Every plan for this region eventually has to answer the same question: protect what, and at whose expense. The Reconstruction Authority is now attempting a formal answer.
What is actually being built
The Authority is developing what its own page calls the state's first multi-hazard
Disaster Adaptation Plan
, and it is being written for here. The region, on the same
page, has one of the highest natural hazard risk profiles in NSW, regularly
experiencing floods, storms, bushfires, and coastal erosion
, and the Authority names
ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred
as the recent reminder of why the work is urgent.
It is being done in stages. The Authority says it will deliver a foundation DAP as a
first step
, containing A regional risk profile focused on the 9 hazards in the
region
along with early actions such as levee and waterway maintenance, cultural
burning and landscape restoration. Everything that follows depends on that risk profile,
and on what the plan decides is worth protecting.
How the community input was gathered
To answer the second half, the Authority partnered with Living Lab Northern Rivers on a
values mapping exercise, published in June 2026 as What Matters Most? Mapping community
values for the Northern Rivers Disaster Adaptation Plan. Participants sorted
100 cards into four piles
, from what matters most to what matters least, across
workshops held around the region during 2025.
Of everyone who took part, 211 consented for their data to be
analysed. The age spread is striking and is stated in the report itself:
1 in 3 were under 18
and 1 in 3 were over 65
. A study of what a region
values, in other words, drew heavily on school students and on retired people, with the
working-age middle thinner than either.
The disclosure that most reports would have buried
Under a heading of its own, the report states: The 211 participants do not constitute
a statistically significant sample, nor do they represent a demographic cross-section of
the region.
It then explains why, rather than leaving it as a formality.
Workshop attendees were people who had the time to participate
, it says, who
learned about the sessions, understood their purpose and were motivated to contribute. So
The findings therefore reflect the values of those able and willing to attend in-person
sessions rather than a representative sample of each local government area or the Northern
Rivers as a whole.
The methodology is designed to keep collecting, with the report noting it allows further
workshop data to be added, enabling the dataset to grow toward statistical
significance
. It is not there yet, and says so.
What the 211 said
The headline findings are close to what anyone who lives here would guess. Most
participants prioritised environmental health, including clean air, healthy waterways and
caring for Country. Affordability came through as a constant pressure, specifically
affordability, specifically affordable rental housing and affordable groceries
.
Roads and infrastructure appeared repeatedly as foundational. Local networks and shared
spaces made up the fourth theme.
None of that is surprising, and a plan built only on it would tell the Authority little it did not already know.
The part worth reading twice
The useful material is in the variation. The report breaks its findings down by group, and the differences are sharp enough to change what an adaptation plan should do:
| Group | What the data showed |
|---|---|
| Young people | Young people tended to place less value on traditional community anchors such as volunteer groups. |
| People with disability, LGBTQIA+ participants, people unable to work | People with disability, LGBTQIA+ participants and those unable to work tended to place more value on local networks, cultural connection spaces and everyday gathering places. |
| People aged 65 and over | Older people aged 65+ tended to place more value on NBN, ATMs, medical access and communication services. |
| People experiencing homelessness | Placed less value on infrastructure and the highest on shelter-related services. |
Read together, those lines describe a region where the infrastructure a plan would naturally protect first is not the infrastructure the most exposed people rely on. A levee and a road matter to almost everyone. A gathering place, a working phone line and a bed matter disproportionately to the people least able to absorb a disaster.
The report also sets its findings against the Community Strategic Plans of the seven
councils, noting that Each of the seven local government areas in the Northern Rivers
has developed a Community Strategic Plan
based on consultation inside its own
boundaries, where this data is regional.
Our view, labelled as such
The candour deserves saying out loud, because it is rare. A government-commissioned study that states in plain words that its sample is neither significant nor representative has made itself harder to quote and easier to trust. The failure mode we expected, and did not find, was a report presenting 211 self-selected participants as the voice of 310,000 people.
What follows from that is a caution about how the findings get used. Values mapping of this kind is a good way to surface what a plan might otherwise miss, and a poor basis for arbitrating between communities that want different things. The risk is not the study; it is a later document citing it as though the region had voted. The honest test, when the foundation plan appears, is whether it repeats the limitation as clearly as the source did.
The second thing worth watching is whether the divergence survives into the plan. It would be very easy to build a risk profile around the four consensus themes and lose the table above, which is the only part that tells you something you could not have guessed.
How we sourced this
We downloaded the Living Lab Northern Rivers report and read it, and we read the Reconstruction Authority's own Northern Rivers plan page. Every quotation is from one of those two documents and each was verified as a contiguous span of the source text rather than assembled from fragments. The report is a two-column layout, and extracting it with a layout-preserving tool interleaves the columns, which produces sentences that read correctly but do not exist; the quotations here were checked against a reading-order extraction for that reason.
What we have not done. We have not attended a workshop, spoken to Living Lab Northern Rivers, the Reconstruction Authority or any participant, and we have not seen the underlying card data. We do not know the workshop locations individually, how the 211 divide between the seven local government areas, or when the foundation plan is due, because the sources we read do not say. We have not read the seven Community Strategic Plans the report compares itself against. The participant quotations in the report are anonymised by role and location by its authors, and we have not sought to identify anyone.
Sources
- Living Lab Northern Rivers and NSW Reconstruction Authority, What Matters Most? Mapping community values for the Northern Rivers Disaster Adaptation Plan (PDF, findings from the 2025 workshops, published June 2026, read 6 August 2026): the 211 consented participants, the 100-card sorting exercise, the age split, the statement that the sample is not statistically significant or representative, the explanation of who attended and why, the note that the dataset can grow toward significance, the four consensus themes, the group-by-group divergences, and the comparison with the seven Community Strategic Plans.
- NSW Reconstruction Authority, Northern Rivers Disaster Adaptation Plan (read 6 August 2026): that this is the state's first multi-hazard Disaster Adaptation Plan, the region's hazard risk profile, the reference to ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred, the foundation plan as a first step, and the regional risk profile covering nine hazards.
Did you attend a What Matters Most? workshop, or work on the adaptation plan? Tell us and we will check it against the report and log the outcome on this page.