The images coming from the floods were devastating.
Scenes of entire regions washed away, of drowned livestock washing up on far-away beaches, and of shivering people huddled together on rooftops struck Australia with a horror not seen since the Black Summer bushfires.
And that brutal reality check was nothing compared with the experience of local communities who continue to pick through the debris.
It’s not exactly controversial to say that we’re now beyond the ‘If we don’t do anything’ point of warnings about the future consequences of a warming planet and are well into the early stages of ‘How do we slow this down and mitigate the effects that are already pouring under our doors?’
The heroes of the floods were the brave folks who went out in tinnies and on surfboards to rescue those who were trapped, and the folks with houses still standing who’ve opened them to those who’d lost everything.
That big-hearted community spirit of looking out for one another: that’s what saved lives in the moment, and that’s what will save even more lives going forward.
And I’m no disaster expert, but one thing I can say with confidence is that individual solutions aren’t going to cut it.
I’ll go further: getting Centrelink to approve conditional one-off payments to individuals in specific zones (but not others) is a good deal closer to an insult than a leg-up.
It’s important to have this in mind because all the signs are that the current federal government will be focused upon putting the onus back on individuals – exhausted, traumatised individuals who, in a lot of cases, aren’t going to have rescued the sorts of records and paperwork required to access whatever insufficient dribbles of money are theoretically available.
With so many of the bushfire affected regions still yet to be rebuilt years on, we know there’s a long road ahead; one with precious few amenities along the way.
Victim-blaming
And tut-tutting headlines telling people they shouldn’t have built on floodplains, from the same columnists who’ve spent years sneering that people just need to give up their lattes and move to the regions if they can’t afford a house in Sydney, need to be called out for their unhelpful victim-blaming rhetoric.
What we need now are big, collective strategies, because the alternative of leaving people to sort things out for themselves can only go so far.
And yes, all solutions are going to be expensive as hell and governments have to accept and prepare for that.
But, as we’ve been told on multiple occasions, there are 4.7 billion public dollars, supposedly, sitting in a federal Emergency Response Fund, which remains mysteriously untouched – a choice that seems inhumane at best and, with an election right around the corner, rather like a personal insult to the voters of NSW and Qld at worst.
Also, as Lismore can attest, not doing anything is also expensive as hell, and comes with a massive bonus cost in human suffering.
Like the government’s ‘individual responsibility’ mandate for dealing with a global pandemic of a contagious virus, ‘letting things happen’ because it’s too much effort to prevent is immeasurably more expensive than just doing the work.
We’re rich, we’re clever, and the floods have shown that we are ready to help one another in times of need.
This won’t be the last time we’ll need to draw on our stores of resilience and strength, which is too much to ask of individuals in the thick of a crisis, but boundless when spread out among entire communities, states and nations.
It’s time that we let the neoliberalist fantasy world of ‘individual responsibility’ be washed away like a thousand unsecured wheelie bins.
It’s the only way we’re going to keep our heads above water.
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