Before I share with you the takeaway messages from the report on the floods that have ravaged many Aussies lately, I just want to share with you a great description of too many politicians. It came from former Labor MP and Pick-a-Box TV quiz champion Barry Jones, who described many of them as “political pygmies”.

It might now be politically incorrect to use such terms because the African pygmy is actually a very courageous and feared adversary, despite their distinctive height. It’s a pity we’ve lacked politicians of courage.

Yep, this is a New South Wales story but it’s really part of a bigger national story of dumb short-sighted politicians who’ve allowed housing developments in the wrong floodplain areas and then have failed to have professional, well-paid rescue service teams when mother nature comes knocking.

The Australian’s Max Maddison has read the report and hasn’t pulled any punches in giving us the strident criticism of many of the key players who were charged with the job to rescue residents and businesses threatened by natural disasters. “Five months after they were commissioned by NSW Premier Dom­inic Perrottet, Mick Fuller and Mary O’Kane handed down a 700-plus page report offering a scathing criticism of the state’s emergency response agencies, while outlining 28 recommen­dations to ensure NSW was better prepared for future flooding events,” Maddison told us.

The NSW Premier has come up with a BIG solution that few of his predecessors anywhere have come up with — that’s buying back people’s properties in flood-prone areas!

The Premier has told flood-­hit residents of Lismore they can register for a buyback scheme by the end of this month, and a program will be ready to go by year’s end.

It’s a great idea. It does come seven months out from a NSW election on March 25, where the current Labor opposition leader Chris Minns is looking like a hot chance to send Dom packing.

It’s likely that there is some method in this overdue sensible ‘madness’ that politicians in the past have chosen to ignore until another challenge from nature comes along.

The Premier concedes it will cost billions to buy back people’s homes and there will be plenty of squealing about what the State will pay — valuations of land not fit for residential building will hardly be a high price — but Maddison says $6.5 billion has already been spent on the recovery bill from these floods.

That said, the potential buyback bill could be staggered. “With 88,000 evacuation-threatened residents already living on the Hawkesbury-Nepean Valley flood plain in Sydney’s west, development plans by the NSW government could see that figure reach 135,000 by 2041,” Maddison reported.

This could get messy, massive and very expensive but politicians have to look at the 10,000 damaged properties in the Northern Rivers region and get real about making sure this doesn’t happen again.

On the subject of the rescue service, no one should think about pointing the finger at the people who showed up and did the rescuing, but the report “offered a stinging criticism of the NSW State Emergency Service and ­Resilience NSW, established in 2019, finding the former failed to use available resources or ­current emergency management arrangements”.

Resilience NSW, led by Black Summer bushfires hero Shane Fitzsimmons, was deemed to have done an unprofessional job. Maybe it’s time we, as a country, got real about the threats from floods, fire, drought and cyclones and spent the money to have the world’s best, state-of-the-art rescue services.

All this requires gutsy politicians, who are prepared to tell us that taxes need to be raised if we’re going to protect people from the threats of nature that become national, heart-breaking stories every year. That will take a politician of massive political stature to explain that to a nation.

Ideally, it should come from a Prime Minister supported by State Premiers and Territory leaders, who give up playing politics to save the lives and properties of hundreds of thousands of Australians nearly every year!

And they have to make us understand that if we actually want a better Australia, sometimes we have to pay for it.