Suppose They Gave a Flood: the Real Story of Lismore 2022

In essence, so-called conspiracy theories – I much prefer the term “conspiracy research” – are more or less plausible explanations of events that are puzzling or out of the ordinary, based on the well-known and long-accepted assumption that deeply inter-connected governments and corporates routinely have hidden agendas, propagandise, cover things up, collude and lie.  Indeed, those of us who have had the misfortune to have worked for either governments or corporations know that such events are daily occurrences.

We have seen all of this play out very recently, on a global scale. 

The Bill Gates funded and World Economic Forum organised Event 201 – a scenario building exercise in pandemic preparation – in October 2019, not only somehow precisely predicted the Covid “pandemic” (their word, not mine) but also came up with all the strategies to “defeat” the virus.  (A Chinese participant at the table most likely already knew of very early cases of Covid in his homeland).  Those present at Event 201 developed strategies that somehow just about every government in the world managed to adopt only a few short months later. 

Life imitating art?  Or a well-planned, well-funded operation to create a pandemic as the first step in a much bigger operation to increase globalist control over individual lives and nations.  Through the creative use of “big data”, digital currencies, contact-tracing technologies, future pandemic preparation, further viral outbreaks, the silencing of opposition, more and more propaganda, the engineered collapsing of food production, the deliberate defenestration of reliable energy, wars and global economic crises that would lead to system collapse and then world government.  A great reset, you might say. 

A theory is only as good as the facts that may or may not fit with it.  The theory of the plandemic seems like a robust theory to me.  In contrast, Hanlon’s razor – the idea that stupidity explains most policy disasters – seems very limp and inadequate as an explanation of the Covid policy fiasco and its still emerging, sinister aftermath.

There is another disaster much closer to home (in my case) that offers similar, plausible evidence of an engineered event.  I speak of the Lismore floods of 2022.  The issue here is, are greens and their useful idiots in government prepared to engage in sabotage in order to achieve their long-term climate change objectives?  Is there a plausible theory that explains the occurrence of so-called natural disasters that are claimed to be evidence of a “climate emergency” and therefore able to be used to drive public opinion and to support the need for radical climate action?  We know the greens want to kick modern societies back to the stone age, and we know that the likes of the dangerous Matt Kean and the moronic Chris Bowen, sock-puppets both, are more than happy to ruin our country in order to do the bidding of their climate puppet-masters.  But are they also prepared to engage in non-action in relation to (say) flood preparation/mitigation, by refusing to attend to relevant engineering and other works, and so allow inevitable floods to become life-threatening catastrophes, as a result of their inaction?  Are these outcomes the result of green-driven sins of omission?

At least two nagging questions persist in relation to the Lismore flood of February 2022. 

The first is, why on earth don’t they ever dredge Wilsons River? 

The second is, who authorised that home owners be pressured to approve the immediate removal of the internal walls of flooded houses, or in some cases doing so without permission of the home owner, thereby rendering these homes unlivable?  As far as one can tell, this has never before happened – expecting distraught and shocked home owners to be making such decisions when the flood is actually only just receding.  

Here the focus is on the first question, though both these and a number of other questionable occurrences noted below are germane to conspiracy research in relation to the Lismore floods.  (Yes, there were two within a month in 2022).

Stuart Ballantyne at The Spectator Australia writes perceptively:

… here in Australia, dredging has become demonised in the last 30 years largely by Green policies. 

… In 1996 the dredging of the Brisbane river was halted by the Green/Labor government, ending a 100-year cheap supply of aggregate which for bricks, cement, and tiles that had made Brisbane the cheapest place in the country to build a house. Warnings at the time that this halting of the dredging would shallow the river and exacerbate flooding were ignored, which 15 years later in 2011 it did, costing 38 lives. The green fools promoting this anti-dredging policy were hoping for a crystal clear blue river which will never happen in any river around the country. The river is no longer navigable above Newstead, and thwarted the national plans of joining the inland rail container terminal at Acacia Ridge to the Port using barges down the river.

There are over 120 small towns around this nation that were established by a fleet of coastal ships and trade, and yes, were dredged regularly. The old wharves are now the habitat of the cappuccino set that occasionally post black and white fotos of ‘the old port’ around the walls. Our nation is sadly lacking in port facilities not for just commercial activities but for Defence, particularly in our whole northern border.

Look at the port history video you-tube of Lismore and the ‘Marine Highway’ used for 100 years to establish and consolidate the city. You will see a 1906 photograph of the ‘Dictys’ a dredge around 60 metres in length with a discharge pipe of approximately 900mm (3 feet). Basic engineering shows that a deeper river mitigates flood risk and keeps the channels navigable as it did in the Richmond river and many other rivers in the nation at that time.

Dredging, for no sensible reason at all, has become a voodoo word for environmental lobbyists. Regional towns around the nation such as Lismore, Innisfail, Port Macquarie, Batemans Bay, and Goolwa would be energised if the rivers and river mouths were once again safely navigable (emphasis added).

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/a-lesson-for-lismore/

You might want to call this form of flood mitigation “following the science”.  The government experts and their political marionettes often claim they believe in the science, that they, indeed, follow it.  If so, they might occasionally try to prove what they assert.

Ballantyne’s account of the end to dredging of the Brisbane River in 1996 is even more revealing:

Labor’s [then Mayor Jim] Soorley hailed the decision to halt dredging as, “a significant victory for Queensland”. He said that for 100 years, the Brisbane River had been, “treated as a sewer and a mine”.

“No other capital cities in the world allow ugly dredges into the heart of their city to mine their river,” said this fool. Nodding their agreement in total ignorance were Environment Minister Littleproud, Natural Resources Minister Hobbs, Ipswich Mayor Nugent, Laidley Shire Mayor Moon, and the Queensland Conservation Council’s Imogen Zethoven.

Ms Zethoven, a fully indoctrinated greenie, said the agreement was, “a major breakthrough for the rehabilitation of the river”. “Clearly dredging is way out of line with community attitudes.”

… 15 years later, in 2011 … I just shook my head in dismay watching the Brisbane River floods on TV. Even a 300- to 500mm difference in water levels makes a huge difference to some houses and businesses, and the enquiry unfortunately ignored the fact that continued river dredging could have dropped the flood levels. This flood claimed 38 lives. Soorley and Zethoven should hang their heads in shame.

https://www.bairdmaritime.com/ausmarine/ausmarine-marine-projects/column-exposing-green-labor-madness-selling-queensland-down-the-river-the-education-of-an-innocent-australian/

Rivers weren’t dredged.  Greens lied.  People died.  Worse, this all looks like a carefully thought-out strategy.

But if you look closely at the Lismore experience of 2022, the lack of dredging is only one aspect of what could be taken to be wilful non-attention to the basics of flood mitigation 101. 

·         No dams (of course); 

·         River gauges that did not work; 

·         A city-wide system of drains and channels that used to work brilliantly during floods, but since wilfully neglected by governments and councils, are clogged with trees, weeds and rubbish, and so totally unfit for purpose;

·         A pre-industrial age warning system for residents; 

·         Inadequate levees; 

·         An order by the State Emergency Service that local volunteers were to stay away and not help in saving lives (fortunately for the hundreds saved by volunteers, the SES order was ignored); 

·         Local SES people shunning the offers of help from visiting SES volunteers; 

·         Excluding the unvaccinated from working for the SES; 

·         Refusing help from the Army.  Three times; and 

·         Ignoring the community for four days following the flood.

This all happened.  Quite the impressive list of failures.  If you really wanted a major flood disaster, you would do all of these things.  Oops, that is what actually happened.

Do we have our own Soorleys and Zethovens?  Steph Cook?  Carlene York?  Dominic Perrottet (and his predecessors)?

Without dredging, the Wilsons River that flooded in 2022 cannot be seen as the same river that it was in 1974, or 1954, the two other catastrophic floods.  It is, therefore, not comparing apples with apples to attempt to line them up one against the others so as to determine which was the worst.  More importantly, one cannot infer that “they are getting worse” because of you know what.  No, if effective riparian management practices had been seriously implemented, even attempted, over time, the flood outcome might have been very different.  Especially if everything else had been working.  Absent this, the insurance companies continue to make a bomb at the expense of long-suffering businesses and residents, and governments get to have their disaster moments.  And we all know how much politicians just love a disaster.  Call it Anna Bligh syndrome.

And so, to the inevitable Lismore flood inquiries …

It is little surprise that the main flood inquiry, just like the Peter Shergold review of Covid policy, was driven by NSW establishment insiders (in this case Mick Fuller and Mary O’Kane) and so found problems largely in governance and bureaucracy, in structures (other than dams and other mitigation measures, of course) and in process.  Its “solutions” therefore are to be found in supposedly better governance.  And in big dollar spending.  And in moving people out of the Lismore region through a near billion dollar property buy-back program.  This truly barmy plan will be another nail in the region’s coffin, as even some of the dumb local politicians have realised.  This is a city already smashed by the Covid lockdowns that shrank the local economy, especially retail, and caused untold social harm.  There is already a dramatic shortage of tradesmen, and so skeletal houses and businesses without walls sit there waiting for something to happen, with their owners and tenants effectively homeless or businessless. 

Both the Covid and the flood inquiries conveniently failed to address the really hard questions or look at remote as well as proximate causes.  They let culprits off the hook.  They serve establishment narratives and green interests.  They perpetuate myths and offer non-solutions.  What about attending to flood mitigation?  Like dredging the river, for a start, as Stuart Ballantyne suggests.  Don’t make me laugh.

You might well think that the climate doomsayers and rabid greens got from the flood exactly what they wanted.  “Evidence” of climate emergency, and so a driver of the truly insane net zero policies being actively pursued by the midwits in Sydney and Canberra that are now becoming, suddenly it seems, a grim reality for the hapless, confused citizenry.  People will lose their local environments, their cars, their travel, the lifestyles and the rest, and they will be forced to choose between eating and heating, by 2030 or whenever, and they will not know why. 

So, clearly, the greens profit from disasters.  Could and would greens and their useful idiot politicians and bureaucrats actually sabotage flood mitigation in the hope of a disaster?  Sabotage might not have been one of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, but there is little reason to think that his modern-day adherents would baulk at a little crippling vandalism.  After all, we already know they are willing to wreck national economies and destroy people’s lives and livelihoods.  They are willing to glue themselves to roads and to works of art.  (Perhaps a little cloud seeding from those mysterious RAAF flights over the Lismore region during the rain dump?  We won’t go there at this point).

At the very least, the Lismore floods, like Covid, have provided a platform for what Mike Yeadon termed convergent opportunism, and a test case for the new global system of governance founded on the back of virus and climate catastrophism.

Oh, and the next person (including a prime minister) who says to a Lismore local that the floods are simply the result of climate change, or that Lismore should never have been built on a flood plain, or worse, both, is likely to get a bunch of fives.

Paul Collits

6 November 2022