Flooded Roads and Frozen Budgets: The Expensive Myth of 'Resilience'
It’s January 2026, and the sky is grey again. After the devastation of May '25, the word 'resilience' has become a political shield rather than a physical reality. While policy papers stack up in Macquarie Street, the Hawkesbury is still waiting for roads that don't turn into rivers.
If I hear the word "resilience" one more time while standing in gumboots on a submerged highway, I might just scream. It has become the favourite buzzword of every minister with a hard hat and a sad face, a convenient linguistic wrapper for a very inconvenient truth: we are not fixing the problem; we are simply managing the decline.
We are now six months past the catastrophe of May 2025, where the Mid North Coast—Taree, Kempsey, Wingham—was battered by a "one-in-500-year" event that seems to happen every three years. The cleanup trucks have mostly left, but the anxiety hasn't. Why? Because looking at the infrastructure budget versus the insurance reality is a sobering exercise in cognitive dissonance.
The Paper Shield
The NSW Government’s State Disaster Mitigation Plan is a masterclass in bureaucratic optimism. It talks of "place-based adaptation" and "risk reduction." But ask a resident in the Hawkesbury-Nepean Valley if they feel more adapted today than they did in 2022. The answer is usually a nervous laugh.
The disconnect is glaring. We are approving new suburbs in Western Sydney that require complex evacuation engineering (read: expensive bridges) just to ensure people don't get trapped. It’s not resilience to build in a bathtub and then congratulate yourself on buying a bigger drainpipe.
"We don't need another PDF explaining 'adaptation pathways'. We need the Pitt Town Bypass to be higher than the flood gauge, and we need it yesterday."
This sentiment isn't rare. It is the default setting for anyone living west of Parramatta or north of Newcastle. The Hawkesbury-Nepean Flood Evacuation Road Resilience Program promised $200 million back in the day. In construction terms, that buys you a roundabout and a ribbon-cutting ceremony. It does not buy safety.
The Uninsurable Future
Here is the number that should keep the Treasurer awake at night: 77%. That is the estimated percentage of high-risk homes in Australia that now lack flood cover, according to late-2025 data. Why? because nobody can afford a $30,000 premium on a median wage.
We are creating zombie suburbs—communities that exist physically but are financially dead. If a mortgage requires insurance, and insurance is impossible, the bank loans become toxic assets. The "resilience" strategy relies on the private market absorbing the risk, but the private market has checked the weather forecast and left the building.
| Metric | 2020 Baseline | 2025 Reality | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Avg. Sydney Flood Premium | $2,400 | $4,100+ | +70% |
| Uninsured High-Risk Homes | ~40% | 77% | Critical |
| Major Dam Upgrades (Completed) | 0 | 0 | Stalled |
Concrete over Concept
What does this topic really change? It shifts the timeline of Australian property ownership. We used to think in 30-year mortgages; now we think in 5-year La Niña cycles. The government needs to stop treating these floods as "unprecedented" anomalies.
Real resilience isn't a glossy brochure. It's buying back the unlivable land (at fair value, not the pittance currently offered). It's stopping the sprawling developments on floodplains that every hydrologist warned against. And it's admitting that some roads can't just be patched—they need to be moved.
Until we see excavators instead of press releases, "resilience" is just a fancy way of saying "good luck."
