Andrew George, Reclaim Our Recovery, The Nimbin GoodTimes

On Tuesday 18th November, the NSW Reconstruction Authority (RA) facilitated the first of four meetings of the Community Reference Group (CRG) for Disaster Adaptation Planning (DAP) for the Northern Rivers (NR).

This is a positive step for democratic, community participation in disaster preparedness and adaptation in collaboration with the RA. It is also a sliver of hope for deliberative democracy for the region.

It is living proof of an alternative to politics-as-usual, to the short-term thinking of the elected cycle, and vested interests corrupting politics and making life harder for everyday people. Yet there are issues with the CRG.

Forty-four months after the second major flood in March of 2022, the CRG is the first attempt by the NSW government to enable democratic community participation in any of their projects.

Of course, their program has constantly evolved as the public have either brought to their attention, pushedback, or outright protested against aspects of their top-down recovery.

The CRG represents a change from reacting to collaborating. If, as Minister for Recovery and for Lismore, Janelle Saffin said, we want a community ‘driven’ recovery, then this is the chance for it to leave the bumper car track and finally take to the road in an orderly fashion, in a vehicle that passes the roadworthy.

Reclaim our Recovery are supportive of this first step towards deliberative democracy and collaboration with the community from the RA, which the community has been calling for since the floods.

However, the process to create the CRG needs some scrutinising. Reclaim Our Recovery has approached the RA to find out more details about their selection process. So far, what we know is that from 120 applicants 40 people were selected.

Unfortunately, only 21 people came to the first meeting. Hopefully this low turn-out can be remedied by enabling a mixture of in-person and on-line meetings, and to offer reimbursement for travel costs.

To get a truly representative CRG, the RA needs to put the money in to recruit people from across the region and across the socio-economic terrain of the NR.

Clearly what they did to advertise the CRG was inadequate if only 120 people applied. Particularly as all those 120 have demonstrated the ‘self-selection bias’.

A truly representative group would not be able to self-select, but rather random selection should lead to their nomination, and they then could choose to participate.

We are very concerned that key cohorts – youth, elderly and lower socioeconomic members of our community – have not even had the chance to nominate and thus participate.

Reclaim Our Recovery will be keeping a close eye on the CRG and their outputs, and we encourage everyone in the NR to do the same.

This article appeared in The Nimbin GoodTimes, December 2025.