New position with Next25

Thrilled to start this week as Philanthropy Manager with Next25, an Australian NFP independent “think and do” tank in Sydney. “Our mission is to ensure Australia has what it takes to make the future its people want. With rigorous research, trusted engagement, and ground-breaking initiatives, we uncover and address levers to shift deep contributing factors of Australia’s biggest issues.”

Lessons from Lismore: What the rest of Australia needs to learn from the Northern Rivers floods

Image source: Department of Defence

“What happened here in the Northern Rivers [in 2022] with Lismore as the epicentre has to be recognised as one of the worst disasters the nation has ever seen,” says Lismore City Councillor Elly Bird. The scale of the floods was immense: Australia’s “biggest natural disaster since Cyclone Tracy in 1974, the second-costliest event in the world for insurers in 2022, and the most expensive disaster in Australian history.”

With all the devastation and disruption, what lessons do the rest of Australia need to learn from the Lismore and Northern Rivers floods? What is it we need to know so we can start planning now for what will inevitably be a future of increasing and cascading natural disasters?

The February 2022 Lismore flood was classified as a 1 in a 1000-year flood, yet it was followed in March by a “1 in 100” year flood. That’s not supposed to happen, yet it did: “Because of the damage already ‘baked in’ to our Earth’s climate, extreme weather events are already intensifying, and are projected to get worse.”

Although only five people died in the 2022 Lismore flooding (four in February and one in March), a massive 31,000 people were displaced and more than 3,000 businesses were disrupted affecting more than 18,000 jobs, including almost 1,000 agricultural jobs. In fact, heatwaves are the deadliest natural disasters in Australia, but floods are our most destructive.

The floods affected about 11,000 homes in the Northern Rivers region, of which more than 4,000 – mostly in Lismore – were deemed uninhabitable. Advance warning of the weather and scope of flooding and communications during the disaster were inadequate. The centre of the Lismore commercial district was completely inundated. Emergency services were quickly overwhelmed with requests for assistance. People were rescued from rooftops, many “by a small flotilla of volunteers in boats, kayaks and canoes.” The destruction was “so intense it looked like a war zone”. Post-disaster financial assistance was slow and often insufficient. Even supermarket shelves remained empty for months afterwards, extending the trauma. A parliamentary inquiry “found that the NSW Government failed to comprehend the scale of the floods … when it was one of the greatest natural disasters in generations.”

Image: ACE Community Colleges building in Lismore CBD after the floods

It wasn’t just Lismore. Much of southeastern Queensland and northeastern NSW was affected, including the NSW LGAs of Ballina, Byron, Clarence Valley, Kyogle, Richmond Valley and Tweed, as well as Hawkesbury in northwest Sydney.

But Lismore remains the symbol of the flooding because of the utter devastation, loss of housing and the continuing despair and trauma experienced by residents.

Here are eight lessons the rest of us in Australia should learn from the Lismore experience to help us prepare for climate-connected disasters:

1. Natural disasters – fuelled by climate change – will continue to cascade, overlapping and growing in frequency. “Disaster is no longer unprecedented,” says Lismore MP Janelle Saffin. The 2022 floods were just the continuation of a series of natural disasters that affected Lismore: bushfires, drought, the mice plague, COVID-19 and then the “mega-flood of 2022”.

2. The climate crisis worsens inequality and inequality worsens the climate crisis. Many Lismore residents in low-lying flood-prone areas were already vulnerable and living in less resilient accommodation, with fewer resources and networks available for post-flood support. “Older people, people with disabilities and those who were pregnant” faced life-threatening circumstances, and often received no assistance. “Climate change impacts people experiencing financial and social disadvantage first, worst and longest because they have fewer resources to cope, adapt and recover, and because they already experience barriers to services and support,” says ACOSS. In a future “net zero” world: “People with the least will still be worse off if the transition is not fair and inclusive…. because those on low incomes pay disproportionately more of their incomes on essentials.” Inequality and disaster vulnerability are two sides of the same coin: “Disasters disproportionately impact the poorest and most at risk people.”

3. Indigenous Australians contribute least to climate change but experience its worst impacts. As of August 2022, six months after the disaster, 1,296 people were still homeless in the northern NSW region, 500 of whom were First Nations people (39% of the total). Indigenous Australians were thus seven times more likely to have become homeless because of the floods, as they constituted only 5.6% of Lismore LGA residents (2021 census). One Indigenous community, with almost 100 people on Cabbage Tree Island in the Richmond River (in Ballina Shire), was totally destroyed by the floods. It will not be rebuilt due to “an unacceptably high risk of exposure to future flooding events and a real risk to human life”. “Mother Nature has spoken. Cabbo is no longer safe for our mob to live there,” said community leader Lenkunyar Roberts. It’s not just east coast flooding: country town and remote Indigenous communities are particularly at risk when facing hotter and drier conditions, resulting in pressures on the supply and quality of water, food and traditional food sources. There is widespread consensus that climate change policies need to “recognise that the adaptation strategy for Indigenous communities are likely to be different to those for non-Indigenous communities”, with work “undertaken to develop culturally-appropriate strategies for this type of settlement”.

4. Housing unaffordability and the climate crisis are linked. Even prior to the 2022 floods, the Lismore region had many “rough sleepers”, several with complex social and emotional needs (and many of them Indigenous). After the floods, the situation turned catastrophic; the destruction of so many homes exacerbated a housing crisis that has not yet abated. While much of the recent national housing attention is focused on capital cities like Sydney, housing costs in regional areas – far from the eyes of Sydney or Canberra policy makers – have soared. An NCOSS submission states: “People are living in unsafe environments because there’s nowhere else to go. There’s massive overcrowding and First Nations communities are really struggling. Many of the homelessness workers [themselves] are homeless. People are living in the mouldy rotting husks of their houses…. Homeless women who were at the end of the queue and who couldn’t list an address in a flood impacted area are not even in the queue anymore.” MP Jannelle Saffin uses the term “internally displaced people, which is usually in the context of refugees from a war zone or major overseas disaster, but that’s what’s happened to us.”

5. Natural disasters produce an increasing mental health burden. Research shows “mental health effects on traumatised communities can peak up to 6 months after the event and again at 12 months, marking the anniversary.” There is widespread lack of awareness about the “long tail” of a disaster. “A common theme was hearing that mental health support and other services … were removed too soon following disaster – whether this was the availability of social workers and counselling services.” Outreach is also essential, as some people – such as those in Lismore still suffering from “collective trauma” – will never reach out for support.

6. Connected communities matter in disasters. Building social capital – informal support and access to information systems; and social infrastructure – community centres, showgrounds, universities, schools and libraries; are both essential responses to climate change adaptation. Socially excluded individuals have less social capital with which to cope, so increasing social connectedness means building robust social networks that can better coordinate recovery. In February 2022 Southern Cross University’s Lismore campus functioned as post-disaster model local social infrastructure. It transformed into “the primary emergency evacuation centre” with more than 1000 people, a home for police and community services, food distribution channels, re-located schools and more than 500 ADF personnel.

7. Climate change is creating an insurability crisis with worsening extreme weather and sky-rocketing premiums. The Insurance Council of Australia says almost 230,000 homes face a 1-in-20 chance of being hit by floods in any given year. It warns of a growing number of residents in “disaster-prone areas not buying insurance because of the higher premiums”, with flooding accounting for more than 54% insurance industry losses in the past five years. The Climate Council says by 2030, 4% of Australian properties will be “high risk” and uninsurable and another 9% of properties will reach “medium risk”.

8. Regional and rural Australia will disproportionately suffer the most from climate-related disasters. They are more exposed to natural hazards and up to twice as likely to be affected by flooding and bushfires.Country towns – already at risk because of economic restructuring and demographic change – may find climate change compounds difficulties. “This has implications both for our understanding and interpretation of the impacts of climate change, and in the development of policy responses.”

Towards a Net Zero Workforce: Overcoming Structural Barriers

Australian governments – national, state/territory and local – are taking seriously the transition to a “net zero” economy. This includes establishment of the new national Net Zero Authority “to ensure that the workers, industries and communities … can seize the opportunities of Australia’s net zero transformation.” We will soon see “huge public spending to kickstart a new era of green industries” that will “drive economic change”, says Treasurer Jim Chalmers. The primary driver of these new industries: clean electricity.

Skilling for a “net zero” economy has become a major discussion point with Australian industry, government, economists and non-profits. The comprehensive Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA) report, The Clean Energy Generation: workforce needs for a net zero economy (October 2023), works to define the clean energy workforce, identify critical occupations and make recommendations. The study identifies the industry workforce requirements in energy supply, energy demand, enabling clean energy workforce, carbon lifecycle, emissions-intensive sectors and transitioning sectors.

The JSA report outlines how a net zero transformation “presents an unprecedented opportunity to revitalise the Australian education and training sector”, in which “Australia can be a renewable energy superpower.” This is heady stuff.

Source: Global Australia

Three issues that need to be addressed in a net zero workforce strategy: the challenge of recruiting women; how literacy and numeracy (“foundation skills”) needs will hold us back; and structural issues in Australia’s post-secondary education system. These are not the only issues (engagement of First Nations and migrants into this workforce are also essential), but possibly the most significant barriers to be overcome.

Women in the Net Zero Workforce

Not surprisingly, almost all the 38 occupations identified in the JSA report as essential for net zero are traditionally “male” roles in engineering, transport, plumbing, electricity distribution, building, metals and machinery, agriculture, chemistry, mining and other trades. The report (p. 16) acknowledges the predominantly male characteristics of the current workforce will hold it back: “The clean energy sector cannot grow at the scale required without the participation of half of Australia’s population, but this won’t happen without addressing significant barriers that exist. Many female engineers report experiencing gender discrimination and bullying in the workplace and do not feel they have equal access to career progression opportunities, salary advancement or mentoring. The energy sector also has the third highest incidence of workplace sexual harassment, with 71% of women having experienced sexual harassment in the last 5 years.”

This is consistent with research into Australia’s vocational education and training (VET) sector. “There is no increase in the female composition of the male-dominated trade sectors over the 20 years, consistently remaining at under 2%. This continuing gender segregation is a sign that gender stereotyping of occupations remains a powerful influence on the career paths for males and females,” writes Dr Karen Struthers. “Female composition of trades in the manufacturing, automotive, electro-technology and construction industries in Australia has generally remained stagnant at under 2%…. Advocates of change have been increasing their efforts to reduce gender segregation of the trades. Yet this research indicates that action will be more effective if the low participation of women in male-dominated trades is elevated from a social issue to a social and economic problem of national significance.” (Italics are mine.)

The JSA report commences that elevation of female participation to an issue of national significance, calling for “an acknowledgement that safe workplaces are ultimately the responsibility of industry (employers and employees) to improve the sector’s culture.”

The report includes three recommendations:

1.       Ensure financial supports and incentives for women in trades are genuinely at the scale required to generate transformational change in the workforce’s composition and culture;

2.       Explore opportunities to directly support employers to attract, employ, mentor, train and cluster female trade apprentices to increase retention outcomes; and

3.       Pre-empt targeted interventions to increase women’s safe and successful participation in the clean energy workforce through: targeted recruitment drives and training programs; employer focused initiatives to promote gender representation in hiring processes and women’s independence and decision making in the workplace; support for flexible working arrangements; mandating the provision of suitable amenities for all workers; and concrete and practical programs to improve the safety, culture and appeal of the sector for women and all underrepresented groups.

These recommendations outline the beginnings of a strategy, but much more needs to be done – requiring substantial resourcing – to change the male-dominated culture of industry training, much of the VET system and the industries themselves, so that women start to feel confident and safe to participate in the traditional male-dominated trades. We will NOT achieve our net zero workforce goals without addressing these issues. It’s time for a “whole of government” and industry to make that happen.

Foundation Skills – Language, Literacy and Numeracy

The JSA report mentions foundation skills (broadly defined as language, literacy, numeracy and digital skills, abbreviated as “LLND”) but does not present strategies to address how these skills gaps hold back the development of the workforce. An estimated 3 million Australians – at least 20% of the adults – “lack the basic literacy, numeracy and digital skills to gain better jobs and participate fully in society.” For First Nations people, 40% of adults have minimal English literacy, which can rise as high as 70% in remote communities. Peak business organisations Business Council of Australia (BCA) and Australian Industry Group (AIG) have long expressed concern about workplace literacy, with AIG stating, “almost all employers experience low levels of literacy and numeracy that impact on their business.”

Australia consistently cannot meet the requested demand for adult literacy assistance (considering much of the need is not even expressed): the Reading Writing Hotline notes that it cannot refer callers to suitable provision for 13% of calls, peaking at 48% of requests from the Northern Territory. “Australia’s skills are not keeping pace with the demands of work and life in the 21st century, and that proficiency declines with socioeconomic status,” says the Australian Parliament’s report, Don’t take it as read: Inquiry into adult literacy and its importance. To really develop this workforce, we need a strong national commitment. The Commonwealth’s current foundation skills strategies are a great start but will need strong and continued support, sustained over many years.

Structural Issues in Australia’s Post-Secondary Education System

The JSA report does not discuss the profound splits in Australian post-secondary education, which is one system with two distinct sectors – universities on one side, and VET on the other – with different funding models (VET students are generally funded at 50% of university students), different language and acronyms, and different types of providers with different business models. The great majority of higher education (university) courses are delivered by public universities, whereas the majority of VET is delivered by private for-profit companies. Although “TAFE” is sometimes used as a way to refer to VET, each year almost 75% of VET students enrol with 3500+ private for-profit providers. Although private VET companies receive only about 20% of total government funding, they do garner over half VET Student Loans funding. The result is an unbalanced system that operates on a “cost-plus” so that any innovations – such as new “net zero” training places – will need to provide major incentives to meet private VET profit margins of 30% for them to consider participating. This is NOT the way to address a major workforce development project, yet the JSA does not analyse these underlying structural issues.

Australia’s VET system is still recovering from the VET FEE-HELP scandals that plagued VET, which the Sydney Morning Herald described as “the biggest public policy scandal in Australian history: the systematic rorting of the vocational education and training system.” Australia’s VET sector carries an unfortunate legacy of poor credibility that no amount of “re-branding” and public relations can change easily: VET will remain a poor cousin to universities. The “marketisation” of VET has not, generally, resulted in higher efficiency. Although TAFEs – and where they can, not-for-profit adult and community education providers – can be relied on to respond to these “net zero” training initiatives, any reliance on thousands private VET providers to deliver such training will inevitably run into significant problems, as recent problems with international VET students have shown.

Commonwealth initiative will ensure foundation skills access through community education providers

A new Commonwealth Government initiative will ensure increased numbers of Australian adults can develop literacy and numeracy skills with substantial funding going to the adult and community education (ACE) sector to deliver the training.

The Australian Government plans to invest up to $142 million over the Agreement “to improve foundation skills training quality and access. This includes up to $77 million for foundation skills training through the Adult and Community Education sector.”

Make no mistake: This is the largest single investment by the Commonwealth in Australia’s ACE sector since 2009, when the Commonwealth set up a $100 million infrastructure “Investing in Community Education and Training program”, part of a $500 million VET Capital Fund.

The new “Ensuring Access to Foundation Skills initiative” is part of the five-year National Skills Agreement between the Commonwealth and states/territories, which commences on 1 January 2024.

The DEWR fact sheet states that “Funding for the ACE sector recognises its key role in supporting the most disadvantaged Australians, who may find it difficult to engage with mainstream education and prefer to learn in a more informal local community environment. The initiative will also develop a 10-year national foundation skills strategy to strengthen the quality and sustainability of the sector.”

Congratulations to Skills Minister Brendan O’Connor for this initiative. Wonderful news for Community Colleges Australia, which advocated so hard and so long for recognition of the valuable work ACE providers do in engaging the most disadvantaged learners. And good news for Reading Writing Hotline, which has an essential role to play in connecting learners and ACE providers.

I am not overstating the importance of this initiative: it is “history in the making”.

Sustainability in New South Wales apartment living has a long way to go but is now urgent

(Image above: High density apartment buildings in St Leonards, Sydney)

(Originally ublished at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sustainability-new-south-wales-apartment-living-has-long-don-perlgut-pggtc/ on November 3, 2023)

Two of Australia’s greatest challenges are dealing with housing supply and affordability and a growing crisis of climate change, including increasing natural disasters fuelled by a changing climate. Australian Governments take both issues seriously, but not necessarily together. That’s a mistake, one we will pay for decades to come if we do not get it right.

New South Wales and Sydney lead Australia in the housing unaffordability crisis – the lowest in decades. Sydney’s median property price sits at “13.3 times the median income; 35.3% of renters are in housing stress, ranked the sixth-least affordable city” in the world, ahead of even New York and London. Sydney’s chronic housing unaffordability crisis threatens “the future potential of Sydney” at a cost of “talent, innovation and productivity.” The impact falls most heavily on people who are disadvantaged and even moderate income: “more households are in severe housing stress than at any other time in our history.”

In response, “the rubber is finally hitting the road” as the NSW Government promises to prioritise housing development to “turbocharge density,” reports The Sydney Morning Herald. The goal is to increase stock, curtail sprawl and shift “housing growth eastward toward established transport infrastructure”. Priority density locations identified so far include Crows Nest, Bankstown, Kellyville, Bella Vista, Sydenham, Waterloo, Burwood and The Bays precinct. There will be more.

All logical, appropriate and necessary.

But not sufficient. Sydney’s housing development and expansion strategy needs to be connected to sustainability planning, so that the upcoming public and private investment in new housing reinforces, complements and supports environmental sustainability and energy conservation, as well as social cohesion and resilience in the face of anticipated natural disasters such as storms and heatwaves. This means providing well-designed social infrastructure – parks, open spaces, greenery, community centres, cultural facilities, diversified shopping, educational institutions, other community services including places of worship, and informal gathering spots that make a city a proper city that works for people.

Most Sydney councils attempt to address these issues but are subject to density and planning over-rides by the state government. That means that the integration of sustainability and community infrastructure could get lost in the rush to house our expanding population.

Let’s take three sustainability examples: water conservation, solar power and apartment design. Water meters: Only in 2014 did newly constructed apartment buildings in New South Wales require individual unit meters. As a result, in most pre-2014 buildings all apartments receive the same water bill as their neighbours (the total divided by the number of units), irrespective of how much water they use. Thus, the motivation for water conservation in these buildings (including my own, in North Sydney) is severely curtailed. Even if you try to save water, your bill won’t tell you if you did. Sydney Water tells me the estimate for installing individual meters in older buildings will be well more than $1,200 unit, and many buildings will find it impossible to do so. As a result, very few do.

Perhaps even more powerful is that we need to plan for rooftop solar, which experts call “the cheapest delivered electricity in the world”; it can halve the cost of electricity in NSW. But apartment buildings don’t have nearly as much rooftop as houses do. And even when they do, there are challenges to reticulate solar electricity to all the units in buildings that do not already have built-in solar; only a few suppliers specialise in this.

(Chart above: Financial benefits of rooftop solar; source: https://reneweconomy.com.au/rooftop-solar-saves-money-and-batteries-can-wipe-out-bills-labor-pushes-household-savings/)

Thanks to my local council – North Sydney, running a Future-proofing Apartments Program – which quickly analysed our apartment building’s roof (see photo below sent to me via email) and identified how our flat roof was suitable for solar. There are some notable examples of existing “smart green” apartment buildings, but they tend to be prestige buildings with motivated owners committed to – and able to afford – required retrofitting.

(Image above: Apartment building rooftops: courtesy of North Sydney Council)

Finally, there is apartment design. All Sydney has abundant sun and much of eastern Sydney is blessed with cooling summer ocean breezes. Western Sydney, however, faces major heat challenges, which have already reached crisis proportions (which I will discuss in a separate article). Apartments need to be carefully planned to maximise passive design attributes: is there natural and cross ventilation that quickly cools an apartment; are there private places to dry clothes on balconies; are external windows and doors oriented to maximise northerly winter sun and eave overhangs to protect from the worst summer and western sun?

This is our challenge: to relieve Sydney’s housing crisis while placing energy conservation and climate resilience high on the priority list for our communities and the tens of thousands of high-density new units to be built in coming years; to support local government sustainability efforts such as those in City of Sydney; and to project an agreed vision for Sydney that is affordable, liveable and sustainable.

Four challenges for Australia: Address to CCA Conference

Last night (10 October), I gave a short address to the Community Colleges Australia (CCA) Sydney Conference dinner, during which I shared my intellectual and professional journey since leaving CCA in July. I concluded that Australia faces four distinct but inter-related challenges, and commented on how not-for-profit (NFP) community education providers can help address those challenges.

1.      We have a growing challenge of inequality, with “the bottom 90% of Australians receiving just 7% of economic growth per person since 2009, while the top 10% of income earners reaping 93% of the benefits,” a radical reversal of the trends from 1950 to 2009. The good news is that Australia’s community education providers and the vocational education system generally is well-positioned to reach and engage vulnerable and disadvantaged learners: people with low incomes and little wealth, young people, older workers, First Nations peoples, migrants and refugees, people with a disability, and residents of rural and regional areas. Community and vocational providers can thus become major players in tackling Australian inequality.

2.      We have a challenge of housing affordability, with sky-high rental and purchase prices and the highest mortgage stress in the world, pushing people of reasonable means out of the housing market and exacerbating homelessness. Many factors drive this housing demand. The good news is the Commonwealth, Victorian and other governments have recently committed more funding and resources to development of social and public housing units, after years without growth. Community education providers can do a lot to support and partner with social housing providers: public (government) providers and not-for-profit community housing sector to deliver place-based education and training to residents.

3.      We have a climate change challenge. Last month, Australia recorded its driest September in history. New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia had their hottest September days ever, and the months of June, July and August 2023 were the hottest months ever on earth. The Australian Climate Council warns we have “crossed a tipping point for Australia’s temperate broadleaf and mixed forests when a critical level of heat or drought triggers a massive, devastating event.” Aside from the obvious – like the Byron Community College sustainability initiatives and Permaculture training – there is much community education providers sector can do to bring local community responses to help address the climate crisis through both mitigation and adaptation.

4.      Finally, we have an Indigenous reconciliation challenge. This coming Saturday, 14 October, Australia votes on the Voice to Parliament. What happens if the Voice fails? How do community education providers – and other NFP organisations – contribute to what will be a long and hard road of continued reconciliation with First Nations peoples? Last night, I was thrilled to listen to Mick Gooda, former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, in conversation with my CCA successor, Russ Hawkins. The community education sector is uniquely positioned to contribute to this process, with the highest percentage of Indigenous students of any educational sector in Australia.

(below: Mick Gooda on right talks with Russ Hawkins, left)

Social Infrastructure: The missing link in Australia’s climate change adaptation strategy

September 2023: Australia records its driest September in history, with an average rainfall of 4.83cm, 70%+ below average. New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia mark their hottest September days ever. In early October bushfires raged, immediately followed by severe flooding in Victoria. June to August 2023 were the hottest months ever on earth. Welcome to the new normal.

The Australian Climate Council warns we have “likely crossed a tipping point for Australia’s temperate broadleaf and mixed forests when a critical level of heat or drought triggers a massive, devastating event.” The Council states: “Climate change is driving a new era of ‘unnatural disasters’ – and as a country we are not prepared to cope…. consecutive, record-breaking events can overwhelm emergency services and devastate communities.”

Climate change – now driven by an El Niño event in Australia – means more heatwaves, increased fire danger and extreme weather. Have we prepared adaptation and survival plans? The Productivity Commission estimates we spend “97% of its disaster funding on mopping up and just 3% on getting ready.” So, the short answer is “no”.

And what does “getting ready” mean? Bushfire preparation, resilient communications for emergencies and natural disasters, workplace emergency training and skilled emergency first responders.

Something is missing: a national plan to develop Australia’s social infrastructure that provides shelter, support and community connections during climate events and natural disasters. The planning for social infrastructure – community centres, showgrounds, universities, schools and libraries – is often left to local councils, but needs to be elevated to state and national policy levels, with a direct connection to disaster preparedness. By contrast, current Australian plans mostly emphasise “social recovery” and not “social preparation”.

During extreme weather events, “Hard infrastructure breaks down. Power goes out, transit breaks down, water may not run. Social infrastructure in a disaster can make the difference of life and death,” writes sociologist Eric Klinenberg.” Klinenberg emphasises the value of public libraries as social infrastructure in US cities, including as shelter from climate events. A fascinating fictional parallel to his work takes place in the 2004 science fiction film The Day After Tomorrow. At one point, the film’s major characters take refuge in the New York Public Library from a storm’s massive deep freeze and major tidal waves. Almost on cue, in 2012 Hurricane Sandy resulted in New York City’s highest storm surge on record, with 17% of city flooded, equating to 130 square kilometres. Art imitated life and then life imitated art again.

During the February 2022 Lismore floods, Southern Cross University’s local campus showcased the classic social infrastructure role, becoming “the primary emergency evacuation centre, with more than 1000 people gathered”. It also became the home for police, other emergency and community services, a state government business hub, a major food distribution centre, more than 500 ADF personnel landing Blackhawk helicopters on the rugby ovals and 3 re-located schools with more than 1800 students. It functioned as a model safe gathering point that coordinated recovery and helped the community to remain connected.

Awareness of the value and importance of social infrastructure in response to climate events is growing. Drawing from his experience in the Lismore floods, Sam Henderson (Northern Rivers Community Foundation) highlights “the indisputable value” of what he calls “soft infrastructure … the intangible asset of community cohesion, preparedness, and commitment that plays an instrumental role in disaster response, recovery, and regeneration.” He regrets the spotlight placed “on the ‘hard infrastructure’ side of disaster management” during the recent Australian Disaster Resilience Conference – a reminder of the Productivity Commission’s findings on the unbalanced investment in emergency management. “When the hard infrastructure and services were delayed in arriving during these crises, it was the community response [in the Lismore region] that saved lives,” he writes. “It’s time to shift the paradigm in disaster management. We must rebalance our priorities and allocate resources more equitably between hard and soft infrastructure.”

The University of Sydney’s Environment Institute has also begun to use the language of social infrastructure. Visiting Professor Daniel Aldrich says diverse social networks matter during climate crises, and these “networks can be deepened and broadened by building ‘social infrastructure’ such as parks, libraries, cafes, community spaces, and places of worship.” Japan’s disasters “showed how both the social infrastructure and intangible social bonds in coastal Tohoku communities helped people survive and thrive” after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

It’s not just flooding. Adapt NSW’s website notes that Australian heatwaves “have been responsible for more human deaths than any other natural hazard, including bushfires, storms, tropical cyclones, and floods. During the 1939 Black Friday bushfires, 71 people died in Victoria. But at least 420 people died in the heatwaves leading up to those fires …. Similarly, 173 people died during the 2009 Victorian bushfires, but an additional 374 people died in the heatwave before the fires. Western Sydney’s Penrith – home to hundreds of thousands of residents – was the “hottest place on earth” on 4 January 2020, reaching a high of 48.9 degrees Celsius – surpassing it’s 2018 “hottest place” record of 47.3 degrees.

Natural disaster, environmental and climate impacts are also social justice matters, “making existing inequalities and injustices a whole lot worse.” Vulnerable and disadvantaged people experience the worst outcomes in natural disasters: “The people who are most vulnerable in ordinary times are often the same people who are vulnerable in disasters.” The US Urban Land Institute reports poorer US communities “can be up to 20 degrees (Fahrenheit) hotter than wealthier neighbourhoods because of historic public disinvestment in green space and tree canopy.” The geography of Australian cities such as Sydney show more heat and flooding in more disadvantaged locations, with upper income suburbs closer to the coast less impacted: “Climate change impacts in Australia show that geographies of heat risk may also coincide with spatial patterns of relative socio-economic disadvantage,” reports the University of Sydney. So let’s add “heat inequality” to income, wealth and other inequalities experienced by Sydney-siders.

Social infrastructure functions not just a response to climate impacts, but can reduce environmental vulnerability through careful open space planning, such as trees and planting that bring down carbon footprint and lessen the need for cars.

Social infrastructure also just makes sense: The residual benefit of “investing in climate security through social infrastructure is … that we could dramatically improve the quality of life in these places all of the time, regardless of the weather.”

(This article will soon be reprinted, in a shortened form, by John Menadue’s Public Policy Journal.)

Social housing is about to expand but residents also need community support services

The cost, supply and availability of housing has engaged Australians as few other current issues have this year, a situation described as “both devilishly complex and capable of unleashing the nation’s darker angels.” A major increase in the supply of social housing has been proposed but is only the beginning of addressing affordable housing challenges.

Housing purchase remains stubbornly high, reflecting an increasingly “broken system”; rents have risen to unprecedented levels, driven by post-pandemic overseas migration, limited stock and steadily fewer people living in each residence. Access to housing now equates to how wealthy – or not – you are: “the disparity in wealth between who owns and who rents … defines Australia’s increasing inequality,” says Tone Wheeler. It’s also become highly political, with the one-third of Australians who rent increasingly leaning towards one political party (The Greens), especially in inner city electorates.

For these reasons, I optimistically predict we will soon see agreement – hopefully with increased support and direct funding – on the Albanese Government’s proposed $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund, which plans to fund 30,000 new social and affordable housing properties in its first five years. But this will only go part-way to dealing with “one of the most serious housing crises in our history,” according to the construction union’s Zach Smith.

It’s about time. The national social housing waiting list has topped 175,000 (with at least another 250,000 eligible but not on the lists) – necessitating a wait of more than 10 years in some locations. Australia’s investment in social housing has lagged significantly for at least two decades. In mid-2022, Australia had around 443,000 social housing dwellings, but only 36,200 dwellings had been added in the 16-year period from 2006 (see Table 1 below, from AIHW). This represented a 10% increase, compared to 28.5% Australian population growth. Not surprisingly, “the proportion of people in social housing … fell by a fifth, from 4.6% to 3.7%, over the past decade.”

Social housing has also been changing, with state and territory public (government) housing dwelling numbers decreasing each year, shifting to an expanded not-for-profit community-managed housing sector.

Housing, construction and renter advocates are correct – our social housing needs are desperate. So what happens when Australia finally starts to build more social housing?

It won’t fix everything, because residents of social housing are some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged Australians, often beset by social problems and higher crime rates: “Social housing has undergone a ‘residualisation’ process where housing has been increasingly allocated to those with complex issues … those with physical and psychosocial disability, who are at risk of homelessness, or are on very low incomes …. This has created an ‘ambulance service’ provision addressing housing of the most vulnerable in society.”

These social challenges underscore the necessity of parallel investments in social housing management and integrated community services for residents. The social arrangements of medium- and high-density housing can be very complex, even more so when large estates are owned and operated by governments: witness the July 2020 Melbourne high-rise public housing tower COVID-19 lockdowns, when “3,000 residents confined to their flats for 5 days,” with residents of one tower locked down for 14 days.

Although strata management has professionalised in recent years, Australia has not developed a tradition of higher density living and housing management. Public and non-profit housing managers are challenged by balancing cost considerations and resident needs. Researchers point out that “lower income and vulnerable residents generally have less choice and less influence than other socio-economic groups, are disproportionately affected by the challenges of higher density living…. and Australian governments have not adequately acknowledged and addressed the impact of higher density housing on lower income and vulnerable residents.”

There has been a progressive shift from large-scale public housing estates to smaller, diverse community housing providers (including cooperatives), from one-tenth of social housing units in 2006 to one-third in 2022. The Community Housing Industry Association of NSW now has 41 members operating around the state; community-owned housing may have received little public fanfare, but has started to change the social housing landscape for the better. Community housing providers have shown their ability to refine “housing management activities and procedures to better support their tenants”, expand place-based management activities and capably support the value and importance of community development.

Social housing tenants – be it in a Melbourne public high-rise or a lower density country town – need integrated community and social support, ideally including education, training and other skills opportunities. Commitment to new construction is necessary, but only the first step on the long road to a successful social housing policy that meets the needs of vulnerable and disadvantaged Australians and ensures our success as a nation.

New Governance and Executive Leadership Audio Podcast Series

My organisation, Community Colleges Australia (CCA) has launched a new governance and executive leadership audio podcast series. Prepared specifically for senior executives and boards directors of not-for-profit Australian adult and community education (ACE) organisations, the series aims at improving governance and dealing with some of the most common – and pressing – leadership problems.

The eight programs can be accessed directly from the CCA website, or via iTunes, and can be either downloaded or streamed for free. This podcast (“Series 3”) follows two previous CCA series in 2019 and 2018, both of which are still available for listening.

Program interviewees include Chris Taylor, Chair, Tec-NQ, Townsville; Julia Ridout, Chair, Central Coast Community College; Dr Ty Wiggins, Principal, Converge Consulting & Executive Director, Russell Reynolds Associates; Wayne Condon, Principal, Converge Consulting; Adam Siegel, CEO, Visage Growth Partners; David Mackay, CEO, Tuggerah Lake Community College & Chair, Community Colleges Australia; Nick Hedges, Director, ResolveHR; Sue Reynolds, Vocational Education Training Manager, Western Riverina Community College; Theresa Collignon, CEO, Macquarie Community College; Kerry Johnson, CEO, ACE Community Colleges, Lismore; Ron Maxwell, CEO. VERTO; Luther Poier, Managing Director and Head of Venture Capital, BlueChilli Technology; and Robert Migliore, Director, Actevate.

I was the Executive Producer, and Ryan Pemberton from Audiocraft was our great producer.

The series:

1. Being the Chair of the Board of a Community Education Provider: Download this episode (16′)
2. Best Practice Board Meetings: Download this episode (18′)
3. When your Board goes rogue – how to get it back on track: Download this episode (14′)
4. What is a strategic plan and why do you need one: Download this episode (15′)
5. Having tough conversations: Download this episode (17′)
6. Leading for change in difficult times: Download this episode (21′)
7. Performance management for your CEO – What does a Chair and Board need to do: Download this episode (19′)
8. Mental health support for staff – best practice: Download this episode (20′)

View more details on the podcast series program page.

Evaluation and feedback: Help CCA to evaluate CCA podcast Series 3 by filling out this short survey once you have listened to some or all of the podcasts.

Program Advisers: Dr Ty Wiggins, Converge Consulting; and Nick Hedges, ResolveHR
Project Assistant: Clare Harris, Community Colleges Australia

Funding: This audio podcast series was produced for Community Colleges Australia with funding support from the New South Wales Government.

(Featured image credit: Wikicommons, used under Creative Commons license)

What ‘On the Beach’ tells us about COVID-19 in Australia

By world standards, Australia has achieved an enviable insularity from COVID-19, an effective and almost total community elimination protected by our island status, our placid and astonishingly well-behaved populace, and our location in an almost forgotten corner of the world. Yet there is a history of Australian survival in the face of universal annihilation, one that gives us insight into our present claustrophobic moment. 

Few Australians under age 60 recognise On the Beach, the 1956 classic end-of-the-world novel by British soldier-turned-Australian writer Nevil Shute (I know, I recently asked about 30 of them). The book tells of how a nuclear holocaust in the northern hemisphere produced radiation that slowly seeps southward, leaving Australia as one of the remaining locations of human life.

Shute, who also wrote the well-known A Town Like Alice, was a social conservative, but in an odd way also a political radical, as he adamantly opposed nuclear proliferation. The novel is set in Melbourne – and the original 1959 film adaptation primarily shot – where despite the impending doom in the story – Australians appear to live a normal life, albeit without petrol and a few other necessities.

Although overshadowed by the inevitability of their coming death by radiation sickness within months, the book and the film both capture unique Australian claustrophobia – not dissimilar to what we feel in Australia in March 2021, a year into the pandemic, where we cannot travel overseas, and many of us have not been able to travel to other states.

On the Beach captures a sense of Australia’s exceptionalism in the face of worldwide disaster. In the novel, an Australian naval officer comments on the problems of inviting the American submarine commander into his home: “Northern hemisphere people seldom mixed well, now, with people of the southern hemisphere. Too much lay between them, too great a difference of experience. The intolerable sympathy made a barrier.” His wife agrees, pointing out that the British RAF squadron leader they had hosted had cried. How many times have we Australians tried, without success, to communicate our experience during COVID-19 to friends or relatives abroad in the USA, the UK or elsewhere that the pandemic rages?

The characters in On the Beach do not panic: “These talks that the Prime Minister’s been giving have been kind of steadying. The ABC’s been doing a good job in telling people just the way things are,” one character observes; what an odd resonance to the present pandemic. The book is still in print; you can watch the original movie version (directed by Stanley Kramer), streaming on Stan, which stars Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins and Ava Gardner, who reputedly remarked that, “On the Beach is a story about the end of the world, and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it.”

The end of the film contains two Melbourne scenes eerily reminiscent of the COVID-19 pandemic: a long queue of people on a footpath, not waiting for COVID-19 testing, but to pick up suicide pills as the radiation inexorably closes in; and shots of Melbourne CBD streetscapes devoid of people, not because of lock-down, but because, well … everyone dies at the end. The film “frightened the hell out of me. I’m still frightened,” reflected anti-nuclear campaigner Helen Caldicott many years later. “I hope it is fiction,” said US Air Force Secretary and later NATO ambassador, Thomas Finletter. “Are you sure it is?”

Shute’s novel remains relevant for new generations. A well-received 2013 feature documentary, Fallout, examines Shute, Kramer and the making of the film. Shute’s writing continues to resonate for a small but devoted group of international fans: the Nevil Shute Norway Foundation has hosted ten major gatherings of “Shutists”, including three in Australia.

Gideon Haigh explains that “Shute languishes in something very like obscurity – for reasons not far to seek. His 23 novels are plain, staid, even chaste: they … contain no bad language, no villains of note and almost no sex. His characters are usually ordinary middle-class people who face extraordinary situations; their customs and conventions are evoked with a clear but kindly eye.”

The plain ordinary-ness of Shute’s characters gives On the Beach so much of its power, says Paul Brians: “Shute directly addresses the most primal fears of the human race which has spent most of its history denying or compensating for the fact of personal death, and does so with a relentlessness which the complex technique of a more sophisticated writer might have muted. For once there are no distractions: no invading aliens, no super fallout shelters to protect the protagonists, no struggle back from a dreadful but exciting postwar barbarism.”

Is the nuclear war analogy with the Coronavirus pandemic too far-fetched? Possibly not. But by mid-March 2021, almost 540,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, easily exceeding the 405,000 American lives lost during WWII; President Biden says the number could rise to 660,000. That’s about 1 in 500 Americans and would close in on the 675,000 Spanish flu deaths in the USA and surpass the 620,000 Civil War deaths – the worst in US history. While UK COVID deaths (more than 126,000) have exceeded the civilian World War II death toll (70,000), they are unlikely to reach the 384,000 soldiers killed in combat. Israel – while leading the world in COVID-19 vaccination rates – has passed 6,000 COVID deaths, a toll that could exceed the total civilian and military deaths (6,373) in its 1947-49 War of Independence, by far its most deadly. By contrast, only 909 Australians have died (and nobody for months), compared to the 39,655 who died in World War II. And yet these comparisons also understate the current pandemic’s death count, because most of these wars extended over many years, not just twelve months.

We live in an age when “the Coronavirus is rewriting our imaginations,” writes Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the science fiction novel The Ministry for the Future. “What felt impossible has become thinkable. We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era…. We’re acting fast as a civilization. We’re trying, despite many obstacles, to flatten the curve—to avoid mass death. Doing this, we know that we’re living in a moment of historic importance. We realize that what we do now, well or badly, will be remembered later on. This sense of enacting history matters. For some of us, it partly compensates for the disruption of our lives.” When the next calamities arrive, “we’ll be familiar with how they feel.”

While much of the rest of the world waits out the virus and pins hopes on the success of large-scale vaccination, we in Australia exist in an uncomfortable utopia – or perhaps it’s simply a comfortable dystopia. We will only know which when we get to the “other side”, a luxury of survival our compatriots in On the Beach did not have.

(This article was originally published in John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations on 25 March 2021.)

screen shot from beginning of the film On the Beach