by PAUL COLLITS – A LARGELY undistinguished, former politician who briefly led an extremely minor (territorial) jurisdiction in the outback of Australia a long time ago wants the city of Lismore moved. To higher ground. Where it will cost taxpayers less.
You should be careful who you appoint to positions such as Coordinator General of the National Recovery and Resilience Agency.
- Such interventions are smug, self-serving, insulting and, more than anything else, complete rubbish.
- There is not the remotest real evidence that global warming is the cause of these non-increasing disasters.
And occupants of these kinds of positions should be especially careful what they say immediately following disasters.
Shane Stone has been lambasted for his gross insensitivity after his awful contribution last week: “On Friday Stone, the coordinator general of the National Recovery and Resilience Agency, told The Sydney Morning Herald that ‘the taxpayer and the ratepayer cannot continue to pick up the bill for these huge, catastrophic damage events’.
“ ‘You’ve got people who want to live among the gum trees – what do you think is going to happen? Their house falls in the river and they say it’s the government’s fault,’ ” Stone reportedly said.
GENIUS
Stone is paid half a million dollars a year to come up with his peculiar brand of genius.
Clearly Stone’s list of deficits includes memory loss.
Wasn’t he Chief Minister of a territory whose major city, when pretty much the size of Lismore, was wiped out by a cyclone (in 1974)?
Just imagine if Major General Alan Stretton, appointed wisely by Gough Whitlam to coordinate Darwin’s recovery, had advised the then government to relocate Darwin to somewhere else
Whether or not he ever thought that might be a good idea, he would be far too much a person of old fashioned class to say it, let alone to say it when the poor souls whose lives had just been wrecked were still cleaning up and assessing the damage.
There are other examples of Stone’s lack of memory. As Niki Savva notes: “Stone, appointed to the job by Scott Morrison to help people in the regions cope with floods and fires, apparently didn’t get his own memo, the infamous ‘mean and tricky’ letter he sent to John Howard in 2001 warning the then-prime minister to be more responsive to suffering Australians, saying voters thought his government was dysfunctional and out of touch.”
The ABC was quickly able to round up some Lismore locals and give them a megaphone to express views on whether to move the city’s CBD.
Whether those speaking out in favour of the suggestion represent the majority of Lismore residents, and, indeed, whether they will maintain this view on reflection when the mess is cleared, is another matter.
I suspect this view is convenient to the national broadcaster, to the extent that suggesting Lismore should be relocated can only underscore the impact of the “climate crisis” we are all said to be experiencing.
So far, there hasn’t been too much climate refugeeism. Not nearly enough. Perhaps governments should manufacture some, so that we can then say, look at all the climate refugees!
Of course, the plight of Lismore CBD retail is simply the latest blow after two years of debilitating COVID policy that has all but pulverised the city’s downtown, like so many other retail ghost towns across the nation.
CRUSHING
The crushing of small business by a government-corporate cartel has been one of the under-examined aspects of the whole COVID fiasco.
Whether it was deliberate – a conspiracy, no less – hardly matters.
We now face what Politicom’s Sean Burke accurately terms the “hollowing out” of small business everywhere.
So it is little wonder that business ratepayers and victims of hefty insurance premiums (the lucky ones) are now at the point of, perhaps, no return. Literally.
And who could blame them? I know of business people in Lismore who have simply felt unable to return to their shops to witness the destruction that has occurred.
Many of these people – the mayor of Lismore is but one – have lost home and business.
But a lot of small business owners across this COVID-policy ravaged land not impacted by floods will be asking the very same question in relation to continuing with their businesses (I wonder, by the way, what the economically rational Stone thinks of all Morrison’s taxpayer funded rewards to businesses large and small – billions hosed up against the wall – to compensate them for the Government’s own policies that forced them to the point of bankruptcy over the virus. Jobkeeper and the like. Perhaps someone should ask him).
I have mentioned Darwin and Cyclone Tracy. I never heard the suggestion (while living in New Zealand) that Christchurch should be moved after the earthquake.
Of course, you would have to move the whole of New Zealand to assuage the fears of citizens there about earthquakes. Make them all leave!
Newcastle had an earthquake once. Brisbane floods regularly (often as the result of both ideology and incompetence). Should we move Brisbane up the hill?
Make a much larger (obviously) Toowoomba the new capital? Much cooler and nicer up there. Large, crowded cities are hotbeds of crime (and so much else that is awful).
Should we have a policy of forced decentralisation in order to reduce crime and all the other pathologies suffered by cities?
And speaking of cyclones, should everyone be forced to move from Cairns, Ingham, Townsville, Cooktown, Mission Beach, Proserpine and similar places to locations where those nasty winds don’t blow? Cyclone Yasi’s damage bill in 2011 was $6.8b.
FANTASY
Shane Stone should be told that his ideas are fantasy and ridiculous.
He isn’t just insensitive. There is also a whiff of the othering of the deplorables about the arrogant style and dismissive content of Stone’s remarks. We know best.
You’ve copped a shellacking from the weather gods. Lost everything. Now we will decide where you live.
After all, we have been bossing you around for two years now. You should just cop it, whatever it is that we determine to be your future.
And, as so often these creatures do, Stone hides behind cost effectiveness memes. And how many floods should occur before we decide we will move you? Three strikes and you’re out?
Now we have the plan of the NSW Government to offer goodies like stamp duty cuts to move away from “flood plains”.
I am not sure which geniuses came up with this one. Perhaps the same nudge-bandits who offered free hamburgers for vaccinations. Remember them?
Incentives to get vaccinations that were, and are, unnecessary, ineffective, dangerous, experimental and protected from legal relief.
Vaccines that now even Bill Gates and the CEO of Pfizer admit do not work. Or maybe the stamp duty idea was the brainchild of the boffins who allocated Lismore no more flood relief than 45 other flood affected council areas across the State.
At least the NSW Deputy Liberal leader realised that another loopy suggestion, that of buying out flood area properties, was “farcical”. He is from Penrith. He knows a little about floods.
The lingering suspicion that we are currently served by the most second-rate political representatives any of us have ever witnessed has been confirmed these past weeks.
Perhaps Stone’s effort was a ploy, a feint, to distract attention away from the bungling incompetence of the Government he serves, and from that of the other governments involved.
FAILED
An attempt at “look over here”. If so, mate, alas, it failed. It simply added to our grief, shock and dazed anger
But we are used to governments doing awful things to us. We do vote, though.
Writing about Kevin Hogan, the Member for Page (which includes Lismore), Niki Savva, quoting the Member for the adjacent seat of Richmond, Labor’s Justine Elliot, (correctly) lambasted Stone and forecast an electoral backlash as a result of the generally plodding efforts of governments in response to the Lismore disaster.
“Never forget, never forgive”, was the arresting headline.
Savva, being a Canberran journalist and an “insider”, naturally dispensed with the plight of Lismorians and moved very quickly to the electoral plight of politicians like Hogan, and his boss, Scotty from Disaster Relief.
To be blunt, people who live in the real world and not in COVID-induced bubbles could not give a monkey’s toss about the fate of any politician at the minute.
After what the political class has done to Australians these past two years, we pretty much loathe all of them, do not want to see them and do not care what happens to their jobs.
Baseball bats don’t even come close to what the locked-down, forcibly masked, abused-unvaccinated jobless have in store for our politicians come May or whenever Morrison mans up to face the people.
But Niki still believes in old politics and hasn’t noticed that we now live in a post-major-party-duumvirate world.
ELITES
Where “Left” and “Right” have very little meaning. Where the divide is now between ruling class elites (that include Niki) and the struggling rest of us.
Niki, as well, confined her focus to Shane Stone. But Shane is not the only heartless, thoughtless official in the house in the aftermath of the floods. And the appeal to neo-liberalism is not the only form of irrelevant punditry in relation to the flood recovery process.
While on the subject of insensitive and irrelevant commentary on flood disasters, we should also pause to reflect on the inevitable interventions by climate botherers.
Whether it is graffiti on an overhead bridge on the Pacific Motorway – “fossil fuel floods” – or protesters’ placards confronting Scott Morrison, or statements by ABC/Guardian types, or even statements by ministers (yes, the inevitable Bridget McKenzie is worried about climate change, post-flood), the last thing the people of Lismore and other inundated regions need to hear is that you were only flooded because governments persist in allowing fossil fuels to be mined and used.
SMUG
Such interventions are smug, self-serving, insulting, and more than anything else, complete rubbish.
Not only is there no evidence that flood events and other disasters (like bushfires) are becoming more frequent, but equally, there is not the remotest real evidence that global warming is the cause of these non-increasing disasters.
Many anthems of defiance have been penned to bolster the prospects of those under siege.
I Won’t Back Down by Tom Petty is one. Perhaps, in the face of Shane Stone’s attack, We Shall Not Be Moved might be adopted by the people of Lismore and other towns similarly aggrieved by his appalling comments.
We will choose where we live. As for the climate warriors who, cynically, tastelessly and ignorantly, use every single natural disaster as an opportunity for political grandstanding on the graves, destroyed possessions and empty bank balances of those crushed by such events, they are beneath contempt and incapable of either rational debate or evidence-based thought.
My colleague at The Spectator Australia, Terry Barnes, has offered the suggestion that Tony Abbott would be an ideal choice as disaster recovery “supremo”.
No argument from me.PC
And while they are at it, can you move Maryborough and Gympie up the hill a bit as well?
For his information, as pointed out by the Mayor of Lismore on radio this week, new subdivisions on high ground have been created and many new houses built there already, of course with floods clearly in mind.
Australia cannot pay for every property owner to relocate, and many or most chose to buy a property likely to be flooded at some point in time and probably many times in the future. Why therefore should all taxpayers pay for them to relocate?
I agree that construction of flood mitigation (environmental engineering) is necessary but even then flooding cannot be guaranteed to be removed as a problem, who knows what major flooding will take place in the future. For example the Maitland NSW most recent floods were somewhat contained by the levy banks constructed not many decades ago, but local Indigenous Australians have pointed to a nearby hill that has never gone under, locals believed. But the Indigenous Australians pointed out high on that hill where floods had reached long ago, according to what their elders had told them.
I read that when the first white settlers to the Upper Hunter River arrived the local Indigenous people told them about a period when the river had dried up during a long drought from the high water tidal point. The tribes apparently moved to higher ground on the Great Dividing Range to access natural spring water. The Hunter River has not been dry since white settlement in the district, Maitland and Morpeth having been the Port, now the Port of Newcastle is located at the ocean.
Climate change is natural, the land we call Australia was covered in rainforest around 130,000 years ago but as the climate became drier and warmer eucalypts replaced the rainforests which are now only 3 per cent of our forests. So we need to deal with the worst predictable weather conditions when building future infrastructure, housing, etc.
The land of droughts and flooding rains, and bushfires.
My first thoughts were to move Lismore up onto a plateau as some 300 Lismore homes are reported non liveable and businesses destroyed again only worse this time as the water level was 2m higher than previous floods so what businesses had put up out of flood height was also destroyed. Then a friend sent me this video of weather manipulation as there had been protests in the capital cities each weekend against vaccine mandates etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A19BaLoJy_A
If you still don’t believe man can manipulate the weather you need to watch the video ‘The Dimming’ on this website https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/
Cyclones are unpredictable. Yes, it would have been a good idea NOT to re-build Darwin. A hardened military base, yes. What is the point of Darwin anyway?
Lismore is a different matter . 91 floods in 150 years. The early settlers had a point in being near water for drinking, irrigation and transport. This no longer applies. How much taxpayer money should be thrown at Lismore? There is actually plenty of high ground nearby. Re-build there. This was done in Grantham in the Lockyer Valley after the 2011 floods.
Alternatively you may have to divert the river around the town. I don’t know if this is feasible.
2017 flood – cleanup – cleanup – Covid – Covid – Covid and flood. Lismore is on its knees. Something needs to be done, but I don’t think the moving the city is viable. It may be put forward but there will be 20 years of political naval gazing and many inquires filling the pockets of the political classes (quelle surprise) Then nothing while the place floods again and again. The new Mayor came in on a platform of some badly need investment into the CBD. But nobody will invest while flooding looms large every few years. I can just imagine how much insurance is going to go up, again.
Is there a solution? I don’t know, hydrology is outside my expertise. Which is, funnily, among other things emergency and resilience planing.
I see a solution to be a combination of dams to restrict and regulate water flow in, dredging and / or pipes to fasten water exit and, an increase in barrier heights. Maybe even with some forced purchases to allow earth dams to be built around the city All of those things will, I have no doubt, be stymied and protested by the insufferable watermelons.
As I said, not my area, but there MUST be a solution found. Lismore cannot continue like this or it will die a natural death as businesses and individuals refuse to invest in a town which turns into a fetid water park every few years.
‘[…] Tony Abbott would be an ideal choice as disaster recovery “supremo”.’
On what grounds – because he’s fought bushfires?
For $500,000 a year, I’d be wanting someone who actually had a clue – that would rule out, for a start, all politicians and ex-politicians.