Election delay the only responsible call

THE voters of Queensland won't thank her for subjecting them to what amounts to an eight-week election campaign, but Anna Bligh has done the right thing to postpone the poll she was eyeing for March 3.

Putting space between the final report of the floods inquiry, which will be reconvened next week to get to the bottom of the discrepancies in evidence exposed by this newspaper, was the only call the Premier could responsibly make after commissioner Cate Holmes dropped her bombshell about bringing back the public hearings.

Campbell Newman was fuming yesterday about the disruption of delaying the state, as well as council, elections, but trying to ping Bligh for playing politics with this decision is a stretch.

Her already slim chances of winning another term of government - it would be the sixth for the Labor outfit that dates back to 1998 under Peter Beattie, and confound the published opinion polls - are now hostage to what Holmes uncovers about the operation of the Wivenhoe Dam in the crucial days leading up to the flooding of Ipswich and Brisbane last January.

Questions must be answered as to why dam managers testified to the inquiry last year that they were using used the prescribed flood mitigation strategy, known as W3, to protect urban areas from inundation when other evidence indicated it was being operated on a less effective setting.

The findings are far more likely to be damaging to Bligh than the Opposition Leader, who enters the undeclared election campaign with his Liberal National Party 12 points ahead of Labor, according to the final Newspoll of last year.

Bligh now gets to bring back parliament for a torrid three-day sitting from February 14 and ramp up the pressure on her opponent in the pressure-cooker of the faux campaign.

While this could be unsettling for Newman, who is running for premier from outside parliament, it will give voters longer to take the measure of a man whose reputation as a "can-do" politician was forged in the cosier environs of City Hall, rather than that sandstone bearpit sitting on George Street.