Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Who would be the target of this outrage? I know nothing about Aussie politics, honest question.



A Royal Commission has been launched to investigate. In Australian law these are the most powerful forms of inquiry. An RC is completely independent of the government, cannot be influenced by Ministers or Parliament, has very broad powers to find evidence and even to compel witnesses, can decide independently what to investigate subject to its terms of reference and can draw any conclusions it wishes.

Generally they are led by respected judges with technical experts in support. So sweeping are their powers that they are only ever appointed in the most extreme situations, such as massive natural disasters (Victoria bushfires, now Queensland floods) or revelations of severe maladministration (corruption in Queensland and NSW police forces).

The Royal Commission into the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria did point to individual as well as systemic failures. Some of these individuals were seen as being close enough to the government that the Royal Commission's findings contributed to the downfall of the government at a subsequent election.


Well the political hierarchy is something like:

- Campbell Newman, Lord Mayor of Brisbane - Anna Bligh, Premier of Queensland - Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia

I think it's pretty unlikely that you could pin the blame on any of them and they all responded well once the crisis happened.

The operating rules for the Wivenhoe dam (which is supposed to mitigate this kind of thing) decide how much water can be released and when, and that is set at the state level (i.e. by Queensland state government), so probably Anna Bligh is the easiest target in that respect.

I saw an official describe the dam operating rules as "conservative", but I'm not sure in which direction they are conservative - in the direction of minimising releases or minimising risk of overflow.


The Premier of Queensland, Anna Bligh, is widely considered to have actually done quite well out of the election - has been seen to have reacted quickly, done her part, said the right things, etc.

There are a few scammers rightfully copping it, but it's been a pretty galvanising event in Australia.


I think the fact that she was genuinely emotionally upset helped.


depends

shock jocks will blame the greens "for not letting us build more dams" or some other rubbish.

greens (like me) will blame poor planning for building cities and major infrastructure on known flood plains.


Not just shock jocks. Normal people as well.

Your policy response, which can be paraphrased as 'don't build dams, move major cities' is idealogically warped and just wishful thinking. You would find it hard outside of your peer group to find anyone to take you seriously.

The cities are where they are. It's not a surprise that Brisbane and Ipswich floods - the very first parts of written QLD history contain stories of immense flooding events.

More flood mitigation via Dams is the only sensible and possible response. More dams also has the side effect of more water supplies and possibly more hydro-electric power.


"Your policy response, which can be paraphrased as 'don't build dams, move major cities' is idealogically warped and just wishful thinking."

I could be wrong, but I think he's suggesting not building on the areas of the city which form the flood plain, not the whole city.

We have an accurate record of which areas of the City were flooded in 1974. The areas that flooded recently are a subset of those areas. People were allowed to build in these areas because the Dam was supposed to have mitigated the risk. We could have kept zoning plans in place to deter building in these areas and still had a vibrant city built up around them. More river-front parkland to boot!


It doesn't matter if it is 5% of a city or the whole city, it's not going to happen. The areas that were flooded now were mostly populated in 1974. There's a popular meme going around that huge areas of previously-vacant land was built upon. While that might be true in some instances of outer suburbs, in general the flooded suburbs of Brisbane were the same ones as all the previous floods.

As I've already stated, if you want to clear the city from the low-lying areas, you'll have to forcibly acquire a large amount of private property, which is either an expensive (if the law is followed) route, or a suspension of the current law. So suggesting the low lying areas be forcibly cleared is clearly unworkable. And it involves acquiring and demolishing the majority of the CBD. If you think that is even remotely possible then I've got the Story Bridge to sell you.

Everyone who purchases property in Brisbane is well aware of the 1974 floods. I know, because I purchased a property knowing full well it could be flooded one day as it was in 1974. And last week it was. But I'm not about to sell it or have the government confiscate it because it gets flooded once every 40 years.

About the best thing that could happen is something along the lines of a) new developments must have critical infrastructure (electrical circuits etc) about the 100-year flood leve b) flood prone suburbs could have prominent markers, such as bands around power poles to remind people of previous flood heights. There's a popular one in the Breakfast Creek Hotel. c) new housing in flood zones could have a mandate not to use water soluble materials such as plasterboard in lower levels, and could be mandated to have the main living area above flood height. People with older houses often came out with no problems because the old houses were built with floods in mind.

This idea of avoiding flood risk by avoiding waterfront areas is silly. By the same token, all residents should abandon Cairns and Townsville because of the cyclone risk. And cyclones in the north happen far more frequently, and with more devastation than Brisbane floods.


I agree with the sentiment but dams can only do so much. In particular, dams don't absorb water, they move the problem somewhere else. There may be enough unused room outside Brisbane, I don't now the situation, but in any area of sufficient population density that won't be the case, unless you want 10 meter high dams throughout your country side.

In the Netherlands where I live, dams are combined with controlled flooding areas. The dams should hold most of the time, but the system is designed in such a way that once in 20-50 years when there is too much water it can be directed to low value areas like farm fields.

That's logical to an engineer, but it takes serious political courage to build a dam in the middle of an area where there is no water to account for a once in 50 year event, and even more courage to declare one side of that dam as "lower value". It makes economic sense though, 10 meter high dams are very expensive (and ugly), more expensive than rebuilding a few houses every generation.


There's plenty of space in the Brisbane river valley for more Dams. One was planned about 15 years back, the land was purchased and it was ready to go. One political group campaigned on having it scrapped so the land was sold off.

The largest Dam servicing Brisbane has a total capacity of 220% - that being 100% is the 'normal' water storage level, the rest is for flood mitigation. So the Dam can temporarily hold more than double its usual capacity. Elsewhere in this topic you'll see people discussing whether that flood mitigation capacity was used correctly, and only time and investigation will tell. I would assume any new Dams planned would also incorporate a flood mitigation feature, particularly after this last flood.

The population density outside of Brisbane drops very low, very quickly. It's nothing like the Netherlands. Australia has one of the lowest population densities in the world, whereas I think the Netherlands has one of the highest.


Brisbane has been in its present location since 1825. If the "green" answer to "how can we stop floods in Brisbane" is "well you shouldn't have built a city there in the first place, so nyer" then I don't think that's the kind of attitude that's going to do wonders for the cause of environmentalism.

Seriously though, to the extent that there's fingers to be pointed they should be pointed at the folks in charge of the Wivenhoe Dam. But hey, I'm not a dam engineer, so maybe we really do need a second dam.


tokyo has a big ass green belt around it's river http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=35.738057,139.824747&...

edit: for a positive comparison checkout south bank http://www.nearmap.com/?ll=-27.478211,153.023704&z=18...

edit2: another example of green belts along rivers is Curitiba in southern Brasil see: http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=-25.45894,-49.191552&... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curitiba#Hydrography_and_Pluvio...


Well, the riverside of Brisbane is mostly private property, including the CBD. Unless you're going to forcibly confiscate private property, people are not going to leave of their own accord - and even if they do, others will be happy to move in behind them. So it's a choice of leaving things where they are, or suspending democracy, private property and freedom of choice and doing a dictatorial thing like clearing all the houses and buildings along the river and creating a park. Even if you did it under existing laws, the amount of money required to resume all the properties would be immense. Everyone of those riverfront homes is worth at least a million dollars. The buyout and demolition would far outweigh any reconstruction costs.

These people know they live in a flood zone. There are flood markers all over the place and every property purchase inclues a 1974 flood report as to the level of flooding in the particular property. People choose to live in these place of their own free will in the full knowledge the river might one day come and flood them.

So a wide green belt along the river might be a good idea. But it's also completely impractical and only good as a theoretical talking point.


Serious question. I don't have a horse in this race, and I don't know the specifics of the Australian system, but:

"These people know they live in a flood zone. [...] People choose to live in these place of their own free will in the full knowledge the river might one day come and flood them."

Doesn't this end up being the usual privatize the profit, socialize the risk scheme? People enjoy their property on flood-free years (which I understand to be most of them). In a flood, the society sticks together, volunteers, the government steps in and helps out the flooded areas. People who live above the flood level, who might have chosen to do so consciously because of the flood level, get little reward for their risk avoidance.

I don't mean to sound heartless and I am sure it is horrible to have your house under water -- but isn't this an issue at the end of the day? Is there a factor I am not aware of? Is there an overall shortage of suitable, natural-disaster-proof land? Do you get flood insurance and pay back for the help received?


I did answer this before but the internet appears to eaten the comment. I'll be more brief this time.

>Doesn't this end up being the usual privatize the profit, socialize the risk scheme?

In short, there's very few locations which don't have advantages of a greater public pool of funds to assist in disaster.

You might say this but I'll counter by saying that all residents of San Francisco are privatising the benefits of living in such a nice city, while greater California and the USA are socialising their risk of living in an earthquake prone area. The same goes for tornado country, or most of florida with Hurricanes, or wherever, really.

So while you can probably argue the technical merits of such a statement it quickly can be applied to just about anyone, anywhere, and starts to look absurd.

I would object if people living in flood zones were automatically provided with government funds to rebuild. While the government might donate money to the general cause of rebuilding (much of which goes to hardship funding) they don't directly underwrite private property. So the person with the most risk is the one living next to the river. As long as they don't expect or are promised help, then you're not socialising the risk. If people volunteer help after the fact, that's a different thing.


> Even if you did it under existing laws, the amount of money required to resume all the properties would be immense.

IANAL, but as I recall, the guarantee that forced acquisition occur on just terms only binds the Commonwealth, not the states. Queensland may not have just-terms laws, and even if they do, Parliament would be able to suspend them.


IANAL either, but anything that happens with regards to forced property acquisitions also means the person with the confiscated property has to be compensated fairly at full market value for said property. And the cost of acquiring all the riverfront property along the Brisbane and Bremer Rivers would be astronomical.

So they only way to resume the properties and provide a benign area for flooding is to either (a) borrow or tax a lot of money for the acquisition or (b) suspend the laws and steal the properties from their owners by means of modified legislation or other force.

I'm not saying that forced property acquisition should never occur, clearly there needs to be cases where this happens ('The Castle' notwithstanding). But to forcefully acquire all the property along the Brisbane river? Another flood mitigation Dam would be a lot cheaper and keep a lot more people happy, and provide more water for droughts. Queensland is still woefully under-equipped for long dry periods. Wivenhoe was designed to mitigate flood waters and guarantee supply until 2000. SEQ needs another large dam.


> IANAL either, but anything that happens with regards to forced property acquisitions also means the person with the confiscated property has to be compensated fairly at full market value for said property.

What you say is true of acquisitions made by the Commonwealth. The Federal Constitution makes that explicit guarantee (Section 51(xxxi)) -- incidentally the High Court have taken the view that "just terms" does not necessarily mean "at market rates". My parents got diddly poop for land compulsorily acquired by the Whitlam Government near Darwin.

But the states are not bound by that guarantee and each State Constitution may or may not have requirements for just terms acquisition by the states. Moreover, State constitutions are generally amendable by State Parliaments without requiring a referendum, making them much less robust to policy pressure than the Federal Constitution.

If it so happens to be that Queensland's "just terms" rules are in an amendable constitution or are an Act of Parliament, then there would be no legal barrier to the Parliament removing or drastically reducing compensation for compulsory acquisition of land.

However I suspect land along the Brisbane river will not be acquired because of the politically poisonous nature of compulsory acquisitions generally.


There's also epic flood control stuff on the river north of Tokyo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Area_Outer_Undergr...


i'm constantly floored by the scale and quality of infrastructure in japan, and not just tokyo even out woop woop they have rail, road, water and telco infrastructure that makes our efforts look feeble.

amazing shit you can do when you run public debt at close to 100% of GDP :)


Japanese public debt is actually at ~200% of GDP. Australia is not seen as a particularly safe bond issuer, we could not sustain that level of debt.


And when you have population density. It makes economic sense to provide better services when you have x number of people per m^2 as compared to the Australian density.

I'm a big believer that Australian cities should be bearing this in mind and building up rather than out.


Except for Bob Brown. Who is now widely perceived as being a heartless loony.

(For O/S readers, the leader of the Greens party claimed that "The Coal Industry should have to pay for the cleanup as it was caused by climate change, which is their fault" (Paraphrased). This is not only unproven, it's also a cop-out... PEOPLE used that coal Bob, they're to blame as well if we believe your causality logic. It's a good thing there were no floods before this year, and certainly none in the 19th century to disprove your theory that natural disasters only happen to naughty planets whose inhabitants mine coal)


privatise the profit, socialise the costs.


Serious question now : do you really believe/agree with what Bob Brown is saying? Or are you going along with the support just because you support his political party? He has no facts or even scientific support for his statement. To state that the Australian coal industry has somehow caused major flooding is to indulge in bald-faced lying of the type that only agenda-driven politicians can manage. The one data point of worse flooding in 1893 before the coal industry even existed is case closed for most rational people. Not even the most activist climate scientist is prepared to definitively link the floods to warming temperature, let along the percentage of warming attributed to co2 emissions, let alone the 1% of global co2 emissions that Australia accounts for. About the best you'll get is 'global warming may have contributed to the flooding'. And that's hardly a smoking gun of the type Brown is fantasizing about.

If I was a supporter of Bob Brown I would be embarassed by this particular outburst.


I wouldn't be. Bob Brown has form on this sort of thing. He blamed the ACT and Victoria bushfires on global warming also. Basically his major supporters at this point must be the forgetful and the shameless.


Here's my question on climate change: it is by now widely accepted that climate change is responsible both for droughts and for flooding rains. That is, climate change can give us more rain at some times and less rain at others.

I'm willing to accept that. But then how do we know that it wasn't acting to give us less rain on this particular occasion? How do we know that climate change didn't save us from an even worse flood?


Well, anthropogenic (as in human caused, via greenhouse gas emissions) global warming is a scientific theory.

A scientific theory has to have a hypothesis (human caused emissions of gases cause the globe to warm in a significant way) and a null hypothesis (human caused emissiosn of gases do not cause the globe to warm in a significant way). No arguments there, that's not controversial.

However, for a theory to be scientific, they have to be falsifiable. That is, there has to be a way of proving them false. But nowadays Anthropogenic Global Warming, now packaged into the catch-all Climate Change, and has been linked with these following items: more droughts, more rain, less snow, more snow, higher temperatures and lower temperatures. As every single type of weather pattern or climate outcome is now predicted by the theory, and as such it cannot be falsified. It's not a scientific theory anymore in that case. It's morphed from a scientific theory (more GHG makes the global temperature go up) into a belief system (any type of human-caused emissions causes bad weather somewhere). It's commonplace for media and activists to now link any weather outside of normal benign conditions with 'climate change'.

Normal or pleasant weather (such as pleasant summers or mild winters) are never linked with climate change - only adverse weather.

Hence Bob Brown has linked both heatwaves and bushfires and cool temperatures and flooding with climate change. Because every type of weather related event now proves the theory, there are none that disprove it.

The current weather conditions in Australia are well within historic recorded variability, and Australia's climate record is pretty short. Climate change is meant to have started either in 1850 or 1940, depending on who you listen to. But in many cases, more extreme weather was recorded prior to these dates than is found now.

But climate change has stopped being a scientific theory and now is a politicised quasi religion for some. That's a shame because researching and undestanding the climate is very important for the resource dependent world we live in. But research cannot go forwards when it is viewed through the prism of a bad theory, in the same way the luminifurous ether had to be discarded to understand light.

And for anyone who doesn't agree with me, I ask this question : what would it take for you to believe the theory has been falsified?


That's a counterfactual, which most scientists and economists won't bother to address, because there's just no way to know.


This is becoming ripe for parody.

Liberals regain power? "Global Warming".

Ice-cream melts when it's left on the counter? "Global Warming".

Bob Brown is asked to step down as leader of the Greens? "Global Warming".


Effects can have more than one cause, my friend.


Bush of course, duh. It's a well-known fact that he did Brisbane because he hates Aussies.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: