Lismore City LGA residents locked out of top-level decision making when it comes to post-flood reconstruction and development

On 19 April 2022 NSW Premier & Liberal MP for Epping Dominic Perrottet and Deputy Premier, Minister for Regional NSW, Minister for Police & Nationals MP for Bathurst Paul Toole announced the formation of the Northern Rivers Reconstruction Corporation (NRRC), a development corporation which is to manage the rebuilding of Northern NSW communities by coordinating planning, rebuilding and construction work across multiple government agencies, following the 2022 floods across Lismore and Northern Rivers region of NSW.

The NRRC works with the Northern Rivers Administrative Group in the Ballina, Byron, Clarence Valley, Lismore, Richmond Valley, Tweed and Kyogle local government areas.

It states of itself that it; operates as a ‘front door to government’ for all reconstruction and development activities in the Northern Rivers. It sets and implements reconstruction priorities in the region, and works with government agencies and departments to deliver those priorities quickly.

The NRRC became effective on 1 July 2022 and sits within the Department of Regional NSW and reports to the Deputy Premier.

David Witherdin (left) leads the development corporation as Chief Executive Officer. Mr Witherdin is Deputy Secretary, Commercial and Corporate Services, Dept. of Regional NSW.

The NRRC will have the power to compulsorily acquire or subdivide land, speed up and fast-track the building of new premises and accelerate delivery of planning proposals through the Department of Planning and Environment. The insurance, construction and infrastructure sectors will be important contributors, alongside local government, industry, businesses and residents.

The NRRC is to be assisted by an as yet somewhat shadowy advisory group consisting of local representatives, such as local members of parliament and mayors, as well as leaders in the community. It met with NRRC CEO David Witherdin for the first time on 5 August 2022.

On that same day Deputy Premier Paul Toole announced the names of the eight NRRC board members: 

Gary Barnes, Secretary, Department Regional NSW; 

Michael Cassel, Secretary, Department of Planning and Environment;

Peter Duncan, NSW Government appointed Commissioner, NSW Independent Planning Commission, former chief executive of Roads and Maritime Services;

Andrew Hall, Executive Director & CEO, Insurance Council of Australia;

Darren Kershaw, North Coast Aboriginal Development Alliance, Tweed Heads;

Jane Laverty, Business NSW - regional  representative, Ballina;

Ballina Shire Council Mayor Sharon Cadwallader, Northern Rivers Joint Organisation; and

Michael Rayner, former general manager Tweed Shire Council, Tweed community member.

TOP ROW: Michael Rayner, Andrew Hall, Gary Barnes, Jane Laverty. BOTTOM ROW: Peter Duncan, Sharon Cadwallader, Darren Kershaw &
Michael Cassel. IMAGE: indyNR.com

What is striking about this NRRC board is the complete absence of Lismore City local government or community members on the only body with full authority to make decisions concerning post-flood reconstruction and development. The design of the NRRC and its remit is as close to Sydney-centric and autocratic as a tone deaf state government can make it.

It should also be noted that the Insurance Council of Australia has a history of political donations to both major parties, with the majority of donations going to the Liberal Party in 2018 and 2021.

When the NRRC was created the original plan was for Resilience NSW to continue to be responsible for providing immediate relief resupplying impacted communities, restoring essential services, cleaning up properties and providing temporary accommodation in the short to medium terms. However, the future of Resilience NSW is now in doubt as speculation mounts that NSW Police is preparing to create a new executive role to handle emergency and disaster situations following the rumored negative findings of yet to be released independent flood inquiry and parliamentary flood inquiry reports. 

It appears that within government circles fevered brains have also left the door open to imagining an expansion of the NRRC sometime in the future to cover other towns, cities or regions as required.

A question springs to mind. In creating this particular version of a reconstruction and development corporation have Perrottet and Toole designed a carthorse or a camel?     

Monash University on the subject of climate change, evolving health impacts and future generations

 

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6Vqu3M1_3U

The Guardian, 21 July 2022:

We know climate change creates catastrophic weather events. But here’s what you may not know about the wider risks to our health.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that the human-induced climate catastrophe is a “grave and mounting threat to our wellbeing”. With a changing planet comes changing threats to our wellbeing. People’s health – and the infrastructure that supports it – will be increasingly affected by adverse weather events and the slow-onset effects of climate change.

As experts from Monash University explain, our future wellbeing is a complex issue. There are questions of new diseases, and old ones making a return, alongside the direct impacts of flood, fire and rising temperatures, disrupted education and supply chains, and the simple fact of living longer. Without serious intervention, the health risks we face in 2030 may be unrecognisable from today’s.

The most common health conditions will evolve

Dr Yuming Guo, professor of global environmental health in Monash’s School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, explains the potential physiological impact of climate change. “Climate change increases the temperature, which is directly related to the emissions and body function – for example, causing increased blood pressure and decreased lung function, and affecting metabolic and renal function,” he says.

These health issues can snowball. Professor Arthur Christopoulos, Monash’s dean of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, says: “You apply that to the next generation and you’ve got a real issue. Because on top of that, climate change is going to influence every aspect of this conversation. You’re affecting water quality and sources, food security, shelter and where you can access food. It’s a combination of factors.”

In Australia, the greatest health burden is currently cardiovascular disease – a condition known to be exacerbated by extreme heat and air pollution. But, Christopoulos says, other conditions are hot on its tail. “Because of air quality issues, respiratory diseases are going to go up. Because of the longevity aspect, age-related neurological diseases will increase – dementia is now the third-leading cause of disease burden. These global health burdens are not new, but they are going to get worse.”

Aerial overhead view of a multi-ethnic group of elementary age children drawing. They are seated around a table. The kids are using colored pencils to make a mural. The have colored a world map, objects found in nature, and symbols of environmental conservation.

The next generation will require more complex care

Alongside physiological issues exacerbated by climate, the incidence of psychiatric disease will continue to rise, especially in the next generation, Christopoulos says. “Depression and anxiety we’re going to be seeing a lot more,” he says. “Partly, they were already on the rise. But Covid, the world’s reaction to it, and isolationism are all factors.”

Professor Sophia Zoungas, head of Monash’s School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, says climate change presents a two-fold challenge: responding to acute health crises, such as communicable disease outbreaks after floods, while continuing to effectively manage pre-existing chronic conditions.

“Natural disasters arising from climate change, such as fires and floods, present immediate logistical challenges to people with chronic disease, as they struggle to access vital medications and care. We also need to consider the spiralling impacts of extreme physical and mental stress caused by these events on underlying chronic conditions.”

says professor Sophia Zoungas”

“The Covid pandemic has seen an increase in public health and healthcare expenditure. While that’s understandable, with climate change potentially driving more frequent disasters, we need to build such responses into our future plans. We need to ensure equitable access to healthcare, especially given the system is already under stress.”

Healthcare will need to change to deal with unprecedented demand

Increases in health concerns will inevitably require more healthcare. But while there will be direct concerns, such as a rise in diseases, they are not the only factor. Guo says weather events, climate-related sociopolitical unrest and increasing poverty will also have indirect impacts, such as supply and resourcing issues, including of medical practitioners themselves.

“The healthcare workforce is only projected to grow. But there is no workforce training without education and without access to education. There’s been chronic underinvestment. We need a greater push to develop the next-generation workforce for dealing with the healthcare needs of our society.”

says professor Arthur Christopoulos, Monash’s dean of pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences”

According to Zoungas, sufficiently addressing those needs might mean investing in a whole new model. “Codesigning healthcare with the community will help us build a system with processes and goals that actually mean something important to patients,” she says. “We also need to improve the way we talk about health and share evidence with the public. We need super communicators who understand the science and can frame it in a way that makes sense to communities.”

Monash’s experts say we can learn from the past as we move forward. Technology, digitised healthcare and new modelling can all help us build a more sustainable healthcare system to face these unprecedented challenges.

“We are learning a new language in healthcare,” Zoungas says. “The pandemic has taught us how agile and proactive the medical sector can be. Clinical guidelines are being updated faster using living evidence models, telehealth has revolutionised routine healthcare, ethics approvals for research are being fast-tracked. It feels like an opportunity to move forward with a renewed can-do attitude and try to apply these learnings system-wide.”

We need change now more than ever. Join us to change it

NOTE: Advertisement feature paid for by Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria

Notice to Readers

 

North Coast Voices will not be publishing posts from today Sunday 31 July until Sunday 7 August 2022.

Apologies to regular readers and sometime browsers.

Tweets of the Week

The gas industry lobby group APPEA have put some ads on social media boasting about how much tax and royalties the gas industry pay.

Here's what they don't tell you.

Climate & Energy Principal Advisor @MarkOgge explains. #auspol pic.twitter.com/6WFafdobkZ

— Australia Institute (@TheAusInstitute) July 25, 2022

With inflation now running at 6.1% annually & wage growth at only 2.4% we have moved from the era of wage stagnation to the new era of cuts to real wages.

— Josh Bornstein (@JoshBBornstein) July 27, 2022

The question has to be asked. How many of the more than 9.23 million people who caught COVID-19 in the last 2 years and five months will have their lives diminished or shortened by chronic post-COVID health conditions?

It is time Australian society stops pretending it is on top of this pandemic.......

ABC News, 28 July 2022:

NSW Health looked at data from 639,430 people infected with COVID for the first time in January when the Omicron wave took off.

The analysis was done by matching the name, and date of birth, of cases.

It showed that within five months, 20,460 people, or 3.2 per cent, had been reinfected.

Reinfection was defined as a positive test four weeks after being released from seven-day isolation, or 36 days after testing positive.

More than 20,000 people reinfected with COVID within five months

Number and proportion of the 639,403 cases in January reinfected in subsequent months

…..Nick Wood, a paediatrician and immunisation expert from the University of Sydney, said in theory, the first exposure to COVID should give some natural immunity that would stop people getting as sick the second time around.

"Your prior immunological exposure, natural infection and vaccine history all probably plays into how you as the individual deal with your second infection," he said.

People who were immune-suppressed or who had ongoing respiratory problems from the first infection would be more impacted with subsequent infections, he said.

"That's all the difficulties in teasing it out how severe, but I think the general, the belief is that the second or third infection are probably less severe than the initial primary infection."

Dr Wood said the BA.4 and BA.5 sub-variants of Omicron were able to evade both vaccine-induced immunity and infection from a previous variant.

"The immunity that they generate is not enough to stop you being infected," he said.

He said that over time, experts hope that as new variants come along, the population is more able to deal with them because of past infections or vaccination……

On the 24th of this month The Sydney Morning Herald reported that:

Researchers investigating long COVID cases in Australia say 5 per cent of people infected with COVID-19 will develop the condition. The prevalence of long COVID before vaccinations were available was an estimated 10 per cent.

“The 55,000 people in Australia who tested positive today ... equates to 2000 to 3000 new cases of long COVID,” Kovacic said. To date, Australia has recorded almost 9 million COVID-19 cases.

Even after accounting for reinfection “we’re looking at almost half a million people who are going to be suffering long-term symptoms in the coming months”, Kovacic said.

The Guardian newspaper reported on 27 July 2022 that a serosurvey of antibodies to the virus detected in blood donations, conducted at the Kirby Institute and the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance (NCIRS), had found that in 5,139 blood donations received from adults between 9 June and 18 June evidence of past COVID-19 infection was detected in 46.2% of samples. A previous examination of blood donors in late February 2022 had found evidence of past infection in only 17% of blood donors.

Noni Winkler, an author of the findings and an epidemiologist at the NCIRS, said the sample size was large enough to reflect rates of the virus in the broader adult population. It should be noted that seroprevalence estimates may miss approximately 20% of infections.

According to the federal Dept. of Health, as of Thursday 27 July 2022 there were est. 373,868 confirmed active COVID-19 cases across Australia. A total of 499,566 of these cases were newly confirmed within the previous 24 hours.

At that point 5,364 COVID-19 infected people were hospitalised, with 145 in intensive care units including 38 patients requiring ventilation.

The national daily COVID-19 death toll on 27 July was 126 people.

By 27 July the cumulative total of confirmed COVID-19 cases stood at 9,235,014 – a figure that can only be described as a massive under reporting of the actual number of infected individuals between 25 January 2020 to 27 July 2022.

The cumulative total of confirmed deaths due to COVID-19 for the same time period is 11,387 deaths of men, women & children. The federal Dept. of Health records that 14 of these deaths were in children 0 to 9 years of age and est. 8,843 were in people aged 70 to 90+ years of age.

Needless to say, the highest cumulative death tolls up to 27 July are in the east coast mainland states of Victoria (4,433), New South Wales (4,051) and Queensland (1,510).

NSW Dept. of Health as at 4pm on Wednesday. 27 July 2022:

In the December 2021 - January 2022 during a SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant surge period in New South Wales, when the public health response was visibly failing to meet even the most basic needs (information, testing & general support) of people expected to self-manage their COVID-19 infection at home, anecdotal evidence began to surface in Northern NSW that individuals and whole families were no longer reporting the result of RAT tests to NSW Health or seeking PCR testing where it was still available.

It was at that point that official government pandemic statistics in Australia were broken beyond repair as a predictive tool with regard to future pandemic behaviour and, effective federal-state public health strategies withered away in the face of continuously climbing infection and mortality figures in the most populous states.

Consumer Price Inflation now stands at 6.1% in the 12 months to end of June 2022 in Australia - rising 1.8% in the June Quarter

 

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), media release, 27 July 2022:

SOURCE: Consumer Price Index, Australia, June 2022

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 1.8 per cent in the June 2022 quarter and 6.1 per cent annually, according to the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

Head of Prices Statistics at the ABS, Michelle Marquardt, said "The quarterly increase of 1.8 per cent was the second highest since the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), following on from a 2.1 per cent increase last quarter."

The most significant contributors to the rise in the June quarter CPI were new dwellings (+5.6 per cent) and automotive fuel (+4.2 per cent).

"Shortages of building supplies and labour, high freight costs and ongoing high levels of construction activity continued to contribute to price rises for newly built dwellings. Fewer grant payments made this quarter from the Federal Government's HomeBuilder program and similar state-based housing construction programs also contributed to the rise," said Ms Marquardt.

"The CPI's automotive fuel series reached a record level for the fourth consecutive quarter. Fuel prices rose strongly over May and June, following a fall in April due to the fuel excise cut."

The price of goods (+2.6 per cent) continued to rise more strongly than that of services (+0.6 per cent). Notable rises were recorded across the food group (+2.0 per cent) and the furnishings, household equipment and services group (+2.5 per cent). Main contributors to the rise in food prices included vegetables (+7.3 per cent), meals out and takeaway foods (+1.4 per cent), and fruit (+3.7 per cent). Supply chain disruptions due to flooding events, labour shortages, and rising freight costs contributed to higher prices. Furniture prices rose (+7.0 per cent) due to increased transport and material costs, and stock shortages.

Services recorded a smaller rise compared with goods. Financial services (+1.2 per cent) and holiday travel and accommodation (+2.3 per cent) rose. Child care (-7.3 per cent) fell as the full effect of additional child care subsidies for families with two or more children under the age of 6, which commenced on 7 March, flowed through into this quarter. Before and after school care vouchers offered by the NSW Government also contributed to the fall in child care costs. Urban transport fares (-4.4 per cent) fell due to free travel periods introduced by the NSW and Tasmanian State Governments within the quarter.

Annually, the CPI rose 6.1 per cent, with new dwellings (+20.3 per cent) and automotive fuel (+32.1 per cent) the most significant contributors.

"The annual rise in the CPI is the largest since the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST)."

"Annual price inflation for new dwellings was the strongest recorded since the series commenced in 1999," said Ms Marquardt.

Underlying inflation measures reduce the impact of irregular or temporary price changes in the CPI. Trimmed mean inflation increased to 1.5 per cent over the quarter and 4.9 per cent over the year. The price of goods (+8.4 per cent) continued to rise more strongly through the year than that of services (+3.3 per cent).

"Annual trimmed mean inflation was the highest since the series commenced in 2003 and annual goods inflation was the highest since 1987, as the impacts of supply disruptions, rising shipping costs and other global and domestic inflationary factors flowed through the economy," said Ms Marquardt.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/consumer-price-index-australia/jun-2022

SOCIAL SECURITY (ADMINISTRATION) AMENDMENT (REPEAL OF CASHLESS DEBIT CARD AND OTHER MEASURES) BILL 2022 closes the cashless debit card program no later than 19 September 2022 and repeals Part 3D of the Social Security (Administration) Act 1999 (Administration Act) no later than six months after bill becomes law

The SOCIAL SECURITY (ADMINISTRATION) AMENDMENT (REPEAL OF CASHLESS DEBIT CARD AND OTHER MEASURES) BILL 2022 came before the Australian Parliament on the second sitting day of the 47^th Parliament at 11:53am.

This bill closes the cashless debit card program no later than 19 September 2022 and repeals Part 3D of the Social Security (Administration) Act 1999 (Administration Act) on the day on which Part 2 of Schedule 1 to the Social Security (Administration) Amendment (Repeal of Cashless Debit Card and Other Measures) Act 2022 commences, ie no later than six months after the bill receives Royal Assent.

The bill was introduced by the Minister for Social Services, Amanda Rishworth MP.

The Minister read into the Hansard record in part, the following:

The bill will:

• Remove the ability for any new entrants to be put on the card;

• Enable the more than 17,000 existing cashless debit card participants to be progressively transitioned off the card as soon as the bill receives royal assent, which we aim to have occur in the next sitting period, in September, allowing for participants to regain the financial freedom they've been asking for;

• Enable the Family Responsibilities Commission to continue to support their community members by placing them onto income management where the need exists;

• Allows for me to determine, following further consultation with First Nations people and my colleagues, how the Northern Territory participants on the CDC will transition, and the income management arrangements that will exist; and

• Finally, it will allow for the repeal of the cashless debit card on a day to be fixed by proclamation or a maximum of six months after royal assent—allowing for the necessary time to support a staged transition off the card. It will also make consequential amendments to a number of other acts and effectively removes CDC from all social services legislation.

Our absolute priority is to ensure participants are supported through their transition off the card in a safe and structured way.

This will be done through extensive communication and an outreach strategy so that participants are well informed about the changes and what it means for them.

Information and education sessions will be held in each cashless debit card site over the transition period with culturally appropriate information and support.

Services Australia will conduct individually targeted transitional support interviews for those who need it, or want this additional assistance, to make sure exiting participants are well informed on the options available to them.

Not everyone will need this level of assistance—but this approach will ensure no-one is left behind due to being forced onto this card by the former government…..

The bill was read a second time on 27 July, with debate adjourned [Luke Howarth, LNP Qld MP] and the resumption of the debate made an order of the day for the next sitting.

I suspect that the forthcoming debate may be rather politically uncivil on the part of Coalition Opposition MPs. Given the brief prelude by way of interjection by backbench LNP MP for Longman Terry Young and Shadow Minister for Education & Liberal MP for Aston Alan Tudge - a cashless debit card enthusiast who as then Minister for Human Services made a joint announcement in March 2017 extending the debit card trial sites, with then Minister for Social Services Christian Porter.