Andrew Fraser
GEORGE W. Bush and Gough Whitlam stand as role models to avoid in the treatment of natural disasters.
Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina after it hit New Orleans in 2005 was one of the low points of his tenure in the White House, while Whitlam was slammed over his seemingly slow reaction to the fate of Darwin after it had been ravaged by Cyclone Tracy in 1974.
All of which would have been playing on Anna Bligh’s mind as she started the first few days of her holiday after Christmas Day while floodwaters started hitting southwestern Queensland at first, then eastern Queensland.
The floods started becoming disastrous on Monday, December 27, and on Wednesday, December 29, she returned from Sydney to start touring flooded areas. She had New Year’s Eve back with the family but other than that she has been a constant presence in flooded areas.
Bligh has convened an emergency cabinet meeting and appointed a military man, Major General Mick Slater, as head of the Recovery Task Force.
This is a lesson learned from the cyclone that hit Innisfail in 2006, when the recovery phase was going quite well but the government was being slammed for not having a figure directing operations.
Consequently they signed up former Australian Defence Force chief Peter Cosgrove, who provided a commanding and reassuring presence and certainly looked like a man in charge.
So Bligh may have ticked all the boxes, and after an initial doubt about how to handle the situation, the opposition is playing it low-key as well.
Liberal National Party leader John-Paul Langbroek and his spokesman made some early criticisms of the government effort but then realised that at times of crisis, the context is different.
Voters want their government to do well, and normal political attacks can be seen as undermining the efforts of the government to help people under duress. So while Langbroek is out and about in the floods, he’s doing so in a low-key way.
But Langbroek, and Bligh for that matter, realise that with these floods, it’s the longer term that counts.
Look at the tragic bushfires in Victoria in early 2009: at the time, they were seen as a natural disaster, but over time, they finished the careers of several bureaucrats and arguably played a role in the defeat of John Brumby’s government in the December election.
Likewise, when the reviews of why these floods came about, they are not likely to be kind to the state government or local councils.
While planning is a local government issue, all plans have to be approved by the state government. Likewise, the dams are under the control of the state government.
And working in a strained environment such as flood recovery, some mistakes are bound to be made.
At the time, people cut a fair bit of slack with these mistakes; after the event, in a completely different context, they take on more sinister overtones.
With an election due by March next year, this year was supposed to be all about good news for Bligh. The strategy was to get the unpopular privatisations out of the way, then spend this year telling people about the ways they’d spent the money from those sales.
The economic effect of the floods will make the delivery of such largesse considerably more difficult. Bligh estimated that the cost of the floods was well over $5 billion and rising. The slowdown in economic activity caused by the floods will also mean that government income will be affected: coal royalties, for example, a cash cow for the government which was predicted to bring in $3.6bn this year, will almost certainly be well under this.
When asked during the week if the cost of the floods meant that the cost-of-living relief of which she’d spoken was likely to be cancelled, Bligh replied that it was “far too early to speculate”.
But disasters such as the floods occurring in Queensland can make or break political fortunes. Both Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott visited parts of the flooded regions this week.
In the worst affected Queensland city, Rockhampton, Mayor Brad Carter has suggested a government buyback of houses in low-lying areas in the long term to get people out of flood-prone areas.
The city straddles the Fitzroy River — which has the second-largest catchment in Australia after the Murray-Darling — and has had five big floods in the past half century.
Carter said this week his council would need to consider a better planning use for flood-prone areas, such as creating sporting fields.
“Can we get some other form of engineering solution that addresses the flooding issues, can we look at creating better drainage systems, [or] building new facilities to a higher level, above flood areas?” he asked.
Local Government Association of Queensland president Paul Bell said the disaster should encourage government at all levels to reassess their emergency funding and local planning guidelines.
“This has impacted on insurability . . . and all levels of government need to prepare for larger flood numbers,” he said. “I think in many cases you can get away with one event, but do you get away with two or three events in a three-year period? Whether it’s poor planning or climate change, all of a sudden it becomes a complicated world that these communities are trying to rebuild in.”
Authorities in eastern Australia, and at Carnarvon in Western Australia, have been faced with spreading floods for more than a month, since early December, though none have caused the damage and heartbreak that is continuing on and near the Queensland central coast.
Thousands of people were evacuated from their homes in inland NSW last month as well as inland Queensland after towns were flooded, and some isolated, following torrential rains in river catchments.
The desire to save water after years of drought may have contributed to the scale of flooding. Phil McMurray, director of engineering services at the Gundagai Shire Council in NSW, told this newspaper last month the Burrinjuck and Blowering dams had been kept too close to capacity.
“In hindsight, they should have been letting some water out over the past couple of weeks before the big rains,” McMurray said. “Water is such a valuable commodity, they sell it to irrigators, so I guess it’s in their interests not to let it out.
“But it would have been in the interests of the downstream communities if they did.”
But despite billions of dollars in expected agricultural and mining losses, the sudden inland seas are likely to leave behind healthier rivers.
Richard Norris, the director of Canberra University’s Institute for Applied Ecology, said last week much of the water would gravitate towards rivers and low-lying floodplains because subsoils had now reached their maximum levels of water retention.
“When we get floods like this they rejuvenate the river and its ecology,” said Norris.
In turn this poses a political problem for the Gillard government due to demands by irrigators to go slow on reform of Murray River water use.
Source: www.theaustralian.com.au
