Member Spotlight: Uniting

1. Tell me about the ongoing need for housing and social support in Lismore and the surrounding areas today, four years after the devastating floods?

Before the 2022 floods, we had COVID, which had a really big impact on the regions. We had less than 0.5% vacancy rate across the region before the floods. If you understand vacancy rates, you know that is incredibly low. I think at the same time, Sydney Metro was close to 3% vacancy rate, so we had very few houses available to rent.

Then after the floods, we lost about 4500- 5000 houses, which subsequently increased housing prices by over 50% in all regions.

When the floods happened many that couldn’t return home were allocated to emergency accommodation, which was kind of hastily set up school camps and caravan parks.

Uniting was procured to work with the people in emergency accommodation. So, we were working with over 4500 people in emergency accommodation for up to two years. Some of them remained open, and then, if you were lucky enough, you were allocated into temporary housing or a pod village.

And Uniting ended up managing three pod villages, and we still have two left, but the housing stock hasn’t been built. While some housing stock is coming on the market, for the thousands of people that were impacted, the level of resourcing doesn’t come close to meeting the level of need.

2. What is going to happen to the people living in the housing pods, which are now closing down? 

The reality is, many people won’t secure housing. We’re trying to map housing options for people across the region. So there’ll be some social housing, but it’s quite a small amount of housing compared to the level of need. We’re trying to make sure the most vulnerable people get allocated into the flood recovery housing, which will be social housing that’s been built to provide housing for people who were impacted in the floods.

We need a coordinated approach. This is Australia’s biggest natural disaster. It isn’t going to get better just because a number of years have passed. The situation is only going to improve because we have a coordinated and responsive plan that increases housing stock. We need more planning.

There’s a lot of talk of people moving out of region, and that always worries me when we’re moving families away from other supports and family members, when we’re moving people away from their communities and their connections and their schools.

I think we can do better as a community and as a government. I know there are initiatives afoot, but it’s not quick enough.

We’ve got an equal number of people experiencing homelessness as the Sydney CBD, so we were already behind the eight ball before the floods happened, so we need a focused response in our region.

On average, if you’re applying for a private rental in our region, you’ll be applying for 91 properties before you’re successful.

3. What do we need to do better with disasters in the future?

Uniting has put a lot of thought into how we can do this better. One of the things we’ve learned is that we should have a recovery support service model that is business as usual – that is just how we support vulnerable people in the community.

We all know that the people who are most likely to be impacted by disasters are the most vulnerable and in the lowest socioeconomic cohorts. We also know they’re the least likely to fully recover and the most likely to be impacted repeatedly.

We’ve found over time that preparedness and adaptation, which are parts of the cycle of recovery, aren’t effective unless you’re working intensely and collaboratively with vulnerable cohorts. They’re not going to respond to the generalist strategies used by government or other providers.

So our learnings would be that a recovery support service that works with vulnerable cohorts to support their experience across phases of disaster – this includes being really well prepared in non-disaster times.

If your house was on fire, you wouldn’t want the government to start by recruiting for a fire brigade, training them, setting them up and purchasing fire trucks. In a disaster, you want people who are trained, who are trauma informed, and can step in and respond.

We’ve developed a disaster welfare framework, because we realise that when a disaster occurs, many welfare services get taken offline because they’re impacted themselves and because everything’s so overwhelming. We’re hoping that we can get some funding to put that into a handbook, because we’re soon going to lose our disaster welfare experts because that funding is going to end. And then, in a year’s time, something else will happen and we’ve got to rebuild the ship all over again without that knowledge and experience that has been built over the last four years.

4. What impact is rising fuel costs having on people in your area?

We’ve tried to be supportive with our staff about the regions they work in. Our programs in western New South Wales have worries and concerns about ongoing access to fuel and people that have to travel quite a long way. In almost all my programs, we have several hundred kilometres between sites and client visits.

Our teams are lucky at this point that we have a lot of cars that people can use, which takes the pressure off people’s personal impact. But it’s certainly something people are worried about.