Fire, flood and wishful thinking: Why we’re not ready for Victoria’s climate future

Gloria and Ian Brereton survive on a dark kind of wishful thinking. Their hope is that by the time the next flood sweeps through their little house in Mooroopna in rural Victoria, they’ll be dead.“We’re sort of towards the end of our lives,” says the seventy-something Gloria as she prepares pasties in a kitchen overlooking her lush back garden. “So I think, well, hopefully … we won’t be around for the next one.”In the big 2022 flood, water bubbled up through the drains in their street, then swamped their brick veneer home in a metre of water. It came mixed with a big dose of sewage.Gloria in the back garden she loves in Lenne Street, Mooroopna.Justin McManusFor a fortnight, the brew sat unmoving, unable to drain from one of Mooroopna’s lowest-lying streets – Lenne Street – into the swollen Goulburn River. The local pump had stopped working.“The smell was disgusting,” Gloria says.In time, the insurance company fixed their house. But while planning rules in this area now require new homes to be built above flood level, theirs was a repair job, so the house was returned to its original state. Gloria and Ian’s mental health was not so easily restored.“Ian reckons if it ever happens again, he’ll hang himself,” Gloria says as her husband tinkers with the gutters outside.“That’s how much it stresses him.”Wishful thinking might seem an elderly couple’s only option in one of Australia’s most at-risk towns, but it’s not a viable state policy response. With average global temperature increases soon forecast to sail past the 1.5-degree target set in the Paris Agreement, the carbon that humankind has pumped into the atmosphere is already changing the weather. No matter what is done to reduce emissions, more violent weather, sea level rise, flooding, bushfire and drought are baked in.Flooding in Mooroopna in 2022.Jason SouthWe’ll need to adjust where and how we build, what streets look like, what protective infrastructure is needed, and consider retreating from some places altogether. Federal minister Chris Bowen told Good Weekend this was primarily a state responsibility. And in Victoria, officially, some progress has been made.Former premier Jacinta Allan’s 2025-26 state budget put $264 million towards adaptation (though almost one-third of that was earmarked for recovery from that year’s bushfires).The Planning and Environment Act has been amended to contain an objective to respond to climate change, and the government is now updating its eight Adaptation Action Plans – though most people are probably unaware of their existence.Stated objectives include building energy back-up systems, planting urban trees and preparing emergency services for more violent weather.Perhaps most important has been the state’s takeover (from councils) of flood mapping and the responsibility for subsequent planning amendments. Melbourne Water has been progressively releasing fine-grained municipal flood maps as they are completed.Apart from this, say climate, planning, local government and housing experts, much of Victoria’s work is high level and poorly communicated. Unlike federal and NSW ministers, Victoria’s recently re-confirmed planning minister, Sonya Kilkenny, refused an interview or to answer questions for this series.The Victorian budget for adaptation is dwarfed by the $2 billion the state has spent reducing emissions. In the words of last year’s upper house Inquiry into Climate Resilience: “Actions identified by the [government] strategy were underfunded and underresourced.” The burden falls on individuals and local councils – those least able to afford it.Infrastructure Victoria’s acting chief executive Jill Riseley says the state is spending vastly less preparing for the future than on responding to natural disasters, which cost $2.7 billion per year on average for the past 10 years, and $3.5 billion after the 2022 floods alone.“We need to flip,” Riseley says. “Resilience has to be designed, funded, and governed upfront, not improvised after each disaster.”In some ways, say planning experts, state policy even pushes against adaptation.In attempting to build 800,000 new homes in a decade, for example, the government has downgraded environmental regulations.Says Kate Cotter, the chief executive of the Resilient Building Council – set up to help prepare Australia’s housing stock for climate change – the task of adaptation needs “investment and political will”.“The demand is there. It’s now just about co-ordination and scale. And we do look to government to help drive that.”For 39 years, Sally Gibson has lived in the large Elwood home where she raised her family. At 70, she’s turning her mind to downsizing, but says local buyers are nervous about investing in the blue-chip suburb as they learn about the increasing risk it will flood.Sally Gibson, a member of the Elwood Canal Action Team.Justin McManusUpmarket Elwood and its neighbours Brighton, Middle Park, Port Melbourne and St Kilda are in Victoria’s most densely populated municipality, and built partly on reclaimed land, dredged river deltas, swamps and marshes. During storm surges, water cannot make it out to sea, so the streets fill up – sometimes catastrophically.A 2024 coastal hazard assessment for the Port Phillip municipality showed the flood threat would “increase significantly” with any sea level rise beyond 0.5 metres. At 1.1 metres – a realistic forecast under climate change scenarios issued by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – “a quarter of land in the LGA is within the inundation hazard extent”.Gibson was quoted $4864 for building insurance this year. She decided to stop insuring her house altogether. Still, the Port Phillip planning scheme contains no flood or inundation overlay – only a “special building overlay” designed to denote low-level flooding associated with drainage.The council’s submission to last year’s upper house inquiry said without adaptive measures, the municipality faced up to $40 billion in economic damage by 2100. Seventy-eight per cent of residents wanted better information, which Gibson says would drive more effective action.“We must speak out – Baby Boomers are trying to downsize for housing for younger families, but this is affecting our ability to move on,” says Gibson, the secretary of the Elwood Canal Action Team.“A real estate agent recently told me that he’d just had five buyers for a property like mine, and two or three had fallen through because of fears of flooding in the area … A conspiracy of silence means nothing is being done to arrest it – and we could be doing things.”Gibson believes a series of valves and floodgates, and higher walls on the canal would help. Overland water from neighbouring municipality Glen Eira should be trapped on their side of the border in sports grounds converted to retarding basins, she says. Instead, new medium- and high-density developments are going up there, making the ground less permeable and generating more and faster run-off. The state is building a $65 million drain that Gibson’s group insists will protect only 11 per cent of flood prone properties.Port Phillip mayor Alex Makin says the state government is stymying council efforts: “It doesn’t have something as simple as an ongoing program for beach re-nourishment, or the rebuilding of infrastructure and the adaptation of infrastructure,” he says.The council faces huge repair costs which are rising at “a pace far exceeding inflation” for things like piers, sea walls and walkways, while rate rises are capped to a state-mandated 2.75 per cent, Makin says. Updating the planning scheme with new overlays to account for a worsening environment has been delayed for months, even years, as councils await approval from the minister.Port Phillip mayor Alex Makin says the council is being stymied by state government inaction.Justin McManusGovernment advisory body the Victorian Marine and Coastal Council issued an alarming report in June saying the state’s entire coastline was at similar risk. Without action, sea level rise and extreme weather would cause $337 billion in damage to land and property by 2100, it wrote.The government says coastal erosion, inundation, storm surge and sea level rise are already considered in the state’s planning system. But the advisory council points out much of it is based on an outdated sea-level-rise benchmark of 82 centimetres, and the science says 1.1 metres is on the way. This disparity made for “fragmented decision-making, inconsistent application of risk and rising exposure for assets, infrastructure and people,” the council said.It was a clear warning. But it was also the council’s final report to government – the state has abolished it to save money.Where and how Victoria develops is crucial to climate change adaption – putting the planning system at the argument’s centre. But when planner Jane Keddie looks at the priorities of that system, she sees climate change nowhere near the top of the list. What instead underpins planning is a policy to build 800,000 new homes by 2034, she says.Making those new buildings environmentally sustainable and liveable into the future “is frequently seen as a luxury extra – an add-on, or green tape, that can be sacrificed when we need to deliver so-called affordability,” says Keddie, the Planning Institute of Australia’s Victorian vice president.This has two aspects: building quality and their locations.Under the national building code, new homes must meet a seven-star energy rating – but there is no climate-resilience requirement built in to the code and no timeline for that to happen. In Victoria, Keddie says the emphasis on speed of approvals has removed other key standards from consideration, including provisions that seek to improve “adaptation, integrated water management, solar orientation for townhouses, landscaping, the siting of canopy trees to provide shade, and biodiversity”.In 2022, councils representing about half the state’s population put forward their own planning rules to boost environmental building standards. Then they waited. The planning minister’s approval never came. The government plans to make these rules standard across the state, but the leading councils argue those standards will take some of them backwards. Municipal Association of Victoria chief executive Kelly Grigsby is frustrated at what she calls “state government inaction”.When it comes to where houses are located, the most life-threatening environmental hazards are heat and bushfire, but the most expensive is flooding. The risk disproportionately affects poorer people, says a recent Victorian Council of Social Service report because flood-prone land is cheaper to buy, and upgrading a home to resist inundation, or buying sufficient insurance, is costly.To guide where developments can be built, in a widely applauded initiative, the state government last year took over responsibility for updating flood maps and the planning scheme amendments that follow. This replaced what the government calls a “fragmented council-by-council approach”.Melbourne Water has already released maps for eight municipalities to the consternation of those who believe they will reduce their property price. Yarra Mayor Stephen Jolly described his constituents “choking on their croissants” on the morning their maps were published. Melbourne Water has taken to issuing a statement to residents saying, “updating flood models themselves do not create flood risk”.Consistent statewide mapping is an important step, Keddie says. But what should follow – planning overlays that identify land as subject to inundation, or at risk of erosion or landslip – have only followed in a few cases and more could be years away.Overlays help planners make judgments about where to build. Without them, they cannot consider many hazards. Under fast-track rules, developments up to six storeys high are “deemed to comply” with planning laws and can be approved by the state planning department, even in vulnerable landscapes and “even when an application will result in more people being exposed to that hazard”, Keddie says. These decisions will likely result in more housing being approved on floodplains.Even where flood mapping has been undertaken, it does not consistently reflect the latest IPCC sea-level rise predictions of 1.1 metres, Keddie says.The biggest change to Victoria’s cityscape in decades, the government’s activity centres and priority precincts program, aims to build higher-density living close to public transport zones. While this is a worthy aim, Keddie says, a “carve out” in government rules means planning for these precincts is not required to include reports on climate change considerations. While flood modelling is being undertaken, there seems to be no correlation between that and the plans that subsequently emerge, she says.Keddie agrees Victoria needs more homes, but says they should remain liveable under climate change and located where there are few climate hazards. Pushing aside environmental considerations stores up pain and cost for the future.“It would be lovely to say to people, ‘just don’t build in those areas of floodplain or bushfire-prone areas’,” says Simon Croft, the chief executive of industry and policy at the Housing Industry Association. “But at the same time, pretty much the land that we do have left available to build on has more and more environmental overlays on it. So that is a significant push-pull issue.”On the ground, meanwhile, housing is being built on clearly at-risk land. In 2023, Campaspe Shire Council approved a 16-townhouse development in Echuca, on a site that just five months earlier had been under water in the 2022 floods.Developer Denham Design wants to build 16 townhouses at 166 Bowen Street, Echuca (rear), which was flooded late last year.Chris JansonThe council rejected a warning from the water catchment management authority that the development was “likely to result in danger to … life, health and safety”.Residents appealed to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT), which found the concerns of the water authority and residents not relevant in making its decision.When approached for an interview on all these issues, planning minister Sonya Kilkenny declined, issuing a three-paragraph statement instead, one of which attacked the opposition.“Victoria is building thousands more homes than any other state while making sure communities are better prepared for future risks,” the statement said.“Our reforms are about protecting lives and property where the risk is greatest, while providing greater certainty about where homes and businesses can be built safely.”Associate Professor Trivess Moore, of the RMIT’s research group Sustainable Building Innovation Laboratory, is not reassured.“We’re making the mistakes we’ve seen the politicians make previously; to build more quickly at the expense of more good-quality housing.”Shepparton flooded in 2022.Jason SouthFor most Australians, planning rules make little difference because they live in existing homes. The Housing Industry Association’s Croft says those eight to 10 million houses are where the main climate danger lies, and where “there is significant opportunity for improvement”.The mayor of Greater Shepparton, Shane Sali, knows this well. His municipality sits at the confluence of three waterways – Seven Creeks, and the Goulburn and Broken rivers. In 2022, all three flooded at the same time. Eighty homes were partly or totally destroyed.“It was our biggest flood in living memory,” Sali says.The Australian Rainfall and Runoff report suggests that, by 2090, rainfall intensity here will increase by 11 per cent. A consequence has been the retreat of insurance companies. ARC Justice, an organisation advocating for the legal and tenancy rights of north-central Victorians, says some insurance quotes in Greater Shepparton had jumped by $10,000 after the floods.Shepparton Mayor Shane Sali .An ARC study, Impossible Decisions, found many struggled to pay and removed flood cover or gave up insurance entirely. One-third of respondents said they now had no flood cover, while 8 per cent were under-insured. All this has serious consequences for buying and selling homes and securing a mortgage.ARC chief executive Damian Stock says, “the stress of being under or uninsured” can be overwhelming for people who have endured a disaster. Even spells of normal bad weather can trigger trauma.“Some participants [in community meetings] were concerned at the implications of increased stress on rates of family violence and even suicide,” says Stock. Anecdotally under-insured householders are more likely to take life-threatening risks to try to save property.If nothing changes, says the Municipal Association of Victoria’s Grigsby, “one in four regional properties are predicted to be uninsurable by 2030 due to climate risk”.“This will fundamentally hurt people if we don’t take it seriously,” Keddie says, “and I’m concerned we’re not taking it seriously enough.”Greater Shepparton mayor Sali insists his council is doing its bit. Since last year, flood overlays in the local planning scheme mean new buildings must be 30 centimetres higher than a flood that has a 1 per cent chance of happening in any year. New housing developments now include subtle landscaping leading up to front doors substantially higher than street level.As for existing homes, the council has mapped the floor level of all of them. The Goulburn-Broken Catchment Management Authority has fed the information into an online tool, the Community Flood Intelligence Portal. Anyone – owners, potential buyers, insurers – can open the map, pick a house and download a report showing its vulnerability to inundation.“We’re trying to make as much information about our flood risk across our catchment as public as possible,” says floodplain manager Joel Leister, “to enable people to … adapt themselves … understand and prepare.”This is a rarity so far in Victoria. The recent upper house committee found available data was overly technical, hard to find and unclear.Infrastructure Victoria’s Jill Riseley says this is not good enough. “We don’t have landslide susceptibility projections, we don’t have updated flood maps, and we don’t have projections around damaging winds … we really need to understand what the projections are,” she says.The Resilient Building Council, an independent, not-for-profit organisation, provides adaptive information house by house.It produces a tool that evaluates the exposure of homes to hazards from bushfire to flood, storm, cyclone and heatwave, and practical tips about how to mitigate the risk – from sticking down tiles to sealing gaps.CEO Kate Cotter lost her home in the Black Saturday fires and sees good information as a “duty of care as a country to our residents … absolutely a no-brainer.” The council has even designed and distributes plans for a fully resilient house, called the Fortis House.Cotter acknowledges this pushes the stress and cost of adaptation onto individual householders – and councils – “the two parties that can least afford it”. But she says Australia’s mass adoption of rooftop solar proves people will spend money on their homes where they see value.A recent Housing Resilience Action Plan formulated by organisations including analytics firm Finity, the Financial Rights Legal Centre, and ARC Justice, believes we should be told the risk of bushfire, flood, storm, cyclone and heatwave when we buy or rent so we can prepare.For now, though, the place most of us look when contemplating a move is a real estate website. On ads for homes in Lenne Street – the low-lying street in one of the most flood-prone towns in Victoria – you wouldn’t think there was a problem.One recent listing described it as “one of Mooroopna’s most sought-after locations”.Socialising the riskRather than leave the cost of adaptation to individuals, the Insurance Council of Australia wants a state and federal government-funded flood defence fund of $30 billion over 10 years – half spent on community infrastructure such as levies, pumps, and drainage, and the rest on property-level solutions such as raising homes or relocating people. The Housing Industry Association agrees that more “community-level infrastructure” is required.“There’s only so much you can keep putting [construction] measures onto a dwelling before it becomes unaffordable,” says Croft.Victoria’s councils say they struggle with the cost of repairing existing infrastructure, let alone improving it. In the Macedon Ranges, according to the upper house committee report, a single windstorm in 2021 cost the shire $21 million – a quarter of the previous year’s total budget spending. In Bass Coast Shire, which has 8 per cent of Victoria’s coastline, the cost of repairing erosion and storm damage has doubled in five years.In the City of Melbourne, says Lord Mayor Nick Reece, stormwater drains are deteriorating, but are so expensive to upgrade the project keeps being pushed back. “It’s a looming crisis that’s coming for city infrastructure, coastal infrastructure, and it’s not going away,” he says.Back in Lenne Street, Gloria points out the drainage works at the back of her house, where a huge new pump and drain are being dug. The old pump failed in 2022 and this is the council’s response. “I don’t know if we’re going to be saved if the river floods us again, but we’re going to have a better chance than what we’ve ever had,” she says, hopefully.Big money flows in to rebuild after a natural disaster, much of it from the federal government’s Disaster Recovery Fund Arrangements. But Municipal Association of Victoria CEO Kelly Grigsby says it only pays for “like for like” replacement, so repaired roads and bridges are sometimes quickly destroyed in the next disaster. Any “betterment” comes at council or, occasionally, state expense.Greater Shepparton mayor Sali says one thing above all would help his town – a second crossing over the Goulburn River built “well above any flood level”. The sole existing crossing was cut off in 2022, leaving the shire reliant on the army to link people to services.After decades as a funding priority for the council, the second crossing finally won joint state and federal approval under the Morrison government. Then the cost blew out and Labor federal infrastructure minister Catherine King scotched it in 2023 – a year after the flood.“In my opinion,” says Sali, “the dollar is determining what they, or how they, respond to emergency management.”Stay, or go?Where Victoria has mostly got it right is in bushfire protection. Since Black Saturday in 2009, all new buildings in at-risk zones have been given a “BAL” rating – for Bushfire Attack Level – and the state government updates the rating and risk-mapping frequently. In last summer’s bushfires, houses built to those standards, by and large, survived, says Croft, unlike many older homes.Even with higher building standards, however, climate scientists say some areas will simply become too dangerous to inhabit. The only option then will be planned retreat, or “managed transition,” where people are helped to leave a disaster-prone area forever.The Black Saturday Royal Commission recommended in 2010 a voluntary buy-back scheme, but the Brumby government didn’t take up the idea, saying it would be too expensive and would rip communities apart.The emblem of that debate was one street in Kinglake West – Pine Ridge Road – where every house was destroyed and 21 people died. Its topography alone carries serious risk – it’s on top of a ridge covered with lush national park which, according to late fire ecologist Kevin Tolhurst, made it potentially deadly even on a normal fire-risk day.Many experts believe it’s now time to revisit the issue of managed retreat, not just in bushfire zones, but also in places prone to flooding. But this is much more than a simple real estate transaction. Can people at risk be forced to sell? At what price? Who pays? Where will they resettle? Will their communities fall apart?Until now, the Victorian government has remained allergic to the idea. A report by the parliament’s environment committee after the 2022 floods said buybacks were “likely to cost the Victorian government a considerable amount of money and be contentious within communities”.The environment department has since acknowledged it’s planning to develop statewide guidance on the issue for coastal and marine areas. Bass Coast council’s manager of future places, Donna Taylor, says the likelihood of combined river flooding and coastal inundation means in her shire, this is an active conversation.“In towns like Silverleaves [on Phillip Island] and parts of Inverloch, the data available to us indicates the threat is such that you just can’t engineer your way out,” Taylor says. “Communities are asking us to have a really good look at it … I think they are feeling quite frustrated at the lack of certainty at the moment.”Shepparton’s mayor Sali said his council had advocated with the state for some kind of buyback scheme after the 2022 flood but had been “getting, clearly, nothing”. Glenn Arnold, president of the Inverloch Surf Lifesaving Club, told the upper house committee that, “The layers of [state government] bureaucracy are ultimately just crippling any decision-making and paralysing any action.”On Pine Ridge Road, much has changed since 2009. The houses are built to a fire-resistant standard, new people have bought in, and summer bushfire warnings have radically improved. The bush has grown back as thick as ever, long-time residents say. Many we spoke to say they leave early on high-risk days.Asked why she lives here, artist and architecture graduate Emma Pattenden allows her eyes to drift over the stunning vista down the wooded hills towards Strathewen. “I mean, the view,” she says.“Just being in nature. It’s quieter, it’s calmer. There’s a nice community … just having a lifestyle that’s a bit slower and maybe mindful.”Pine Ridge Road residents Emma Pattenden and her partner Jason Svarc.Eddie JimHer partner, Jason Svarc, was out of town on Black Saturday when his old house burned down. He rebuilt and moved back. But the peace can quickly disappear. “On a catastrophic day,” says Pattenden, “I’m not hanging around. I don’t need that stress in my life, the panic.”And the things she leaves behind? “In the end, it’s just stuff,” she shrugs.The Resilient Building Council’s reason for being is to make our homes safer in a worsening climate. But even CEO Kate Cotter agrees, “it’s not always going to be effective or make sense where the risk is just so extreme that there’s no point”.“We just keep getting hit by disasters, then throw all our money at recovery. There’s so much suffering and cost that’s avoidable and there’s so much demand from the community.“They really do just want help to adapt.”With Caitlin FitzsimmonsLifeline: 13 11 14Get to the heart of what’s happening with climate change and the environment. Sign up for our fortnightly Environment newsletter.