How can we think outside the box to help our coastal neighbours?

As many of our friends, family and neighbours living just a short drive to our east begin post-flood clean up for the second or third time in a very short period of time, I am moved to ponder how we in the highlands can help.

More than sending some volunteers to help in the clean up, I mean the really heavy lifting of helping people to feel safe. Can we transform our communities and systems to support people to make a new life here in the high country?

Hard conversations

Facts are facts, and science is science. And whether you want to call it climate change or something else, the fact that parts of the north coast of NSW are becoming almost unlivable due to persistant severe weather events is hard to deny.

There will be many in places like Glouster, Taree, Wauchope, and many other communities less than 90 minutes drive from the Northern Tablelands, who wouldn’t leave their homes no matter what. We need to support them to stay and build back better. To build the levy walls, dredge the rivers, and mitigate their risk through good science and planning.

And there will be many that just can’t do it again. We need to support them to make a new life elsewhere. The Insurance Council says there’s 220,000 homes on the east coast of Australia that have been built in known high flood risk areas… so the numbers looking to relocate, or who should be encouraged to relocate, are not small.

In the case of Taree, that’s not just homes. It’s most of their CBD.

These are hard conversations to have.

But we must have these conversations. Now, not later.

How can we help?

Last year we did a series of stories on people who had moved to the New England – and a really surprising number of them were Lismore refugees, who had quite literally fled to higher ground. We should expect this again.

Just as we have seen with our Lismore refugees – and our Ezidi refugees! – the New England is a great place to make home. Our communities are welcoming and embrace the diversity new people bring.

But, as I’ve said before, and was apparent in the God’s Country series, the cliquiness of our communities can be a barrier. The flurry of programs to welcome newcomers are great, but we each – as individuals – can do more to be welcoming, open to making new friends, ready with advice and tips, and a little less negative on the socials.

As a region, we also must ask what we can do to help those looking for higher ground permanently. What can we do to help businesses relocate? What can we do to help families relocate? How can we support them to make that relocation the best decision they’ve ever made?

What can we do to make sure that while we support our internal refugees, we are not making our housing more unaffordable, and not taxing our services and infrastructure beyond a growth level they can handle?

How can we lead?

The pointed and urgent nature of these conversations should make those who dismissed climate change science as fabricated nonsense that would only affect some attol in the Pacific be ashamed of themselves. Not that the Green movement has anything to skite about: their toxic believer-or-denier rhetoric is a significant part of the reason all of these very difficult issues are stuck in the muck and decades behind where we should be.

We have already seen how the New England Highway was utterly shredded thanks to the Pacific Highway’s normal truck load being diverted inland for a week – what can we do to convice our governments that the New England Highway – and the rail line! – need to be built to the same standards as the coastal routes between Brisbane and Sydney? That we can’t and shouldn’t keep sending all our sick and old to the vulnerable coast? That government departments should be located in the far more affordable and safe inland areas?

Is the likes of Chris Bowen capable of imagining a whole of community transition, not just an energy transition? Understanding roads and transport links are just as important as transmission lines? Is he willing to support the economic activity to relocate to the new energy source as much as they are investing in taking the energy away?

And if he is, will Barnaby Joyce embrace his new post-Coalition-split reasoned leader persona and not oppose it on “principle” or other ideological nonsense?

Would it be possible to have some major employers relocate up the hill, but improve transport links to coastal communities so that it becomes commutable? So people can enjoy coastal living while the economic assets of their workplaces are safely out of flood range? There would of course be substantial benefits to having better transport links generally!

Can we move major health services – specialist surgery and long term higher level care services – to a new purpose built regional facility in the highlands, so that those vulnerable patients don’t need to be evacuated when the next inevitable flood happens?

How can we support this very necessary transition, without our neighbouring councils taking it as a raid on their hard fought for communities and assets?

Quickly now

Blue sky creative solutions will be required to really deal with the changing reality for the north coast of NSW. We need leaders willing to lead, and to consider the possibilities that would have once seemed ridiculous. We need communities with open minds and open hearts.

And we need to do it quickly.

Not rushed, we need to do the work, but Andrew Hull from the Insurance Council told ABC Radio National this morning that it’s taking local councils more than 10 years to do a flood plan, and then once they’ve done the work, there’s no funding to implement it. So nothing happens.

To quote new Green’s leader Larissa Waters, we need to “get shit done”.

Work out the plan, fund it, implement it. Now. It’s not that hard, just leave your ego and ideology at the door, and get on with it.

Got something on your mind? Go on then, engage. Submit your opinion piece, letter to the editor, or Quick Word now.