Reconstruction Authority announces Mission Accomplished: Lismore Now Fully Resilient (Pending Reality) – a triumphant dispatch from the Bureau of Unchecked Optimism.
The Northern Rivers Reconstruction Authority (RA for short, because acronyms = progress) has bravely announced that everything is fine. Again.
Locals were briefly ecstatic over a Lismore App headline declaring: “The Resilient Lands Program (RLP) doesn’t pass the pub test: RA’s Graham Kennett explains why.”
The RA read the room though and realised that most people wouldn’t pay to get behind the pay wall where they would have discovered that it was still business as usual – just with more adjectives and a touch of self-congratulation.
Armed with the RA’s guidebook on ‘how to put lipstick on a pig’, Graham repeatedly transformed failure into success – key phrases being “robust investment” and “high quality legacy” and of course as an executive officer of the RA “he is not wrong”.
After four short years of “faux consultations”, “draft strategies”, and “vision documents”, the RA has reached its destination: somewhere between a press release and a photoshoot. The Resilient Lands Program (RLP) and Resilient Homes Program (RHP) – two arms of the same tired octopus – continue their work at dazzling speed. The RHP is finishing before the RLP really gets going, proving that time is a construct and housing is not.
Graham, with his penchant for saying the quiet part out loud, thinks “…it would be disappointing if we didn’t see that overlap” but luckily he is an eternal optimist who rounds out this moment of introspection with a classic: “But at the end of the day the right decisions were made.”
Local contractors are reportedly thrilled to be demolishing homes faster than they can be replaced. “We’d love to deconstruct sustainably,” one said, “but the RA gives us a stopwatch, not a plan.” Meanwhile, the Resilient Lands team has promised to consider considering what land might someday look like when viewed from a helicopter with a hard-hatted minister on board.
Officials assure the community that any frustration is merely a sign of “vigorous engagement.” One spokesperson stated, “We acknowledge people’s feelings of displacement, confusion, and despair – and we thank them for their constructive feedback, which will be logged under ‘Done’.”
And anyway, as some of our favourite executive officers from the RA reminded us, “We’ve had enough community consultation, it gets in the way of us doing our job.”
In previous episodes of ‘Building Back Better’, the current Minister for Recovery, Janelle Saffin, Member for Lismore and part-time voice of reason, compared the release of the Draft Resilient Lands Program by the NRRC (the agency put in place post-flood and pre-election) to an episode of Utopia – except that in the TV series, someone occasionally gets something done.
The NRRC, meanwhile, held an on-line briefing where journalists were forbidden to record, quote, or ask meaningful questions – thus a revolutionary new model of transparent communication was put in place.
Critics note that the RA’s ‘Resilient Homes Without Lands’ approach may lack a certain… land. To this, insiders reply: “That’s exactly the kind of negativity that stops resilience in its tracks.”
Developers have been invited to the resilience party, and they’ve brought champagne. The NRRC and subsequently the RA had $100 million on the table to “unlock” private innovation.
Fast forward to 2026 and the Inspire Lismore 2040 Strategic Plan – now with fewer locals and more investor townhouses and cranes – is alive. When asked who will profit, officials replied, “Yes.”
As one resident summed up: “They promised us a future. We didn’t realise it was a future PowerPoint.”
In conclusion: the Reconstruction Authority remains proud of its record-breaking effort to reconstruct the narrative, if not the town. The message to the people of Lismore is clear – be patient, be resilient, and above all, be grateful that the vision is still under review pending further visibility.
