The NSW Reconstruction Authority is demolishing taxpayer-bought and government-owned buyback homes across the Northern Rivers.
One of the estimated six demolition companies, Melbourne-based contractor Industrial confirmed it has destroyed 26 homes to date, as the $880 million Resilient Homes Program limps toward its close, having failed the majority of people it was designed to serve.
“They waited until we went away and they did what they were always going to do: destroy our homes and delete the evidence of their failed Resilient Homes Program,” says Laurie Axtens, a Lismore flood-affected resident who will soon be the only person remaining on his street in Lismore’s North.
Four years on from the Northern Rivers floods, the NSW RA has settled just 732 home buybacks of the 10,500 homes damaged. Thousands of flood-affected residents remain stuck in a program so convoluted and burdensome that completing it requires navigating builders, architects, Development Applications, council approvals, and grant acquittals, all while managing the on-going trauma of displacement and the demands of daily life.
Many homeowners living in temporary accommodation are now facing eviction. Many more have simply given up.
Rather than delivering resilient homes, the NSW RA built what its own Northern Rivers executives describe as a “connection agency”: a market model that handed out grants and made flood-affected residents jump through exhaustive hoops to spend them.
The result is a bureaucratic nightmare that outsourced every facet of delivery, fragmented accountability across dozens of private contractors, and left residents, RSS workers and community organisations without basic answers about their own cases.
It’s a disgusting waste of housing, money and time. What should have already been relocated, retrofitted and raised, homes that should be providing shelter to hundreds of families, are now being demolished by the NSW RA. What has the NSW RA done in the last four years?
These homes were abandoned. Our community has been torn apart. So many residents are still living in temporary accommodation, about to be evicted. Homeowners still haven’t completed their resilience works because the process is arduous and not built for a human being to navigate. Too many are still suffering.
Instead of using the same funds to relocate buyback homes to public land, providing desperately needed public housing during Australia’s worst housing crisis, the NSW government is contracting demolition companies to crush the evidence of a program that never delivered on its promises.
There is still time to stop. The NSW RA must immediately halt demolitions and redirect those resources to relocating buyback homes to public land. These are homes that could house families today.
The Northern Rivers deserve a recovery that actually recovers people. If the NSW RA fails to change course now, it will set the precedent for every community facing climate disaster after us: that when the government says it will rebuild, what it really means is that it will manage a grants program, exhaust the people who need help most, and demolish what it never finished or started recovering.
