Stakes are high in the flood blame game

AT first blush the Brisbane flood in January was widely seen as the result of intense, unusual and prolonged rainfall on sodden catchments in southeast Queensland. It rained. We flooded. End of story.

This simplistic and convenient categorisation of the flood as a natural disaster suited the Queensland government, with the Lazarus-like political comeback of Premier Anna Bligh for her strong leadership and communications skills amid the inundation of thousands of homes and businesses in Brisbane.

It suited SEQWater, the bureaucracy charged with operating the state's water grid and the Wivenhoe Dam. It suited many in the media as sentimental campaigns promoting the goodwill of Queenslanders in helping each other in a crisis replaced rigorous analysis of why the flood happened and whether the population of Australia's third-largest city had been treated like mugs.

It suited the military chief picked by Bligh to run reconstruction efforts, Major General Mick Slater, who fired an early offensive shot across the media's bows with his warning not to "become divisive"; and then, in a line from the censorship handbook, warned that "over-analysing and looking for different lines and angles can be amplified by the media and cause negative impacts in the community".

The categorisation also suited proponents of climate change, who could point to prior warnings about the threat of more extreme weather events caused by global warming, notwithstanding the advice that there would also be significantly reduced rainfall.

But after two months of community recovery, the strengthening force of the proposition that one of Australia's worst disasters was avoidable - and, with better management of the dam, should have been a minor inconvenience, with moderate flooding of a few hundred houses - will soon be tested by a public inquiry.

It is difficult to imagine an inquiry in Queensland's history in which the stakes have been higher.

If Justice Cate Holmes is persuaded by the submissions and evidence of senior engineers who believe they have incontrovertible proof the Brisbane flood was largely the result of massive releases of water from Wivenhoe Dam, after the operator SEQWater had released too little, too late, Queensland's financial and political future will become more uncertain.

Consider a car crash and multiply the consequences by millions. People and businesses suffered enormous losses. Who will pay?

Insurers seeking to mitigate their significant losses will be pressured by shareholders and boards to point to the ultimate owner of Queensland's water infrastructure, the government.

Thousands of uninsured residents and a few million voters will point to Bligh and those cabinet ministers who were responsible over the years for overseeing dam safety and upgrades.

When the bureaucrats from SEQWater and elsewhere are in the frame, they will point to the government's policies during the drought, which pressured them to store more water in the dams and value the water as a precious financial commodity.

Incredibly, the policies and operational strategy did not change when the Bureau of Meteorology found the weather had changed fundamentally last year, from the droughts of El Nino to the flooding rains borne by one of the most intense La Nina systems.

A history of poor planning and management of Queensland's main public infrastructure, including the lamentable decision of former premier Wayne Goss and his then chief of staff, Kevin Rudd, to abandon advanced plans to build Wolfdene Dam in the late 1980s will lead many to point to Rudd.

The reaction to global warming concerns is also in play, given the evidence that government and policy planners were conditioned in the drought to believe the region would not see high rainfall as often, so the higher priority of the dam was to store water for urban supply rather than have reserve capacity to mitigate floods.

From a former prime minister to climate change proponents and sceptics, to the shareholders of leading insurance companies, the hapless residents of submerged properties and millions of unaffected citizens who are up for a flood levy, everyone has skin in the Brisbane flood blame game.

Bligh said this week: "I live in this city and my family lives in this city. Some of the questions in relation to the operation of Wivenhoe Dam are as critical to me and my family as they are to the broader public of Queensland. They are legitimate questions and I want them answered."

The inquiry and Bligh, however, will lose fragile public confidence by not granting funded opportunities for well-organised and large groups of affected residents and businesses to appear and engage lawyers to question those responsible for public policy and operational decisions. Many senior lawyers, already briefed at vast expense to protect bureaucrats and the government against potentially adverse findings, will do everything in their power to limit exhaustive cross-examination of their clients. In circumstances where those most directly affected are not directly represented, the risk to public confidence is inevitably heightened.

"Victims of the floods are being denied the right to appear at the inquiry and ask legitimate questions of those people who made decisions that had major impacts on their families or their businesses," says state Opposition Leader John-Paul Langbroek. "This is not the way the Patel inquiry operated. This is not the way the Victorian bushfire inquiry operated. Victims in Victoria were granted leave to appear."

There will be hundreds of hours of evidence and submissions before the inquiry brings down any findings. Meanwhile, Bruce Flegg, an opposition parliamentarian, harks back to his school years to recall a ditty, Arkansas Traveller, that could be a metaphor for Queensland's responses to the great Brisbane flood of 2011.

As Flegg tells it, an old man sits on the porch of his shack as the rain buckets down, flooding through a hole in his roof. The Arkansas traveller passes by and says: "For goodness' sake, man, why don't you fix the hole in your roof? Your house is flooding." The old man looks up in disbelief and says, "I can't fix it now. It's raining."

Undeterred, the traveller says: "What you should do is on the next sunny day get up on your roof and fix it." The resident looks at the traveller as though he's an idiot and says, "My roof doesn't leak when it doesn't rain."

Says Flegg: "That is pretty much how Queensland has been run for the past 10 years."