Woes bring out the best in Bligh

MUCH has been said and written about Anna Bligh in recent days. Some of it unthinking hyperbole, as if tears maketh the leader.

On closer analysis the Queensland Premier taught even the most cynical among us something about the intangible qualities of leadership. Whether she will use her new cache of political capital to the benefit of Queenslanders remains to be seen.

When Bligh talked last Thursday about the smaller details of the calamity, the tradespeople given priority to enter towns to get the electricity back on, the planes airlifting groceries, the loss of small businesses, of schools and parks and swings, she did what the best leaders do. She understood the people she leads. Mercifully free of spin, Bligh spoke from the heart. Yes, the tears and emotion were genuine. The words were too. When she let down her guard, unpeeled some of the layers that most politicians accumulate after years of political battle, she treated voters with respect. Voters respect that kind of leader. They will pay her a little more attention now.

Bligh shone for being human at a time when suspicion of this group called the political class has never been deeper among voters. Notice how we talk more about this new class of professional politician? We measure this class in numbers and percentages against the outsiders. We lament the lack of politicians who have had careers outside the political realm. Political insiders are often too far inside their world, or simply too far up themselves, to take our suspicion seriously.

Likewise, many voters are wary of spin doctors. We read more about all the new masters of spin, about the ballooning spin departments within government departments. We know how much taxpayers are spending on them. And each day, we hear the results: the slick one-liners made for the news bulletin. One-liners that treat voters with contempt.

The Queensland Premier stepped outside the political classroom, into the real world where most people live. As Tony Blair recalls in A Journey, "the single hardest thing for a practising politician to understand is that most people, most of the time, don't give politics a first thought all day. Or if they do, it is with a sigh or a harrumph or a raising of the eyebrows, before they go back to worrying about the kids, the parents, the mortgage, the boss, their friends, their weight, their health, sex and rock'n'roll."

Bligh understood that. She knew that people need the small details that tell people she is in control, and then some inspiration so they can feel they can confront the future. So she said: "As we weep for what we have lost, and as we grieve for family and friends, and we confront the challenge that is before us, I want us to remember who we are. We are Queenslanders; we're the people that they breed tough north of the border. We're the ones that they knock down and we get up again. this weather may break our hearts and it is doing that, but it will not break our will and . . . we are going to prove that beyond any doubt."

The contrast between Premier and Prime Minister was unavoidable. The next day most commentators would remark about Julia Gillard's "wooden" demeanour. Didn't we just have a wooden PM? Kevin Rudd is a political robot switching scarily from speaking about "detailed programmatic specificity" to chewing up Aussie slang. And even his self-described "blubbering" at his farewell press conference as PM was for his own leadership cut short, rather than for others. What a shame if Gillard also fails to show us enough emotion to make us sit up and listen to Gillard the leader, rather than Gillard the politician.

In private, Gillard can be charming and warm. The public Gillard and that contrived "real Julia" are the personification of the political class. It's a profile carefully manufactured after years of careful attention: to get that political job, win that preselection, take that seat, score that ministry, become party leader, and rise to prime minister. As PM, Gillard is head prefect of the political class. In the real world, her overly scripted words make her seem detached, using safe words as one might wear a safe black suit as armour against mistakes. Is she confused about which part of her is suitable for public consumption after so many years in the political class?

Writing in The Wall Street Journal a few months ago, Dorothy Rabinowitz recalled how respect manifests itself in great leaders. A few months after Pearl Harbor, when the Allies were facing defeat, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered an address known as the Map Speech. Speaking on radio, FDR asked Americans to find a map and follow as he referred to specific battles across the globe, the status of those battles, the enemies' aims and so on. He wanted Americans to understand the worst of what they faced. He treated Americans with respect. As Rabinowitz mentions, after Roosevelt died, a man was found weeping when the funeral train passed. A passer-by asked him whether he knew Roosevelt. The man replied: "I didn't know him. But he knew me."

Leadership was there in the early hours of October 12, 1984. Barely an hour after an IRA bomb ripped through the bathroom of Margaret Thatcher's hotel suite on the eve of the Conservative Party conference, Thatcher emerged to announce that "the conference will go on". By 9.30am the next day, she rose to open the conference with the following: "The fact that we are gathered here now, shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed but that all attempts to destroy democracy will fail." The words do not do justice to Thatcher's steely determination.

Within a day of Bligh's true grit comments about Queenslanders, on a different continent, US President Barack Obama did something similar. He meshed the small details about the tragic shooting in Tucson, Arizona, with inspiration. Whereas last year Obama was routinely attacked, even by his supporters, as too detached, speaking at the memorial last Wednesday, the Democratic President connected with people well beyond his political base.

Obama's speech drew praise the next day from Peggy Noonan. High praise from a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, another leader who understood something about leadership. Think of Reagan's Challenger speech. When the space shuttle exploded, he alluded to courageous aviators who "touched the face of God".

Great leaders understand the import of a crisis. It's not expressing emotion that matters, although that counts.

I recall a wise history teacher once telling his 15- year-old charges that those who learn most from history do so by marshalling empathy, not sympathy, for people and places. The same is true of the best leaders.