A force of nature

AS the people of north Queensland count the cost of Yasi today, The Australian looks at the leader who rose to the crisis.

bligh yasi

ANNA Bligh may have had a haircut, but everything else about the Premier is pretty much the same.

This time around she is talking cyclones, not floods, but her approach these past few days has been little different from the one she took last month when the big rains ripped through Toowoomba, the Lockyer Valley, Ipswich and Brisbane. Give them the facts, and hold it together. Then do it again. And again. Even when your fringe gets in your eyes; even if you're terrified the dam is about to burst.

"I don't think we have seen anything like this anywhere in the world before," says James Goff. The University of NSW disaster specialist is talking about the Queensland leader's performance, not the cyclone that cut a swath across the coast overnight, threatening lives and property.

Goff says Bligh has carved out new ground for politicians landed with the responsibility for managing the media.

It began in early January as she talked of the floods breaking "our hearts" but not "our will" and continued yesterday as she calmly outlined the details of Cyclone Yasi, the surge, the wind, the rain.

"She has been brilliant," Goff says. "The major brownie points she has got have come from her ability to be calm, collected, organised. I think it has been remarkable."

Goff is not alone. January was an extraordinary month for the 50-year-old politician whose approval ratings fell to 24 per cent last year. Back then, the Premier couldn't take a trick as she struggled with opposition to her privatisation plans. That wasn't Bligh's only problem.

As Ian Ward, reader in politics at the University of Queensland, says: "She has never put together a sensible narrative, a story to tell voters about who she is and what she wants to achieve."

Her constant, virtually uninterrupted television appearances in January changed that, giving Queenslanders a chance to see her up close, apolitical and preoccupied with the crises, not with her media image.

"What you are seeing now is a more relaxed, less media-directed, less scripted Anna Bligh whose obvious communication skills are coming through the television set in a way that they haven't before," Ward says.

Over the summer Bligh has led with a combination of concise, no-nonsense delivery of vital information and sometimes soaring rhetoric. Her measured tone as she dispenses data has contrasted with extraordinarily lofty language. Indeed, it has been her ability to inform that has allowed her to inspire without appearing mawkish or cynically political.

On Tuesday, for example, as Cyclone Yasi became a reality, the Premier joined the dots of the last month in an almost Churchillian appeal: "I know many of us will feel that Queensland has already borne about as much as we can bear when it comes to disasters and storms, but more is being asked of us and I am confident that we are able to rise to this next challenge." On the same day: "I can reassure people, our emergency teams are rested, they're ready, they're in place. We've deployed people like swift water rescue teams, SES, extra police; they're all positioned in this region now."

Two days earlier she had told Queenslanders: "As we contemplate what might lie ahead I think it would be easy to think that somebody up there has got a grudge against us, but frankly this is just what the weather in a tropical state does from time to time and we have to be ready to cope with it."

Bligh's ubiquitous presence, her 24/7 briefings and the extent to which she has "owned" the crises, is very different from the way another Labor premier, John Brumby, handled the 2009 Victorian bushfires. It is a world away from the disastrous mismanagement and lack of leadership shown by the Bush administration when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005.

In Victoria, it was largely left to then chief commissioner of police Christine Nixon and then fire chief Russell Rees to handle the crisis. In New Orleans, everyone seemed to be taken by surprise, with devastating consequences. There were, according to Goff, too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Not so in Queensland. "She's the chief," Goff says. But there are obviously plenty of Indians, with police, emergency services and meteorological bureau representatives flanking the Premier at her press conferences. The tableau, repeated daily, sent a clear and reassuring message to Queenslanders: yes, we are terribly worried, but we've got it covered.

Goff says the management of disasters in Australia has become much more sophisticated in the past decade or so, with a "remarkable" level of professionalism.

He contrasts it with the chaotic response in Europe to last year's eruption of volcanic ash in Iceland. In Australia, he says, "there has been a recognition of how serious these events are and we have learnt the lessons of the past, with every state putting in place expert disaster management teams. We have had disaster after disaster and we are learning from them."

Technology has been important, with the ability to collect and model meteorological data and confidently predict the pattern of events.

But the continuous coverage of the floods has also given the authorities a rare opportunity to explain and educate the public.

Bligh has been shown to have a wonderful memory and ability to marshall facts, but her ease with the data comes in part from early briefings and forward planning in the period leading up to the floods.

Ward says: "The Queensland floods have obtained a kind of continuing media coverage which disasters such as the Victorian bushfires did not. The crisis unfolded slowly and Anna Bligh was giving press conferences several times a day. The coverage was far more sustained. In the bushfires, it happened and then it was catch-up."

He believes there has been "a conscious effort by policy-makers to educate and inform the public and encourage them to take sensible precautions and to manage the aftermath."

In a sense, the public was included in the debate and the strategy, setting up a level of connection that spilled over into the extraordinary efforts of the volunteers.

Ward says that while Bligh's performance has been well received, it has not been orchestrated: "It was more a case of, here is a problem and here is what you have to do. There was nothing scripted about [her]. There was no concern about camera angles or lights and the Premier came across as a person."

Online opinion pollster Graham Young says that Bligh has done well over the summer because she has appeared as apolitical. Two weeks ago, his research showed almost 80 per cent of people approved her handling of the floods, but when asked whether they approved of the Premier in general, her rating fell to 38 per cent.

Young says: "She is getting marks because she is coming across as a non-politician. The public always want their politicians to be non-politicians, but politicians can't be."

Indeed, Bligh has been very poor at adopting a Bob-Hawke-style demeanour of consensus and common ground.

"Anna has an unfortunate habit of slagging off the opposition," Young says. "But there is no opportunity to do that now, and no reason to. So the [image that comes across] is that you are the person who is doing the job."

He credits her performance but believes, "it would be hard for any halfway competent politician" to have failed during the floods.

"The whole effect of these disasters is that people pull together," he says. "They feel vulnerable, directionless and you are a competent leader, all the attention is focused on you. It's like pulling pus from the sore."

And he says it had nothing to do with gender: "People weren't saying she was empathetic, they were saying she was efficient; she was doing the job, no bullshit, not trying to make political points."

He warns that any whiff of Bligh attempting to exploit the disasters for political gain will work against her. She has avoided that trap, instead appealing across partisan divides to a notion of Queenslanders as united and special. On January 13 the Premier said: "Can I say to Queenslanders everywhere: wherever you are and there are so many places to list - if you are in central Queensland, if you're in southwest Queensland, if you're in western Queensland, if you're in the Burnett Region, the Darling Downs, Toowoomba, the Lockyer Valley, Ipswich or Brisbane - all of those places have been affected by floods and I say to every one of those people in those areas and to Queenslanders in other parts of the state: 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."

Can it last? "Over the months ahead she will face a lot of disgruntled people," Ward says. "As the rebuilding is prioritised there will be losers and the Premier is in for some tough times as people vent their anger."

Young says Bligh faces a problem with the aftermath of the floods that she hasn't got with the cyclone. "With the cyclone, apart from building codes - which have been in place forever, anyway - you can't mitigate damage," he says. "There is no room for recriminations. But with the floods, it is different."

Bligh seems to understand that challenge.

On January 17, after volunteers had swarmed across Brisbane for the clean up, she warned that "the road to recovery is going to have some big ups and downs on it. It's not all going to have quite the festive atmosphere that we saw out on our streets on the weekend. So, there is a long slow journey ahead."

Two weeks on and in the aftermath of Yasi those words are truer than ever.