Northern Rivers flood recovery and Lismore

In South Lismore, on streets where older timber houses sit high on their original stumps and newer infill sits low on concrete slabs, it is still possible in 2026 to find a for-sale sign nailed to an empty block — the house removed after a state buyback, the land now waiting to become something else. On the same street it is just as possible to find a family still living behind a freshly repaired front door, waiting for a buyback offer that has not come, and a household two doors down asking why their raised and retrofitted home now carries an insurance quote bigger than their mortgage repayment. All three households lived through the same flood, on the same night in late February 2022, when the Wilsons River peaked at 14.4 metres in Lismore — 2.3 metres above any level ever recorded — and again five weeks later, on 30 March, before the town had finished drying out (NSW Audit Office, Flood housing response, 22-Feb-2024). Four years on, their experiences of "recovery" look nothing alike, and that gap is the story of this program.

Thirteen people died in the Northern Rivers floods of February–March 2022. Across the region, 4,055 properties were left uninhabitable and a further 10,849 were damaged — a disaster on a scale no Australian state had previously tried to recover from through a large, voluntary home buyback (NSW Audit Office, 22-Feb-2024). What New South Wales built in response, and how well it has been run since, is the subject of what follows.

What the government did

The independent NSW Flood Inquiry, led by former NSW Chief Scientist Mary O'Kane and former Police Commissioner Mick Fuller, reported in August 2022 after receiving 1,494 submissions and holding 144 meetings across the affected regions, including in Lismore itself. Among its central recommendations was that government use its planning and funding powers to move the highest-risk households off the floodplain rather than simply rebuild them in place (NSW Flood Inquiry, Aug-2022). The then-Coalition government, in its final months in office, answered with the Resilient Homes Program, which opened for applications in November 2022 — four months before the March 2023 election that brought Chris Minns' Labor government to power. Almost the entire delivery life of the program has therefore run under Labor, even though its design and initial funding envelope were set by the government it replaced.

The Resilient Homes Program, jointly funded by the NSW and Commonwealth governments, offers eligible Northern Rivers homeowners one of three paths: a voluntary buyback of the property at its pre-flood value, a grant of up to $100,000 toward raising the house above flood level or rebuilding, or up to $50,000 toward a flood-resilient retrofit (NSW Reconstruction Authority, Resilient Homes Program fact sheets, 2024–2026). A further $40 million extends parts of the program to flood-hit Central West communities such as Eugowra and Forbes, on top of the figures below. The Northern Rivers-focused Resilient Homes Program ($880 million) and its companion Resilient Lands Program ($100 million) — meant to prepare flood-free land so bought-back households have somewhere nearby to move to — together represent a combined $980 million commitment (NSW Audit Office, The Resilient Homes and Resilient Lands Programs, 20-May-2026).

None of it is compulsory: households can accept an offer or decline it, and thousands took time to decide either way, which is one reason the program's own targets have shifted. In August 2025 the Reconstruction Authority reset its delivery targets, from an original 1,345 buybacks down to a revised 1,000 buybacks plus 600 home raises or retrofits, citing community feedback (NSW Audit Office, 20-May-2026). Settlement deadlines have also moved: buyback purchases are now due to be settled by 30 June 2026, relocations by the end of 2026, and resilient works completed by 31 March 2027, with the program winding up by mid-2027 (NSW Reconstruction Authority, Resilient Homes Program, 2026).

The evidence

Set against that genuine complexity, the primary record — chiefly the NSW Audit Office's two performance audits of the flood recovery, in February 2024 and May 2026 — shows a program whose parts are moving at very different speeds. The 2024 audit, covering the emergency and temporary housing response, found "there was no plan in place to guide a temporary housing response" when the floods hit, despite temporary housing having already been used in the 2019–20 bushfire recovery. Against an estimated peak demand of around 1,642 households, only 546 temporary dwellings were ever built in the purpose-made villages, and of the first 75 households who exited temporary housing by mid-2023, only 30 moved into a long-term home — the rest left for reasons the audit could not always establish, including eviction (NSW Audit Office, 22-Feb-2024).

The May 2026 audit, examining the Resilient Homes and Resilient Lands Programs together, is starker. It found neither program had a business case or a cost-benefit analysis before it was rolled out, and that basic planning — detailed project plans, risk mitigations, milestones — was missing from the start, with the supporting Resilient Lands Strategy still significantly delayed years after it was first needed (NSW Audit Office, 20-May-2026). As at 31 March 2026, four years and one month after the floods, the figures were these:

That last line is the one that should concern anyone watching the program, because the Resilient Lands Program is the piece meant to give bought-back households somewhere nearby to go. Without it, a "buyback" for many families has not meant relocating within their own community — it has meant leaving it (NSW Audit Office, 20-May-2026).

The critique

The absence of a business case or cost-benefit analysis is not, on its own, proof of bad faith — disaster responses are often launched in an emergency, under real time pressure, without the luxury of a normal Treasury approval process. But the program is now approaching its fourth anniversary, and the government that has run nearly all of that time is Labor's, not the Coalition's that launched it in a hurry in late 2022. A rushed start can be forgiven. It is harder to excuse years of the same government failing to close the basic planning gaps the Audit Office says persisted into 2026, including a Resilient Lands Strategy that remained significantly delayed years after it was first flagged as necessary (NSW Audit Office, 20-May-2026).

The August 2025 decision to cut the buyback target from 1,345 to 1,000 households, and shift some of the difference into raise-and-retrofit grants, may well have been the right call — it followed community feedback, and some households always preferred to stay and rebuild rather than sell. But rescoping a headline target three years into a four-year program, without a clear public account of why, makes it hard for anyone outside the Reconstruction Authority to judge whether the program is ahead of or behind where it should be. A family deciding whether to wait for a buyback offer or take a lesser grant and rebuild now needs a program that tells them plainly where they sit and how long the wait actually is. The record suggests communication has lagged the scale of the decisions being made.

The raise-and-retrofit numbers are the sharpest illustration of a program moving at two speeds. Buybacks, at 793 of a revised 1,000, are the furthest along, because a buyback is a single transaction: an offer, an acceptance, a settlement. Raises and retrofits, at 54 of a revised 600, require something harder — engineering assessment, building approval, a contractor, and a household able to live elsewhere during the works — and the Audit Office's finding of no advance planning shows up directly in that gap. It also collides with a problem the government does not fully control: insurance. The Actuaries Institute found, in a report published in August 2024, that more than half of Northern Rivers households face home insurance premiums exceeding a full month's gross income, against a national affordability-stress rate of around 15% (Actuaries Institute, Home insurance affordability, Aug-2024). A household that spends years and its own co-contribution raising a house above flood level can still find the resulting premium unaffordable once the work is done.

Underneath all of it sits a slower, quieter number: people leaving. The Australian Bureau of Statistics recorded Lismore local government area's population at 45,938 at the August 2021 Census; its most recent estimated resident population, for June 2023, was 43,907 — a fall of 2,031 people in under two years, in an area that had not previously been shrinking (ABS, Census 2021; ABS Estimated Resident Population release, Jun-2023). Some of that fall is buybacks working as intended, moving households out of harm's way. Some of it, on the Reconstruction Authority's own figures, is families who stopped waiting.

Zero homes delivered under the Resilient Lands Program, four years on, is not a delay families can be told to be patient about. It is an answer they have been left to work out for themselves.

It took until March 2025 — three years after the floods — for recovery to become a dedicated Cabinet portfolio, when Lismore's own state MP, Janelle Saffin, was sworn in as Minister for Recovery, Small Business and the North Coast (NSW Government, ministerial appointment, Mar-2025). That a local member with direct knowledge of the Reconstruction Authority's workings now holds the recovery brief is a reasonable, defensible choice. That it took three years to make recovery a Cabinet-level responsibility in its own right is a fair measure of how long communication and accountability lagged the scale of what communities were living through.

The risk to the future