QLD floods: what shape will a Royal Commission take?
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A Royal Commission on the Queensland floods should be set up by the Bligh government as soon as possible, an expert in public inquiry says. But unlike the review into Victoria’s deadly Black Saturday fires, any flood inquest is unlikely to become a witch hunt, with the focus on how any future disaster can be avoided. Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman yesterday called for an “open and transparent” inquiry into the flood disaster, which has so far claimed the lives of 15 people and left thousands of houses and business inundated. Premier Anna Bligh is yet to support Newman’s call for a public inquiry, preferring to focus her efforts on the immediate reaction to the flood disaster. Professor Scott Prasser, executive director of the Public Policy Institute at the Australian Catholic University and author of Royal Commissions and Public Inquiries in Australia, advises Bligh to install an inquiry as soon as possible. “The Bligh government should seize this opportunity, tell the people ‘we’ve been working our guts out and when things have settled we’ll set up a review of how things were managed and how they can be done better’,” Prasser told Crikey. “She shouldn’t get herself in a tizzy and think that people are out to get her.” Prasser says that there had been a “pretty good track record” for public inquiries in Australia, citing the Royal Commission on the Longford Gas Plant Accident, the Victorian Bushfire Royal Commission and the Royal Commission on the loss of HMAS Voyager as examples. “What makes a Royal Commission so effective is that it can collect evidence in the way a court does,” he said. “They can make you give evidence or appear as a witness, even if down the track it will see you end up in the clink. It’s a public inquiry, not an internal inquiry run by politicians.” The floods inquiry is likely to draw comparisons with the review into the 2009 Victorian bushfires, which claimed the lives of 173 people. Premier John Brumby instigated the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission on February 16, nine days after the horrific Black Saturday fires tore through the state. At the 2009 commission, chaired by ex-Supreme Court judge Bernard Teague and assisted by Ron McLeod and Susan Pascoe, former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon came under scrutiny for her actions on Black Saturday, in particular keeping a hairdressing appointment, a meeting with her biographer and a dinner reservation at a restaurant. Many questions are set to be asked in the aftermath of the flood waters, including the actions of emergency services, the location of housing developments and the performance of flood mitigation devices like Wivenhoe Dam. Still, Prasser believes it won’t become a witch hunt like the Victorian commission. “Royal Commissions into disasters can often fall into two categories,” Prassar explained. ”They can be looking to find someone responsible, someone to blame or they can be more of a fact-finding exercise. I think any potential Royal Commission into the foods will fall into that latter category; at this stage it doesn’t look like there is anyone really to blame for this disaster.” One disaster which did not result in a Royal Commission was the 2003 ACT bushfires, which claimed the lives of four people. A coroner’s inquiry was held on that occasion, but Prasser says more needs to be done in response to the Queensland floods to scrutinise policy processes that have been put in place. “What I would do is commission a multi-member inquiry, preferably chaired by someone with real expertise about water; a hydrologist or an academic-type person,” he said. “I don’t think you necessarily need a judge in charge or an ex-judge; maybe a QC-type person would be appropriate. I would also get someone in who was an expert in disaster management, preferably someone from another state or overseas who is not directly involved in the floods.” Prasser says an issues paper should be released in the first month, detailing everything up for discussion, with the entire process resolved in six months. “There are some complex technical issues which don’t have black and white answers,” Prasser said. “We want to review how we handled it, what are some of the things we can do better, were response times appropriate and so on. Things that can be improved in the future.” Campbell Newman says residents want to under the deluge. ”Many people have died and it is appropriate that this be done,” Newman said in The Australian. “I certainly think there needs to be a public inquiry into how the state and local governments, across Queensland, can better protect their communities from the risks of flooding that we will have in future with extreme weather events. “I would be more than happy to front up and put my views on the table about these matters and I welcome such an inquiry. Everyone has to front up, accept what has happened and be accountable.” |
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43 Comments
rights and wrongs of a royal commission aside, would Professor Prasser use the expression “shouldn’t get herself in a tizzy” to describe the thinking processes of any male politician?
The good old Aussie habit of blaming and the political habit of point-scoring and the media habit of saying ain’t in awful, all will be in full flight if there is something called a Royal Commission. Regardless of its merits as process, the title invites the belief that there was incompetence or skulduggery. This was a natural disaster. People did very well. Queenslanders did very well. Lessons to be learned, no doubt, but let’s have a process that is kindly and decent and doesn’t invite the blamers and snarlers.
A witchhunt. You think?
Final summing up at Royal Commission -
“And thus in conclusion, your Honour, I beg you to look past her baby face, and realise that La Niña was the culprit, aided and abetted by Mr.Climate Change. I hope you will recommend they both be charged by the Department of Public Prosecutions.”
Campbell Newman is absolutely out of line.
First of all, the emergency is still in progress and there are people still in mortal danger.
Second, a Royal Commission is what you call when you need to compel witnesses, i.e when you believe somebody has something to hide.
In contrast, a Parliamentary Inquiry is for asking, “How well did we handle it and how can we prepare better for next time?”
It rained. Full stop. It’s not like the bushfires where many were started by humans or power lines on hot as hell days.
It rained. Things flooded. This happens in the tropics.
I bet the people of Sri Lanka and Brazil who also had floods this week won’t start the blame game, and 7 million Pakistanis still in tents have not asked for a royal commission.
Most times a natural disaster is juat a natural disaster.
No-one stood around with hoses on to drown Brisbane and Campbell is an idiot.
Again we have the dilemma of a natural disasters and trying to identify the controllable risks relating to property damage and loss of life. Soon we will also have to address the issue of compensation and the inequity associated with handouts to those who are not insured whilst those who have been prudent suffer receive little or no assistance. I have little sympathy for those who expect the community to bail them out when due to a lack of foresight or deliberate bloody mindedness they have not taken out adequate insurance cover this for foreseeable insurable risk.
Similarly I have little sympathy for people who knowingly built in flood prone areas where recent experience such as the 1974 Brisbane floods would indicate a significant recurring risk. However in this instance the average punter may have been misled by a combination of corrupt politicians and developers suppressing information from public access.
It would be appropriate for Premier Bligh to order a full judicial enquiry into the whole mess, although I suspect that such leadership qualities as displayed during the disaster will evaporate quickly once the apparatchiks and faceless men in Labor Party identify the risk exposure arising from such an enquiry. I predict that calls for a full judicial enquiry will rapidly dissipate under this pressure.
Could the Royal Commission start with the obvious problem? Brisbane is built on a flood plain. Everything, if you’ll excuse the expression, flows from there
A Commission of Inquiry of some sort into the entire rolling series of flooding incidents - from the lead ups through to the adequacy of warnings and all the recovery efforts - is essential. An inquiry can be very valuable in figuring how to do things better next time - whether that be warnings, preparedness or protection.
But while I hope Professor Prasser is correct is stating that there won’t be some people wanting to turn into a witch hunt or someone to pin the blame on, I’m afraid I don’t share his confidence.
The flood waters hadn’t even got to Brisbane and there were at least two LNP MPs were publicly blaming the greenies (and Labor who is allegedly in thrall to them) for a lack of dams which would allegedly have prevented or alleviated the floods). I’ve also seen people blaming council planning, property developers, climate change, government cheapskating on infrastructure while wasting money on pink batts, school halls and the NBN. Of course there is also climate change as a possible culprit, in which case we can collectively blame ourselves.
Examining the plausability of climate change being a factor in such severe weather events also needs to be done. There is not much point doing this as a blame-pointing exercise (although one assumes climate change skeptics will run interference on this as they in every other context), but as part of figuring out the best response.
If weather events like the Toowoomba/Lockyer Valley inland tsunami (which I think can fairly be called unprecedented, at least since British colonisation of the continent commenced) are going to happen more frequently, I don’t know how we can protect / defend people against that (assuming we don’t want to all live behind 100 foot high walled cities completely removed from any waterways), apart from perhaps more rapid warning systems.
Can I correct my own stupid comment? Too quick to read, too slow to think - the Royal commission is into the floods in Queensland, not just Brisbane. But the comment on Brisbane still stands - especially after listening to Ed Blakely’s comments vis a vis re-building New Orleans on Radio National this morning.
I agree with Greg on the issue of compensation. Already there are suggestions from the media that insurance companies should be flexible and generous in addressing claims. This is code for paying claims not covered under the policy. It has been common knowledge for years that flood damage (as defined in the policy) is not covered unless it has been obtained by paying an additional premium. Moreover, there are always people who for whatever reason do not insure their houses at all. Insurance companies should not be pressured into paying any of these spurious claims. It is morally wrong because it rewards those who have not paid for cover and punishes those who have. It is legally wrong because insurance company directors have a duty to act in the best interests of shareholders. In fact there is an argument that no one should be permitted to build, purchase or occupy a house in a flood-prone area unless they are insured against flood losses or sign a release to the effect that, in the event of flood damage, they have no right to claim compensation from anyone.
I agree that there needs to be a review. (One additional topic, incidentally, would be the adequacy of current practices in insurance, bank lending, planning and conveyancing. Unlike in Victoria at least, Queensland vendors are not required to include flood information in their pre contractual disclosures. Some people are saying that they have planning approval to build in a flood prone area, a bank has given them a mortgage but they can’t get insurance against a flood.)
I also agree that public confidence would be helped by a public inquiry.
But a judicial inquiry would be inappropriate and too expensive. It would be far better to establish an inquiry which operated on scientific, not legal principles, particularly the adversarial legal principles of the Anglo-US system in Australia.
Don’t forget those who said the refugees should be sent home because we can’t “afford” them anymore.
How on earth we blame batts, NBN, school halls and refugees for this is beyond me.
Sometimes it really does just rain.
I bet Brazil and Sri Lanka, Pakistan and China, Burma and Thailand, Indonesia and other nations where natural disasters happen don’t run off and blame their government and infrastructure - except in the case of the Chinese earthquake where schools were badly built.
And we don’t have to keep maundering on about our supposed “unique” spirit do we? The people of Sri Lanka have survived 35 years of war, starvation and natural disasters without this carry on.
Pakistan has had 20 million victims helped by their neighbours, after their terrible earthquake so-called terrorists helped them.
Haitians are living on fresh air and hope.
And guess what? They all fight to survive without all this whining and patting themselves on the back like we do.
@ Marilyn
“And guess what? They all fight to survive without all this whining and patting themselves on the back like we do.”
Dunno about that bit, M. I’ve lived in a fair few places (but not Bangladesh or Pakistan, I acknowledge) and a local version usually crops up when a) something minor (like sporting success) goes right, or b) something major (like a natural disaster) goes wrong and public motivation not governmental agency is required to even begin to fix it. Or when the pollie or pundit spouting the cliche is running out of worthwhile boosts to offer.
I did think KRudd’s remark that overseas aid was superfluous here because we are the world experts at disaster recovery was pretty odd, though … particularly for a Foreign Minister. I hope Bill “hubris” Shakespeare wasn’t listening.
“And guess what? They all fight to survive without all this whining and patting themselves on the back like we do.”
So you’re saying that I will not find a single example, anywhere, of any of those people criticising their government for not assisting, nor expressing solidarity with, and approval of, the community they live in ?
Certainly the potential usefulness or otherwise of dams should be investigated. The a priori opposition to dams by green groups — who tend to take the view that nature untouched by humans is a perfect thing and human-wrought changes can only be negative — needs to be assessed. But not in a blame-seeking manner.
What’s the point putting someone’s back against a wall? Royal Commissions are an appropriate way to get at the truth for inquiries into corruption or negligence. Not for a comparative assessment of approaches to civil engineering, urban planning, resource management, and disaster risk management. The proper instrument for this is a parliamentary inquiry.
Methinks Lord Mayor Campbell Newman is doing a bit of grandstanding, raising his profile by being the first to make the inevitable dog-whistle call for an RC (because everyone else has the decency to wait until the dead are counted and the bodies recovered) and get in first for a bit of finger-pointing.
Any inquiry may or may not become a witch hunt but questions are already being asked about the running of the Wivenhoe dam. Apparently with forecasts of a La Nina event, dam administrators went into the wet season at near 100% capacity. The Wivenhoe was built to protect Brisbane from another 1974 event and during the flooding was releasing water. As a Brisbane resident I certainly would like to know more; much more.
One would not want to be the manager(s) of Wivenhoe during the enquiry. Looking at the release schedule published by The Australian today, it does look like they left it dangerously late to start really serious releases: 172 GL on Monday and lower before that, then a whopping 645 GL on Tuesday. Cut back to 200 GL on Wednesday. It takes water 36 h to travel from Wivenhoe to Brisbane City so depending on when that cutoff on Tues/Wed occurred, that large wollop of water could have coincided with Bremer & Lockyer flood inflows (downstream from Wivenhoe, thus independent), exacerbated by Wednesday’s high tide. (1 Sydharb=520 GL).
Newman may hope to show up dithering between state ministers, top bureaucrats and the actual Wivenhoe managers, and typically this might have delayed the correct action. But of course the LNP are on record as wanting the water storage level (designated as water supply, nominally 100%) permanently increased (and of course to irresponsibly remove water restrictions). The dam had reached 120% when the storm surge occurred and had a thousand GL inflow into the dam. I get the impression the experts wanted the dam kept to below 80% in the wet season but that was politically fraught. And Queenslanders are a capricious lot and we can guess how they would react, especially with the LNP goading them over wasting water, and punishing us with high water bills too. Remember the Traveston dam was one of the early turning points in Bligh’s popularity, and then the desal debacle (same as all other cities).
Nevertheless it seems like the managers did a pretty reasonable job under such conditions because when the water rose to a tiny bit over the banks (here in New Farm & Teneriffe) on Wednesday, it seemed it would truly cause problems with the coming high tide — but lo, the level barely budged until after Thursday’s afternoon high tide the level started going down. (It is well down now and they should be furiously emptying the dam at one Sydharb per day until they reach that 100%; there is a king tide next week and no one can say if the rain will not return.)
Still for those unlucky enough to live in those perpetually flood-prone areas, an extra metre lower could have made a big difference.
In all likelihood any enquiry might recommend that the politicians and bureaucrats should leave these decisions to the experts, but on the other hand such decisions with potentially huge consequences probably should and will always have political oversight.
Of course anyone who imagines for a nanosecond that the LNP or Campbell Can-do Newman would leave it to experts needs therapy. Any real traffic expert in the world would have told Newman that building more and more absurdly expensive roads and tunnels (while fighting buslanes on “his” regular roads; he closed several the week of his first election) was never going to solve the congestion problem.
In my previous post I wrote “But of course the LNP are on record as wanting the water storage level (designated as water supply, nominally 100%) permanently increased ..”
Just to be clear, if the permanent “water supply” level was re-designated to be 120% (I forget what level the LNP via Jeff Seeney, were recommending, it could have been higher yet), then the consequence is that there is a lot less for flood control — (in this example, 70% because they do not wish to exceed 190% even though they say the dam would be safe at 210%) — which is more or less what happened courtesy of the Lockyer valley storms.
Southern readers might need to be reminded that Brisbane gets most of its annual rain in these short, intense bursts. Thus governments and water managers are always reluctant to throw away any water captured water because we just never know when the next rain will come. Pace the previous 6 years of near-drought.
Oh, and those who would thank Bjelke-Petersen for building Wivenhoe are delusional too. The Country Party did not have a single SEQ/Brisbane electorate so he hated the city types with a vengence. He would have agreed only under extreme duress. Remember he had Liberals in his coalition and occassionally a few who realized that the state needed a functional Brisbane city. It was the Liberal state Treasurer Gordon Chalk who worked with Mayor Clem Jones to transform Brisbane from big country town to sewered and paved city. He had to approve debt financing which Councils are not permitted by themselves.
The last thing “Brisvenice” needs is a grandstanding Lord Mayor. The stories that have been coming out of the city in the past few days beggar belief and if there is to be any form of enquiry then some of that investigation has to be on how such mindless hysteria was raised in such as short space of time.
I left Brisbane on Tuesday night when the roads were weekend like quiet and the river swollen to the brink but access was available to the airport, public transport was running relatively normally - but - if you’d listened to the media and social networking you would have thought the opposite. I was roundly abused and villified on Facebook for suggesting that a bit of calm and rational thought/discussion would be better than the panic that was rising. Totally idiotic comments were being posted by the second, which led to the following examples of humanity at its worst. Tales of people buying 20 2 litre containers of milk in one go (why, for god’s sake), supermarkets being guarded by the police and allowing people in 10 at a time to strip the shelves bare including supermarkets that were nowhere near a flood zone or likely to be isolated, a business on LaTrobe Terrace, Paddington sandbagging - that was the most absurd. If Paddo and the terraces were ever threatened by flood, we’d all be shaking hands with Mrs Noah on an Ark. (And those sandbags could have been used to better effect elsewhere and not wasted sitting on a terrace many dozens of metres above and away from the river.)
I wondered from where these expressions of panic and hysteria were being fueled - and then I saw the media and who was feeding the media. “CanDo” was doing all he could to whip up hysteria and still he’s doing it. In an email on Thursday to his city he starts with; “Make no mistake, Brisbane is experiencing its greatest natural crisis in over a hundred years. Unlike the flood in 1974, the existence of the Wivenhoe Dam has helped absorb the vast majority of the floodwaters. If not for Wivenhoe we would have faced flooding the likes of which we cannot comprehend.” If this is the greatest crisis in a century, then the survivors of 1974 should be up in arms. Furthermore he’s been on the media trail (again) claiming that more flooding was likely as there is the king tide next week, a cyclone and a wet season that lasts for two more months. Being prepared and warned is one thing, mindless chicken little remarks like that are another. I do hope that when CanDo issued his plea for all tradies to come and work for nothing to rebuild the city he will be forgoing some of his vast salary for a period of the clean-up as well. (And if he is stupid enough to stand for re-election in a year’s time, I trust that the people of Brisbane will remember his “leadership”.)
Let’s start any investigation of this natural disaster with the way the media, added and abetted by people who should know better, drove the populace into an frenzy of hysteria and panic that did no-one any credit. I thought we could be better than this in the 21st century.
Here is the flooding history of Brisbane.
http://www.bom.gov.au/hydro/flood/qld/fld_history/brisbane_history.shtml
As can be seen, Brisbane floods are to be expected.
You can be sure that the insurance actuaries will have factored the inevitable flood scenario into their calculations. This means that the flood affected homes will have been underinsured or not insured in many cases.
There are going to be folks owing full mortgages of properties which are now worthless.
Underwater, is the term coined in the US housing sub prime meltdown.
Unfortunately Australians can’t avoid the debt obligations by returning the keys to the mortgagee as in USA. So some Brisbanites are going bankrupt after this.
Suggest the term ‘witch hunt’ will be a mild understatement.
Of course there should be examinations of the flood crisis, looking at its genesis, human behaviour in the course of it that either helped or hindered, measures that may in future reduce the frequency or extent of such events and their human consequences, and of organisational procedures that might be “tweaked” to reduce loss of lives and other forms of loss but it is extremely doubtful whether a “Royal Commission” is the best way to go.
Most of the matters of relevance here involve questions of science and technology on the one hand and of human management and behaviour on the other. They do not rest on questions of legality, probity, and equity of the kind that legal process is primarily designed to deal with.
Lets put the control of inquiries accordingly in the hands of those who are experts in undertaking the sorts of tasks that are really involved here.
Inquiries based on court process almost invariably become confrontational, rather than co-operative. The legal process is simply geared to produce such ends. The Australian media, similarly, love to turn such events into sensationalised circuses, where even trivial differences of view or inconsequential”faults” become causes celebres , laden with invented significance and notions of “blame”. Politicians, of course, invariably jump on the bandwagon, stoking the fires and diverting time and energy from any real understanding of the situation under investigation.
Prasser is either being naive or disingenuous when he suggests otherwise.
He who lives by the media, dies by the media. Come election times, let Mayor Newman be remembered as a demagogue, and Premier Bligh as the woman of the hour.
In most places they accept that natural disasters happen. It’s not like a preventable fire or oil spill.
Sometimes awful things do happen.
Unlike some nations desire to bomb other places to bits.
None of the MSM reported a shameful interview with Sandi Logan from DIAC - 70 jailed asylum seekers with nothing much to their names, mostly Afghans and Iraqis, pooled their last $’s to help.
and Logan accepted it.
Disgusting.
Perhaps we could stop jailing innocent people and save $1 billion per annum.
1. a quick google of bbc will probably bring up a long report I heard on corrupt land use control of flood mitigation by the aristocracy in Pakistan. With locals very upset about that. Suggestions to the contrary seem wrong to me.
2. No one is mentioning the incredible escalation in land clearing in Qld with up to 500K ha a year of clearing over the last 20 years. Consider NSW is 80M ha in total size including the empty desert. To be clearing millions of ha of water retaining vegetation MUST have an impact. But who has the moral courage to address that? Take note former senator Bartlett.
3. I read about Jack Rush QC seriously criticising the incomplete and by implication shallow (?) final report of the Royal Commissier Teague in the 2009 bushfire tragedy. That’s pretty serious posturing by Rush with a central role in the RC.
4. For myself on Vic disaster I drove through the Alpine Hwy on the break and feel more convinced than ever with my legal and evolutionary ecology degree that land use over colonial times is badly under estimated: In that scenario - 1,000 year old wet schleorphyll success stage forest has been replaced with 20-50 year dry schlerophyll regrowth. The minimal evidence of what was actually there before white mechanisation is also fast disappearing. The huge canopy etc. Scientific evidence in the last month was released showing charcoal deposits showing fire history have escalated since Europeans took over the rural lands. In other words and the so called fire stick farming of the Indigenous was nothing like the logging, clearing, fragmenting and resultant burning of the colonialists. And all this broke the forest water cycle. Which brings us back to the linkage with the water cycle and natural vegetation in Qld.
Lastly a political comment on land clearing - B0th the ALP and the Coalition have a shameful record on this policy front. So how would a RC deal with that? There will be GIS data recording catchments a with water flows, and changed land use/damage for the last 20 years or more. But with the government and vested interests like Big Agri funding the main legal players in an RC one fully expects a censorious choreography to be played out UNLESS there is some kind of Fitzgerald style supra moral entity above the moral morass of competing and dare I dishonest interests.
By all means bring on the shallow accusations about greenies and dams, but only if you have the moral credibility to work up the evidence and analysis of land clearing in the water cycle. I won’t hold my breath on that, just as Teague seems to have completely missed the point in the Vic RC.
scroll down and have a look at this map via TWS - those ‘dangerous ratbag greenies’ who are financially independent of vested interests: http://www.wilderness.org.au/campaigns/land-clearing/qld_landclearing
Looks suspiciously like an overlay of SEQld flooding maps? I do wonder.
I thought Beattie stopped land clearing in Queensland.
Most of the damage was done by Menzies after WW11 when he was paying people to strip clear to grow wheat for the mother country.
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1466152/Asylum-seekers-donate-to-flood-appeal
Do you want real human spirit?
Here we have refugees from Afghanistan and Iraq illegally locked up in a Darwin hellhole for asking for help after we have blown their country to bits.
I was sick and ashamed.
SHEPHERDMARILYN…….geez girl how did you get to be so relentlessly miserable.
Agree with much, disagree with much.
Campbell Newman is out of line and is grandstanding. I said on another post, BCC and the Planning and Environment Court have a lot to answer for regarding development on a flood plain. Its very true that flood searches are not done (nor advised by ones solicitors) when buying a house in QLD (in fact that whole system needs to be written off and started again as well, its completely useless.. but I digress) and yes people after getting a mortgage and buying a house have been advised they could not get flood cover, so a review into insurance as relating to natural disasters is needed too.
About the dam - comments here don’t recognise that the Toowoomba event was a freak occurrence - never happened before. Toowoomba is 700m above sea level for petes sake, and the rain that occurred there out of nowhere sent a volume of water equal to Sydney Harbour rushing down towards Brisbane. The reason the dam releases were relatively low until Monday is because they were managing the rain that was occurring and predicted to occur.
There absolutely needs to be an enquiry into the handling is the issue, I don’t think anyone disputes that. But there also needs to be a full-scale enquiry into the sale and development of land - state wide, not just Brisbane, that continues to suffer from an extreme lack of transparency and accountability.
The Lord Mayor and the Premier should both be running for cover.
Mostly correct. The press claimed up to 12 Sydharbs (>6,000 GL) from those storms (but note that Toowoomba lies on the inland side of the ridgeline of the great dividing range so its catchment mostly flows westward to eventually join the Darling). That sounds a tad on the high side and of course a lot of it bypasses Wivenhoe before joining the Brisbane River. But if it is correct it puts things in perspective: the flood compartment of Wivenhoe holds “only” about 3 Sydharbs. At any rate it will remain a major issue of differing opinion about what is the appropriate holding level for the dam. Should it be at 80%, 100% or (as the LNP were arguing before the flood) higher. It was at >120% at the time of the storm surge and surpassed 150% before the massive releases kept it at 2 Sydharbs were flowing into Wivenhoe each day so in such events, at best it becomes a limited controlled release tool (eg. reducing impact at high tide).
As to the land development, nothing will change. And while Campbell Newman may be no different in serving the interests of developers above long term planning, most of the flooded areas were long established.
Living in this pissant country with pissants who lock up children, waste their lives and then pretend that we have this great and special human spirit.
What a load of bullshit.
“Living in this pissant country with pissants who lock up children, waste their lives and then pretend that we have this great and special human spirit.”
So leave. A hate-filled narcissist will not be missed.
With any luck some immigrant more interest in doing rather than saying can take your place.
Getting back to the topic - there will no doubt be a number of reviews coming out of this, but a Royal Commission seems entirely over the top. It was a natural disaster and, given the scale of the crisis, it was handled very well. Royal Commissions are expensive and, because of their adversarial style and publicity, tend to distract and focus on the wrong things. While I’m sure the Bushfires Royal Commission came out with some useful policy, it turned into a media witch-hunt of Christine Nixon and other fine folk who are, quite frankly, doing public service as well as they can. Some short, sharply focused policy inquiries would be much better.
Of course Scott Prasser would favour a Royal Commission - it is his main field of academic inquiry, he’s written a book about them (a very thorough and well researched one, by the way). Tom Cowie therefore is not the innocent reporter here - from the story it appears (although the fomulation ‘Prasser told Crikey’ is ambiguous) that he called Prasser, not the other way round. He would have had a pretty good idea of the sort of response he would get.
However, a Royal Commission in today’sa adversarial media and political climate is not a good approach if the intention is to gather sound evidence for the future. Mostly, they look backwards and look for blame. The first thing a RC does today is hire lawyers, lots of them. The RC counsel try their darndest to uncover criminal or improper activity. They cross-examine witnesses as if they are in court. The Victorian bushfire RC has been mentioned; think also of the Building RC, and even the Longford gas RC (cited in the article as a good example) had as its main finding blame casting at the plant owner Esso.
If you want to find lessons, use an inquiry process that does not involve judges or lawyers. Although - as Prof. Prasser points out - a RC does not necessarily have to involve anyone with a legal background, mostly in recent years they have. Precedent is hard to escape, and it will be difficult for a governemnt to prevent a RC becoming a lawyers picnic. An alternative like either a parliamentary inquiry, or commissioning an independent evaluation, or asking an existing expert body to conduct a review, is more likely to avoid the blame game.
A RC might be useful if it is authorized to call God as a witness and compel Him to answer questions, and if somebody can be found to serve Him a subpoena.
Seriously though, Tom McLoughlin’s point about land use and impairment to the natural water cycle should serve as a springboard for deciding what to do from here. Unless people are still interested in fighting never-ending history wars.
There are research-worthy proposals to start building up the organic content of Australian soils, by seeding soils with biochar and other organic content which can start a positive feedback loop leading to more fertile soils, immense carbon sequestration from the atmosphere, increased primary production, and higher turnover of both carbon and water in the soil.
To start this requires augmenting both carbon and water in the soil. Organic content without water will not start the positive feedback loop. Water without organic matter will simply salinate the soil and lead to further desertification. Improving the landscape — not just into farming land but a mixture of farm, forest, and other diverse components — requires a big visionary coordination of the best minds in soil science, biology, hydrology, civil engineering, and money.
We have some of the best scientific minds in the world, but too many of them are in thrall to a sort of ecological fundamentalism which holds that the Australian landscape was perfect in 1788 and should be returned as close as possible to that condition. We’ve got to get over this idea that all irrigation and all interference with nature’s water supply is inherently bad.
I tell you what a royal commission will not reveal, the entitlement mentality of property owners & professional developers in Qld (specifically in Brisbane). Since the mid 1990’s I have personally seen 100’s of development applications pass through the assessment branches of the Brisbane City Council which should never have received approval yet have either been poorly consented by a toothless council, or developments have been refused & then appealed with respect to conditions on flooding restrictions & the interpretation of the Q100 flood mark on properties which are obviously suspect to flooding.
It happens all the time. Regulatory town planning in Brisbane is a joke. I knew this day would come being a professional in the development industry and sincerely feel sorry for those who have purchased affected properties, but have little sympathy for owner occupiers (mostly very wealthy types) who systematically abused a system of checks & balances for their own whims. Not surprisingly it is the STATE government who has facilitated this system of bankrupting regulatory planning & land zoning framework in Brisbane, at the behest of political financial donors (corruption?)…specifically the property development industry & lobbying by the UDIA.
At the end of the day its all about making fat profits & common sense be damned
It’s surprising (at first, anyway) to find Marilyn disputing the need for an enquiry into the deaths of Australian citizens, not to mention the widespread destruction of Australian properties, caused by an exceptionally unusual weather phenomenon. The same good lady who previously was screaming for an enquiry to explain how it was possible non-Australians in an illegal boat could have lost their lives during a not particularly unusual storm at a distant island, far from our mainland.
Then it becomes clear. In her eyes, Australians are pissants, and our Governments are pissant Governments, so apparently we’re unimportant. I guess we should be grateful she’s not teaching Geography, or her lack of knowledge might be a bigger concern?
On the other hand, imagine her teaching civics. It could be a very brief curriculum, if all students needed to do was to accept her pissant status for us? As for History — - perhaps it’s best to not even think about what imagined horrors she could bring to that?
On the bright side, we can assume she isn’t in a job being subsidised in any shape or form (directly or indirectly) by Australian Taxpayers’ money. She’d be far too principled to accept ANYTHING from pissant Australian taxpayers or [[horror!]] pissant Australian Governments.
Forest clearing, reduces infiltration and percolation of water into sub-soil, increases velocity of both laminar and channel flow and leads to increased erosion. In short forest clearing can result in more weater arriving in channels faster, in situations where channels are likely to have a higher bed load because of erosion resulting from forest clearing. This is simple fluvial morphology. I’d like to see a Royal Commission address the extent to which past forest clearing has potentiated the impact of an extreme La Nina wet period.
When I first saw russ darnley’s comment above, I thought how did I miss what the article said which justified such a conclusion, and checked.
So Campbell called for an “open and transparent” inquiry into the flood disaster. Good God!! What a thing to say!! But wait, it gets worse, and he believes “there needs to be a public inquiry into how the state and local governments, across Queensland, can better protect their communities from the risks of flooding that we will have in future with extreme weather events.” What on Earth possessed the man to support such an idea?
But in the story there were what poor Russell would have thought even more dangerous ideas than that, had he read the whole article. Imagine his horror had he read on and found the comments of Professor Scott Prasser, who “advises Bligh to install an inquiry as soon as possible.” The shock might have killed Russell, or at least left him permanently scarred — - unless, of course, Russell’s outburst resulted solely from his prejudices against Campbell?
But we can rule that out, because we never encounter emotively driven rants on websites — - do we?
Very funny Norm. Thanks for the support.