Damn right, the lady's not for turning nor caving in to public pressure

THEY breed them so tough north of the border, Queenslanders would never bow to anything.

Crikey.com takes The Australian to task yesterday for daring to write that Anna Bligh had "bowed" to pressure to hold a flood inquiry

BOWED? Was there really ever any doubt that Premier Bligh would rightly set up an inquiry over the Queensland floods, and ask all the relevant questions, including questions about the role of dams?

Well, actually . . . Last Thursday's statement from Bligh's media unit:

IT is standard practice to review the planning and preparation processes in the wake of a natural disaster such as the current floods. The recent amendments to the Disaster Management Act 2003 require that the chief executive regularly review and assess the effectiveness of disaster management by the state, including the State Disaster Management Plan and its implementation.

Short memory? Crikey, January 14:

THE water hasn't finished receding and the clean-up has barely begun, but the blame game has already started. Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman is calling for an open and transparent inquiry, run by the state, into the floods along the lines of the 2009 Victorian bushfires royal commission. The Premier's office declined comment, but said it supported a formal evaluation of the floods once the crisis phase is over."

Hedley Thomas in The Australian on Friday, January 14:

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.

ABC news on Saturday, January 15:

QUEENSLAND Premier Anna Bligh says it is too soon to be calling for public inquiries into the freak flash flood that claimed lives in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley this week . . .

Ms Bligh says an inquiry will have to wait until life starts returning to normal.

As record floods affect parts of Victoria, the state's Governor David de Kretser on 3AW yesterday blames climate change :

I'M sorry, I'm one of these believers in climate change, I'm afraid, and if [we don't] get that message out I don't think it's going to go away.

There's too many of these events, not only in Australia but throughout the whole world, that are happening now, which everyone says this week [is a] one in 100, one in 200 years [event], but they are happening pretty much more frequently now.

Not the message de Krester would want to hear. Professor Andy Pitman, of the University of NSW's Climate Change Research Centre, in The Sunday Age, January 16:

WE certainly can't say there is or isn't a global warming signal because the work's not been done.

Crikey! Even Germaine Greer in London's The Guardian last Saturday can relate to that:

WHAT'S going on in Australia is rain; the ground is swollen with months of it.

The new downpours have nowhere to go but sideways, across the vast floodplains of this ancient continent. We all learned the poem at school, about how ours "is a sunburnt country . . . of droughts and flooding rains". And yet we still don't get it.

After 10 years of drought, we are having the inevitable flooding rains. The pattern is repeated regularly and yet Australians are still taken by surprise.

Peter Costello's former senior advisor Alan Anderson in yesterday's Australian Financial Review responds to Bob Brown's attack on coalminers:

HE is a political carrion crow, feeding off the misfortunes of others, and his attack on coalminers for a disaster which runs directly contrary to his own climate warnings of four years ago, while the waters are still receding and the bodies still being discovered, is an act of base hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy.

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