Bligh's 'tough people' owed a tough inquiry

IN a few days we will be at a critical juncture in Queensland's devastating floods.

It is imperative that our political leaders go the right way and call a far-reaching judicial inquiry into all the circumstances that contributed to the death toll and the billions of dollars of destruction.

The people of Brisbane and every severely flooded community deserve to know the lessons that can be learned from the painful losses they are now bearing, and will continue to bear in the years it will take to rebuild and recover.

Premier Anna Bligh, who choked up yesterday in praising the strength of Queenslanders as "the people they breed tough north of the border", is rendering champion leadership through this natural disaster.

But mateship will only go so far and soon the commendations will wane. The tough people of Queensland will need more than praise: they must be reassured that there is accountability for actions and inaction, which appear to have contributed to the crisis in Australia's third-largest city and surrounding towns.

There must be an investigation into the policies and strategies deployed in the operation of the Wivenhoe Dam, which could have been upgraded years ago at a cost of tens of millions of dollars to significantly increase its capacity to store much more water.

There must be hard-headed analysis of the decisions of the dam's operators to let the dam fill to levels close to maximum capacity, forcing a critical release of huge volumes of water before the Brisbane flood occurred.

We need to discover if the operators' decisions to hold so much water at the start of our wet season were prudent, given that there would have been tens of thousands of casualties if the dam had collapsed because of over-topping.

And there must be rigorous investigation into the policies of local government administrations that have permitted thousands of homes to be built in low-lying areas of a floodplain.

Brisbane's Lord Mayor, Campbell Newman, should be applauded for his stance in welcoming just such an inquiry.

The issues are too important to be shelved. Victoria's bushfires necessitated a royal commission - and Queenslanders deserve nothing less.