Weathering the storm

I just read this opinion piece written by Courier Mail journalist Mike O'Connor. It's a great view in to Anna Bligh's performance during the recent Queensland weather disasters.

THERE was a time when political leaders appealed for calm in the face of a gathering storm.
Perhaps somewhere they still do. Not in Queensland, however, where the strategy, as evidenced by Premier Anna Bligh's performance last week, is to scare the bejesus out of the populace with apocalyptic predictions of impending doom.

The reasoning behind what became an unintended stand-up comedy routine is transparent enough and can be found in the hope that has grown in the bosom of the Bligh camp that her on-camera performance during the floods may have saved her political hide.
That she performed in a creditable way, doing the job she is paid to do, is undeniable although one might ask why so many people were surprised when she did so.
This less flattering view aside, she did well but a politician has yet to draw breath who believes that it is possible to have too much of a good thing.
Thus the temptation to revisit the scene of her triumph, the dramatic press conference, was too strong to resist when Cyclone Yasi swirled on to the weather radar, bringing with it wind, rain and that most blessed and most sought after of commodities, potential political capital.
Here was another chance to occupy centre stage as Fearless Leader, directing operations from the command bunker as the cyclone approached the coastline.
You get cyclones in north Queensland at this time of the year which, I imagine, is why they call it the cyclone season, but this was a big one.
Big, however, was not going to do it for the Bligh PR machine. It had to gigantic, enormous, stupendously large.
There was no point in the Premier hauling out her special, freshly laundered flood jeans for her press conference if the very existence of north Queensland was not to be threatened and so the process of talking up the threat posed by Yasi began.
I don't question for a moment the ferocity of the storm. I sat through a cyclone as a child and still recall the banshee wail of the wind.
What was entertaining however, in a sadly predictable way, was the deliberate choice of language by the Premier words chosen not to reassure, but to paint the most vivid images of imminent destruction possible.

Yasi was not only massive but gargantuan, colossal, immense, mammoth, prodigious and titanic.
Yasi defied the human mind to imagine its proportions. Who knows how many Sydney Harbours or Suncorp Stadiums, the internationally recognised units used when measuring anything of more than moderate proportion in Australia, it could hold.
Everyone knew it was a large and potentially destructive weather system. It was, after all, a Category 5 as stated by the Premier several hundred times for the benefit of those who were a little slow in appreciating the essential difference between 1 and 5.
I kept waiting for the Premier to remove a shoe was she wearing the R.M. Williams boots, de rigueur in time of crisis? and offer her toes to the camera. Five, got it? One, two, three, four, five!
When you are in a cyclone's path, whether it be a Category 4 or 5 is of largely academic interest. It's powerful, so people should be urged to take all prudent precautions but this was not the essence of the message.
Nor was it that, while this might be larger than previous cyclones, there had been plenty of time to prepare for it and all people had to do was follow emergency procedures, evacuate if told to do so and everything would be fine: "Don't worry. Do as, if you live in the north, you will have done a dozen times in the past and all will be well."

This, alas, was not what we heard. The Premier was predicting destruction on a truly biblical scale. The message was that north Queensland from Townsville to Cairns would be smote as if by the hand of God.
It was, she assured the population, a "potentially very deadly event".
By late afternoon television reporters, wired on the steady stream of foreboding press releases being pumped into their iPhones by the Premier's office, were hyperventilating on camera.
Cairns would be inundated. There would be a 7m storm surge that would sweep through the city. Palm trees from the Esplanade would end up in Mount Isa. Devastation would be visited upon the city.
What would have happened, I wondered as I listened to the Premier's increasingly bizarre performance, if, at the outset of World War II, Winston Churchill had gone running into the street shrieking: "The Germans are coming and the bombs they drop will be really big. Not just big but massive. They'll be the size of 10 Sydney Harbours. When they explode they'll leave craters the size of 20 Suncorp Stadiums!"
Fortunately for Britain, he chose instead to exhort them to fight on the beaches and in the streets and never surrender. Then again, Churchillian dialogue has never been a hallmark of Queensland politics.
The Premier should forgo the amateur dramatics and let Emergency Services Minister Neil Roberts do his job.
Her performance was overblown, unnecessary, reeked of political opportunism and was not, to borrow once more from Churchill, her finest hour.