On a debris-lined street, not far from Lismore’s centre, Kym Strow and her wife, Sarah Jones, are staying well away from the Scott Morrison circus.
“We don’t need someone picking up our hand to shake it,” Strow says.
Instead, the pair are walking through their ruined home. They move slowly, still digesting.
In spots, the floors are dangerous to walk on. The warped timber threatens to give way underfoot. Paint is peeling off the walls.
Everything they owned is in a pile out on the street. But it’s not just their home.
The cafe they’ve owned for nine years, Flock, is ruined too.
Asked about Morrison’s visit to Lismore on Wednesday to see the flood damage, Strow says anger isn’t helpful right now.
But it’s there, visceral in her voice, as she looks around at all that she’s lost.
“This is desperation. We’re living in a fucking garage,” she says.
“You need a leader who is going to stand up and say ‘I’m coming’ or ‘this is coming, you’re not alone’ and give hope.
“People sure as fuck shouldn’t have to ask for it. It wasn’t even asking, it was begging.”
Across town, at Morrison’s chosen public relations point – the emergency operations centre at Lismore’s council chambers – tensions were running high.
A group of protesters were there to welcome him, staying for hours in the oppressive heat.
Some brandished signs saying “this isn’t strange, it’s climate change” and “mental health crisis”.
Morrison, unsurprisingly, didn’t stop to chat. His car ferried him around the back of the council chambers, while a line of police kept the protesters at bay.
Inside, you could still hear them chanting. “The water is rising, no more compromising.”
After an interminable wait, Morrison fronted the press to fend off criticism about the federal response, the inadequacy of the government’s effort on climate change, and the insufficient disaster payments, which, while now increased, are a drop in the ocean for those who lost everything.
“It has taken everybody including the community by surprise, no one expected to get to those levels, and what we’re dealing with here is an extraordinary event,” the PM said. Then he left.
In South Lismore, at the Norco ice-cream factory, a business ruined by the floods, Sarah Moran, a lone protester, waited for Morrison at his second scheduled appearance.
Moran brandished a sign saying “SloMo”. She tells the Guardian her brother works in the Norco factory.
Like most here, he lost his home in the floods. Moran waited two hours for Morrison’s arrival.
“When I realised [he] would be a while I just stood out the front, showing the people of South Lismore my signs,” she tells Guardian Australia. “They gave them a toot. They know what he [Morrison] was there for, he’s here for the photo opp, but won’t actually talk to anyone.”
Waitin for a mate
— Sarah Moran 💃 (@SarahMoran) March 9, 2022
Norco ice cream factory in South Lismore. My brother makes ice cream here.
He has no home now.#slomo #lismore pic.twitter.com/xajL2JFA3F
When Morrison was driven in, Moran seized her opportunity.
“I yelled at him for a good 10 minutes, because there was no one else here,” she says.
“My chest hurt. He hasn’t even offered a living wage, and you’re talking about people who were poor before. How dare you. You’ve got people who work here, they make the ice-cream, they’ve got no homes.”
Morrison, perhaps wary of the 2019 bushfires disaster, didn’t stop to shake hands with victims in front of the press. He denied allegations of stage-managing his visit, saying some people didn’t want cameras in their faces amid disaster.
But he also didn’t stop to talk to others.
Also outside the factory was Marcus and Leonie Bebb.
“We copped the brunt of it,” Marcus Bebb says. “Everybody did, but … we got it from all directions, left, right and centre.”
The Bebbs say they talked to a representative from Morrison’s office, asking for five minutes to chat with the prime minister.
Marcus was told Morrison was “running late”. “He said they had a deadline, then got in one of the cars.”
They lived 500 metres down the road in a part of South Lismore that was devastated by the floods.
Marcus whips out his phone and plays a video of his house during the peak of the disaster. It’s shocking.
In the darkness, Marcus and Leonie are wading through their inundated home, commentating as they go.
“Push the fridge this way and follow the wall,” Marcus tells his wife, as they make their way through a flooded kitchen, appliances bobbing in the water.
Leonie Bebb spent six hours on their roof. At one point, she saw a cow, desperate to survive, try to climb into a boat to escape the flood waters.
Asked what they thought of Morrison’s visit, Marcus is frank.
He’s not furious at the prime minister’s Lismore appearance, unlike others, and avoided the protest at the council chambers because it was political. Climate change isn’t his most pressing concern, he says.
His family are homeless.
“Yeah money is great, yeah making plans and rebuilding and fixing flood mitigation, yeah that’s stuff that’s got to be done,” he says.
“But 4pm on a Wednesday, and I’m looking for a house. I’m looking for a roof. I’m looking for somewhere to put my family.”
