Premier Anna Bligh has been presented with a clean slate. She has recently been called a hero and her party almost absolved from the biggest financial disaster, in Australian history, caused by the preventable Brisbane floods
last January.
You would have to ask: how can this be? Does it connect with a weak Opposition hardly able to raise hue- and-cry at the spectre of 25000 homes and businesses inundated, and the futures of thousands of Queenslanders severely disrupted, many who have had wrecked properties too often without insurance to cover their losses? The lack of discerned disgust and an appropriate reaction is–frankly–disgusting itself–and could be with some hyperbole seen as a measure of decadence.
The Beattie/Bligh regimes believed the weather prophets eg Dr Timothy Flannery, who falsely predicted we were in for an endless drought. The recent new age secular, junk science prophesies have resulted in billons of dollars spent on infrastructure including a desalination plant at Tugun on the Gold Coast costing the taxpayers over one billion dollars.
Why was the Bligh/Beattie Government responsible for such a disaster as that which devastated people’s lives last January? Isn’t it questionable that they didn’t use the 2750 square kilometres of buffer zoning, called Wivenhoe, instead turned it into a dam for water storage, with regulatory processes that permitted the dam to be filled to the point the water pressure may have caused the Wivenhoe Dam wall to collapse, with obvious catastrophic consequences?
The people of Queensland had built thousands of homes and set up businesses on the flood plains believing they were safe–living in a region with the protective flood mitigation of Wivenhoe. How they were deluded!
The Labor Government failed them and failed them badly; it believed in a falsity–that due to the so-called Global Warming predicted by the weather gurus such as Flannery, the need for a dam was crucial.
The crisis was actually born 18 years after the 1974 floods when, due to the Green lobby, the Goss Government sold off the land that had previously been resumed by the Bjelke-Peterson Government to build the Wolfdene Dam. That dam and later the Traveston Dam (also abandoned) would have gone a long way to obviating the need for Wivenhoe for water storage.
Anna Bligh is not a hero. She would now be a hero if she admitted her government’s error and made good the losses experienced by thousands of Queenslanders who, now off the front page of the nation’s newspapers and no longer in TV headlines, have inherited a mammoth mess, many losing everything, beginning again with only the shell of their dwellings.How would it be for the young family featured in the Courier Mail today living in a gutted home? What would it be like to have had a home mortgage and had it gutted by the January flood?
Anna Bligh is a pyrric hero; she and her government deserve nothing but scorn for their gross stupidity and now the heartless post flood treatment of thousands of Queenslanders, expecting the federal government to use a tax levy to cover that stupidity due to mismanagement.
Warren James
Engineer
