Auditor-general’s flood report finds NSW had ‘no plan’ to house 2022 Lismore survivors

The NSW auditor-general has delivered a damning report on the provision of emergency and temporary housing after major flood events in the Northern Rivers and Central West in 2022.

A report released today found there was no plan in place to guide the temporary housing response when catastrophic flooding hit the Northern Rivers, and no long-term plans in place to help tenants move out of temporary housing villages. 

The key findings included:

• The amount of temporary housing provided did not meet the demand.
• There is still an extensive waiting list for temporary housing and the remaining demand in the Northern Rivers is unlikely to be met.
• No long-term plans are in place for the transition of tenants out of temporary housing.

Almost 550 dwellings were established on 11 temporary housing sites across the Northern Rivers in the year following the disaster, but the report found that “did not meet the forecast demand”.

In November last year, 724 households remained on the waiting list for temporary housing, but the report noted: “The Reconstruction Authority has not reviewed this list to confirm its accuracy.”

“The number of households leaving to enter longer-term accommodation is relatively low, and it is unlikely that turnover alone will accommodate households on the waiting list in the near future,” the report said.

“There are also no plans in place setting out how people will be rehoused in other appropriate housing.”

The report noted the scale of the disaster, which left more than 4,000 properties uninhabitable and damaged another 10,849.

“While the event was large in scale, the use of temporary housing as a response was not unprecedented and had previously been used in response to the 2019–20 bushfires, albeit on a smaller scale,” the report said.

“Not having a plan in place that incorporated lessons learned from this experience meant that the NSW government was not as well prepared as it could have been for the use of temporary housing in a disaster context.”

Lessons learned in Central West

The report noted that Resilience NSW used “excess pods” from the Northern Rivers region to reduce the waiting times in the state’s Central West.

It found government agencies had learned “key lessons” by the time floods also hit places like Eugowra in November 2022.

Almost 100 people were housed in emergency accommodation in the three weeks following the flood and, by May the following year, 59 pods and 124 caravans had been placed on private property.

“Resilience NSW was able to meet the demand for housing in the Central West by placing temporary housing on people’s property,” the report said.

“It was not always possible to house rental tenants by placing a pod on the property they were occupying. However, most of these tenants were able to be housed in pods on alternative properties.”

The report contained specific recommendations for the NSW Reconstruction Authority to:

• develop a plan for the provision of temporary housing
• review the temporary housing waiting list
• determine a timeline for demobilising the temporary housing villages
• develop a strategy to manage the transition of people into long-term accommodation
• develop a process for state-wide recovery lessons learned