buyback. You’d be hard pressed to find someone without a home not keen to shelter in many of these houses. In the midst of a housing crisis do people really expect these liveable houses to remain empty?
Pine Street in North Lismore has become a niche of human adaptation in our climate and bureaucracy deranged world. Seven of eight of the houses at the cul-de-sac end of Pine Street are buybacks. They are now full of human habitants. Every bedroom, as well as many vans that line the street serves as safe shelter for people living in a unique community.
Is the floodplain unsuitable for permanent habitation? Probably not in the way that modern consumerist society defines that. Perhaps boarding up liveable homes amidst a housing crisis is a solution that only an out of touch bureaucracy could come up with?
The Pine Street communal squat experiment has been going for over seven months, facing down a handful of eviction threats by mobilising the community to stand peacefully in support at various crunch-times. The slogan ‘occupation til relocation’ has been at the heart of this stand.
After all, these are big scrub timber homes that must not be demolished but protected until safely relocated, as the RA itself proclaims is its intention.
In July Lismore police superintendent met with squatters, community supporters and RA execs to come to an understanding of occupation. At this stage, a discretionary and proportional approach was taken.
Now the occupants of Pine Street have been given one week’s notice to vacate by Tuesday 28th January. The RA is citing the need to have the houses available for the Expression of Interest (EOI) process (in which private bids can be made on buyback houses to relocate them from the floodplain).
The EOI trial process is currently well underway and adding nine new houses at this stage would confuse the process. The claim that these houses are needed immediately is therefore false. There is no evidence yet that the trial will successfully see buyback homes removed from the floodplain, with preference given to flood impacted residents and zero chance that the timeline for eventual removal will be short of many, many months.
Therefore, the move by the RA to once again try and evict Pine Street Squatters, can be seen as both a cynical move to appease potential Labor voters in the face of a federal election (with Nationals MP Kevin Hogan calling for their eviction), and a cover for the RA’s own failure to make any material progress on turning buyback houses into social housing.
In December last year Reclaim our Recovery met with the RA and asked again about the forty houses not in the ‘red-zone’ that RA had earlier in the year told us were suitable for social housing. They said they were working with Homes NSW to make this a reality. In the words of the RA, “there’s a shortlist of 15. We are waiting for a legal agreement. It’s pretty close”.
Four months later and there is no news – we have come to understand that ‘soon’ and ‘pretty close’ means a very different thing to the RA.
No surprises that the public are taking things into their own hands, moving in and taking up ‘public housing’.
What is truly disturbing is how far Australian society is from demanding secure housing for all and making that demand a reality through multi-pronged and creative re-organising, based in a culture of solidarity. The system rewards investors, and thus there are people with multiple properties, renting them out at exorbitant rents or leaving them empty to bank them and make capital gains.
We all know someone who is facing rent increases or struggling to find somewhere to live. To accept this reality, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, is to act in class treachery or ignorance. By propping up the elitist system of commodification of basic needs, we support the ceaseless neoliberal capitalist project of destabilisation, disconnection and thus exploitation of ourselves, the masses.
What is called for is solidarity and resistance.
Stand up with the people of Pine Street facing eviction and all squatters, support tenancy unions with your membership and your wallet, build alternative housing solutions, take action, and always think of those less well off.
This article appeared in The Nimbin GoodTimes, February 2025.
