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• 1 Bob Brown calls for miners to pay for flood costs - Tom Courtney // Jan 17, 2011 at 7:46 am

  Is Bob Brown a dill or just stupid?

  He is calling on miners to pay for the flood damage because they burnt coal which he claims caused the rise in sea temperatures which in turn caused the floods.

  The coal was burnt so that the Australian people could have electricity. If Australians hadn’t wanted and used the electricity then the coal would not have been burnt. Let Bob Brown show the way for us all and practice what he preaches.

  As one of our fearless leaders, let Bob Brown show us the way and refuse to use coal generated electricity at home, in his office or in the supermarkets he buys his food.

  Or does Bob Brown hope to remain as one of Australia’s best known hypocrites?

  People built homes or chose to buy homes built on known flood plains. Most of the homes in Brisbane were flooded in 1974 and those who have bought or built there since have just ignored the inevitability that the land would flood again.

  And it will flood in the future. With even more devastation when they get a 1 in 200 year flood. We may not have to wait for 50 years. It could happen next year!

  And of course the successive Councils have approved the construction of buildings on known flood plains and to make matters worse, have added infrastructure such as roads and bridges and sewers etc to support those who build and live and work on flood plains.

  Back to Bob Brown.

  Did the Australian miners also cause last weeks floods and landslides in Brazil which have reportedly killed over 600 people? Did the miners cause last weeks floods in Sri Lanka which have reportedly killed 32 people and rendered over 1,000,000 homeless?

  Australians have the choice of where to live. We have been able to build on flood plains. We can live in fire prone forests. Its our choice.

  Whatever happened to personal responsibility?

  Is Bob Brown a dill or just stupid? Maybe both.

• 2 Independent Commission inquiry into Queensland floods - Tom Courtney // Jan 18, 2011 at 6:00 am

  Well can you believe it?

  Anna Bligh has announced yet another Government inquiry which will cost $15,000,000 when many of Qld’s residents are in desperate need of immediate financial support. Bligh and Gillard are pressing the Australian public to be generous and to donate to the Anna Bligh appeal ie. give the Queensland Government money, much of which will go to fix State and Commonwealth infrastructure, which should never have been in flood prone areas in the first place.

  No need for an inquiry.

  Whilst there are obvious differences between Toowoomba, the Lockyer Valley and the Brisbane River, everyone but the Premier knows that it rained. The rain went into the catchment areas. The water then fed into the streams and rivers and then into the Wivenhoe dam, which overflowed – and some was released – and it flooded homes and infrastructure which had flooded before and which will flood again. Maybe even worse next time.

  An Independent Commission will naturally find that something could have been done better. That is the nature of an imperfect world with imperfect people expected to perform perfectly under severe pressure and stress in abnormal and difficult situations. Every time there is an accident, or what used to be called an accident, someone could have done something to lessen the effect or avoid the situation.

  So after Bligh has taken your donations, she will spend $15,000,000 of your money, to have someone tell her that the Bureau of Meteorology could have (in hindsight) upgraded its warnings, the water released from the Wivenhoe dam may or may not have increased the damage, the emergency services and more particularly its leaders could have responded a little quicker etc etc.

  At the end of the inquiry, there needs to be some findings which justify the money spent and government will introduce more legislation which will require every new home to have a flood assessment before it can be get a building permit. In the interim, we will get months of media commentary, highlighting in the most dramatic way possible, little pieces of evidence on a daily basis.

  We don’t need outrageously costly inquiries to tell us that people wanted to live close to the water where it was known that it had flooded previously; where it was known that it would flood again; where it is known that it will flood in the future and where, despite knowing this, successive governments have constructed road and essential services and have allowed people to build and live.

  No different to living in fire prone areas or living on major earthquake fault lines or beside active volcanoes.

• 3 Gillard's probable flood levy // Jan 27, 2011 at 8:29 am

  Surely Gillard has totally lost the plot.

  Doesn’t she know that you need a flood levy before the flood to stop the water inundating the land, not after the waters have receded.

  Having wasted $ billions on pink bats & schools projects she now wants too top up by the Federal Government funds by increasing taxes.

  She has about $5 billion in a contingency fund.

  That’s what contingency funds are for.

  She is about to waste billions of the $42 billion National Broadband Network funds in rolling out optic fibre to lots of towns which still operate on ADSL1 and for which satellite or wireless would be a low cost, totally adequate solution for those who do not want to download high graphic content movies, videos etc. and where cost v benefit could never be justified.

  Take $2 billion of the NBN budget and allocate it for flood relief.

  “Mateship” says Gillard.

  Mateship is where people help each other and give donations in the belief that it is going directly to those adversely affected, only to find that, as with the Victorian bushfires and now with the appropriately named Anna Bligh Fund, that large sums are stolen by the Government and allocated to Councils etc for infrastructure repairs and commensurate bureaucratic wages and waste.

  We no longer give to those appeals, choosing to give directly to those organisations which are on the ground and directly helping the unfortunate affected individuals, and where we get best value for our donations. I expect that many Australians will do likewise in the future.

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