Do we allow idiots to have advocacy? It appears so!
I applaud David Lowe’s article [last week] titled ‘Nationals and water should never be mixed’.
It seems that the politics of vested interests gives rise to the bizarre madness of taking Lismore infrastructure and housing options back down the hill, from Goonellabah… back onto the floodplain! Who would suggest such idiocy?
My father-in-law, Frank Lancaster, was an engineer with Lismore City Council for almost 30 years. As a highly respected and awarded city engineer, (after the unprecedented 1974 floods), he met with profound resistance from established and entrenched business families, when he and his team of planners began implementing action and advice to take the town out of an increasing disaster zone – and shift it up the hill to higher ground.
It seemed a no-brainer at the time. To that end, the Council chambers shifted to Goonellabah, and then operated completely out of the flood-risk zone.
During that era, any businesses and community that had remained in the low-lying basin, only continued to experience ever-increasing flooding and environmental disasters, along with the attendant personal and financial tragedy. Greater societal trauma only compounded with each subsequent event. Very unfortunately, anyone who bought in to the old downtown structure put themselves patently at the risk of financial loss. I know so many who invested unknowingly just before the 2022 floods. They can never regain their costs.
And yet, at this very moment, particular business people in this current era, together with certain well-recognised climate-denying politicians, are once again staring down reality and plain simple inevitable truth – with a clear and obvious blind lack of logic!
What is the very obvious problem for our community? It is an ever-building emotional trauma, economic and social cost, in a time of the escalating onslaught of increasing flood disasters for the Lismore basin?
What is their current answer to the problem? They urge just simply try to coerce (or force) vulnerable businesses and community to head back down off the high ground, back into the valley! Back into the next trauma inevitably coming again very soon! They urge us to preserve the same absolute folly! They urge us to preserve the impossible!
It is questionable ‘leadership’ in the extreme.
As of this moment, let’s now decide to choose leaders of greater wisdom, prudence, and innovation, for the sake of all of us, and our children, and our grandchildren, and many generations to come.
I certainly miss my old father-in law, Frank, with his enterprise, imagination, vision, expertise, and outright common sense.
He’d be absolutely disheartened, and devastatingly sad, with where Lismore and many of its unfortunate people now find themselves. What a bedraggled catastrophe we are condoning while trying to maintain the original dream.
What a tragedy! Idiots advise. Unless we choose otherwise.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
