George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

January 2011 is a month that Australians will never forget. It is a month in which, in a variety of forms but particularly in the form of water, so many parts of Australia were affected. The part of Australia which suffered the greatest effect was the city in which I live, Brisbane, and I want to confine my remarks to how the great flood of January 2011 appeared to those of us who call Brisbane our home and how it affected our city. I understand Senator Macdonald, who is, of course, a proud North Queenslander, will be addressing his remarks primarily to the effect of Cyclone Yasi on North Queensland and in anticipation I want to associate myself with what Senator Macdonald will say in relation to that.

Let me talk about my own hometown. Brisbane is a city of hills and valleys but, first and foremost, it is a city built on a river. Whether people live on it, or near to it or cross it on their daily journey to work or school, the Brisbane River is part of our lives. So many authors who have written about Brisbane, like David Malouf, Nick Earls or Matthew Condon, have observed there is something about the Brisbane River that captures the city’s soul—understated, relaxed, undramatic, sometimes languid, usually benign. Most of the time we take it for granted. But in the third week of January the Brisbane River was anything but benign. In the early part of that terrible week we had seen the horror of the flash flooding in the Lockyer Valley, in towns such as Grantham and Murphys Creek, and the shocking events in Toowoomba. We had been astonished by the appalling suddenness and loss of life. Then, as the week wore on in Brisbane and Ipswich, the river began to rise. It was not sudden or violent as the events in the Lockyer Valley or Toowoomba had been. But there was something almost sickeningly cruel about the sheer remorselessness with which the waters inched higher on the Wednesday of that week. By Thursday morning, when a king tide in Moreton Bay coincided with the biblical quantities of water coursing downstream, thousands of homes had been flooded in Brisbane and Ipswich. In the case of more than 5,000 of them the flood waters flowed through the homes above the level of the floorboards while tens of thousands of other homes were flooded or damaged to a lesser degree.

It was a remarkable thing to see—in the space of one lopsided suburban block some houses were quite unaffected while houses or shops down the road were completely submerged. But it was not just the people whose houses were inundated who felt the effect of the flood, although, of course, they felt it most cruelly. Everybody in Brisbane was affected just as everybody in Ipswich was affected. Everybody had a shared sense that we were in this together. The spirit of community was palpable as the people of Brisbane gathered themselves. By Friday morning, after the waters had begun to subside, there were armies of volunteers in the flood affected areas.

I will never forget the sight of the Rosalie shops when Tony Abbott and I accompanied Teresa Gambaro, the member for Brisbane, and Jane Prentice, the member for Ryan, two of my colleagues whose citizens had been most directly affected. We saw literally hundreds of people, armed with pumps, brooms and other equipment, cleaning up restaurants, shops and homes, with the sorry detritus of the floods—the smashed furniture, the sodden mattresses and the paraphernalia of people’s lives—lying in heaps on the footpath. The smell of the muddy floodwaters, which were still about though subsiding, was something that none of us will ever forget. It was something that I remembered because I have lived in Brisbane long enough to remember the 1974 floods. The scenes then were eerily the same, of disrupted lives, destroyed homes and ruined businesses.

Yet that Friday morning, as we walked among the people in Rosalie, there was no sense of despair and there were no recriminations. There was just a gritty, almost cheerful determination to get on with the job, defy the odds and not be overborne by overwhelming circumstances. I remember talking to a couple from Redcliffe who had a ute with a pump on the back of it. I asked them if they were affected and I remember the lady—Terri, her name was—saying to me, ‘No, we live in Redcliffe. We weren’t affected at all. We just came down here. You couldn’t not.’ That was the spirit of the people of Brisbane, as in so many other parts of Australia. It was spontaneous, it was generous and it was no nonsense. It was the Australian spirit, the spirit of the volunteer and the spirit to do with a word often used and abused in political rhetoric but I think deserving of use in its proper sense on this occasion—mateship.

One of the few good thing to come out of this disaster was how well the leadership of the state and the city responded. Rarely do we see spontaneous and universal acclaim for political leaders. In fact, I think it is one of the real signs of the robustness and health of our Australian democracy that political leaders are so freely mocked. Yet, on this occasion, we saw no cynicism. We saw genuine acclaim for the leadership of the state and the city on a job well done. The handling of the crisis by Premier Anna Bligh was widely and, I believe, fairly judged to have been exemplary. Throughout the emergency she displayed what Ernest Hemingway once called ‘grace under pressure’. The Premier provided both reassurance and empathy in a way, it must be said, the Prime Minister found impossible. Just as impressive was the Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Campbell Newman, who with similar matter-of-fact competency dealt with the destruction of so much of the city’s infrastructure, particularly that like ferry terminals and boardwalks located on or by the river.

But of course the real heroes of the occasion were not the political leaders. They were the volunteers, the SES workers, the police officers, the paramedics, the Defence Force personnel, the Brisbane City Council workers, the community organisations such as the Red Cross which ran evacuation centres and the school communities. The flood occurred the week before school was to go back and yet with barely an exception, as a result of the work of parents, teachers and staff, almost all of the schools in the flood affected area were ready for the commencement of school only a week or so later. And, something politicians rarely do, I want to pay tribute to the role of the media, particularly the radio channels in Brisbane which broadcast news—612, ABC and the commercial station 4BC—and the Courier Mail, all of which fulfilled their role of communicating information to the community in an exemplary manner.

The immediate devastation may have subsided, and we no longer see news of the Brisbane flood on television news channels as we did for days on end, but the need for help and support has not gone away. On the contrary, it is after the immediacy of the emergency has passed and the consequences have settled in that people are left alone and are feeling overwhelmed, distressed and fearful for their future and their children’s future. So as we talk proudly about the character shown by so many of our fellow Australians let us not forget that beneath the stoicism lies deep hurt which we must assuage with generosity and kindness. In fact, the mood in Brisbane in the past few weeks—as you know, Deputy President Ferguson, Brisbane has always been a friendly city—has been one of kindness and helpfulness. There is a palpable sense of people caring about one another, being conscious of how many tens of thousands of their fellow citizens have been badly hurt and wanting to provide the emotional as well as physical support that they need so badly.

In closing, I express my admiration for the way in which so many of my colleagues fulfilled their high responsibilities as members of parliament and, as such, leaders of their local communities. I have mentioned already Teresa Gambaro, the member for Brisbane, and Jane Prentice, the member for Ryan, but there were many others. I want, if I may, to single out in particular Scott Buchholz, elected only last August as the member for Wright, in whose electorate the epicentre of the devastation in the Lockyer Valley took place. From all I have heard from so many people, Scott Buchholz’s pastoral care for his community, his sharing of their burden and their loss, was magnificent.

Finally, I express my own sympathy for all those who have lost loved ones, lost homes, lost livelihoods or simply lost memories. As I said at the start of these remarks, the third week of January 2011, like the fourth week of January 1974, was a time no-one who loves Brisbane will ever forget and equally there will always live in our memories numberless acts of kindness by the great Australian people.