Downtown, however, is a very different story. There is an eerie emptiness about the place, a silence, despite the still busy highway that goes from Ballina to Tenterfield.

The army trucks seem to have gone. If you look into houses, you will see timber wall frames but no walls. If you expect to hear the hum of power tools everywhere, working to repair residences and shops, you will not.

MOOD

The endless grey skies don’t improve the mood. Nor do the governments of Sydney and Canberra. As Mr Kevin Hogan (the Nationals Member for Page) just might find out on Saturday week.

But one thing you do see around the city are hearts in windows. Some years back, an intrepid place marketer came up with the heart symbol for Lismore.

As in, it replaces the “o”. Now they are everywhere. I assume they connote the locals’ solidarity, their continued love for our town and their determination to fight on, after the dual inundations this autumn. The hearts of Lismore still beat.

The citizens of Lismore might well add, it is a good job that we love the place, because it seems no one else does.

Many of us still have the view that we are all but invisible to our elected representatives, and certainly to the unelected bureaucrats working mostly from their cushy loungerooms and glorying in their pay rises.

Three recent developments suffice to make the point.

First, there were the polite letters written by the bankers and the insurance industry leaders to the NSW Premier suggesting that he get a wriggle on with post-disaster planning, since people in Lismore were now receiving financial recompense – not from the NSW Government, I might add – and could well do with some clarity about future plans for the city. In order for them to make informed decisions about their next moves and their longer-term futures.

As reported by The Sydney Morning Herald: “A crucial window of opportunity to resurrect Lismore after the nation’s worst flood event is in danger of closing, insurers and banks warn.

“In a letter to NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet, the Insurance Council of Australia chief Andrew Hall and Australian Banking Association chief Anna Bligh last month urged the government to urgently ‘identify key actions, resources and timing for any rebuild’.

“Without this NSW government direction, they fear that residents and business owners will either leave the region or use insurance payouts and government grants to reinvest in areas later deemed uninhabitable.

“The city is reeling after the March 2022 flood killed four people, inundated 3045 residential, commercial and industrial buildings and damaged hundreds of millions of dollars worth of critical infrastructure. Lismore City Council this week said its central business district will be uninsurable for years until mitigation works are undertaken.

“Insurance council chief Andrew Hall told the Herald on Friday that Lismore needed details of the government’s overarching plan for the community by the end of July, if not earlier.

GO/STAY

These are go/stay decisions, as Andrew Hall notes: “It’s the big-ticket issues: Do I stay? Do I rebuild my house? How do I rebuild my house? Do I reopen my business in this location? Can I get finance to do it?”

Bligh was, of course, famously the face of the 2011 Brisbane flood. She notes: “I know when I was Queensland premier that I didn’t face anything like what has happened in Lismore.”

It is, indeed, that bad. Perhaps the most telling comparison might be with Darwin in 1974. God help us, Gough Whitlam did a better job then, than this lot now.

The NSW Government should not need to be told this. They should already know it.

End July, too, seems very generous to the government. If people are receiving insurance payments now and making decisions now, then they need good information now.

Tony Abbott once said of Kevin Rudd in 2007, “he has hit the ground reviewing”. Well, the Perrottet Government is doing too much reviewing over Lismore and not enough acting.

Second, came the story of the disgraceful non-payment of grants by the NSW Government promised to residents and businesses affected by the floods.

“Less than 13 per cent of rental and business support payments has been paid to communities in the State’s flood-ravaged north almost three months after the catastrophic weather event,” the report stated.

“The latest State government figures shows more than 15,000 applications have been lodged for small business grants of up to $50,000, but less than 13 per cent – or $28.2 million – has reached victims.

“More than 40 per cent of business support applications have been rejected as ineligible and a further 40 per cent is awaiting assessment. About $10 million in applications are undergoing a fraud review.

“State member for Lismore Janelle Saffin, who lost her home in the late-February flood, said bureaucratic hurdles were slowing down payments to flood victims, despite a commitment from Premier Dominic Perrottet to remove red tape and fast track cash payment…

“Of flood recovery rental support payments announced in March, more than 9500 or $90.7 million in applications have been lodged. However, less than 1300 have been paid.

“Sixty-five per cent of rental applications has been rejected and 20 per cent is awaiting assessment.”

MESSY

As Ms Saffin says: “That three months on there is no money circulating, a messy bureaucracy, grants not getting out, businesses not being able to stand up, people not knowing where they’re going to live.”

This is simply unbelievable, and reflects precisely the well-made, indeed, compelling, points of Anna Bligh and the insurance people.

Having botched the rescue and ignored the city for the week after the first flood, they then do this.  All they have done is (inevitably) to announce a new layer of bureaucracy – the Northern Rivers Reconstruction Corporation – to supervise all the other layers of bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, the inquiry into the flood dribbles on, to report to the NSW Government by June. Too long. Too late. And heaven knows when the government will get around to responding to the findings of said inquiry.

Dare one say it? A cynical observer might. Lismore, of course, is a Labor (State) seat that is very, very unlikely to change hands come March 2023.

Third, there is the Australian Electoral Commission and its placement of the one pre-polling place currently open in Lismore.

Let one of the locals (Clare Kearney) take up the story: “The only early voting in Lismore this week. Not where the map takes you, just a classroom number listed for a whole university campus, inaccessible by car via the road advertised, two sets of stairs and absolutely zero signage on campus. I am so sick of fighting for everything.

“There’s a lot of people that have a lot of strong feelings about the way the recovery has been handled,” the small business owner said.

“These people have been already disfranchised in so many ways. Everything is so hard for people here right now. You have to jump through so many hoops to do anything.”

Kearney lives near Southern Cross University – where the only polling booth in operation is located – and said it was hard to find. It would be near impossible to access “if you had any sort of [physical] disability”, she said, noting many people had lost their cars and transport was an issue.

Another local seems to me to be way too polite. Rose Harvey, understood that people making decisions from Sydney might not understand how challenging life still is for people in Lismore. But she said there should be more help for residents who are “feeling powerless” to exercise their democratic right to vote.

WASHED

“People are going to turn up to where [the polling booth] used to be and it will have been washed away,” she said.

“This has shocked people to their core and that means that they aren’t thinking straight.

“It’s been a real letdown … the AEC has had months [to prepare] and they haven’t done enough.”

Oh, I think the decision-makers in Sydney well understand. They just don’t care. And if they don’t understand, they damned well should. We pay them enough to keep us gaslit, masked, jabbed against our wills and locked up.

Perhaps they just don’t want us to vote. Their political masters might be scared of the outcome. After all, we do have a generous sprinkling of FFMPs (freedom friendly minor Parties) standing on May 21.

So … no grants being paid, no clear recovery plan, and nowhere to vote. You could not make this up. 

As the local Member for Lismore (Janelle Saffin) points out, whenever the Premier comes here, he is full of earnestness and sympathy. When he leaves, nothing happens.

Well, nothing good happens. This is the Premier who, upon realising the utter shambles of the initial flood rescue efforts, where (for example) the State Emergency Service (whose CEO, inexplicably, has so far kept her job) shoo’d away unvaccinated volunteers and employees and tried its best to stop rescues happening and refused help (three times) from the Army, said that this was never to happen in NSW again.