2011: episode two

The latest edition of the Democratic Audit of Australia’s invaluable newsletter taught me the following things I (mostly) didn’t already know:

• Griffith University commissioned Newspoll to conduct two polls on “constitutional values”, in May 2008 and March 2010, and has handsomely published the full results in a comprehensive report. This finds the most pressing item on the public’s constitutional agenda to be “a referendum to decide which level of government is responsible for doing what”, which 54 per cent rate “very important”, followed by “what levels of government Australia should have” on 47 per cent, indigenous recognition on 43 per cent and a republic on 38 per cent. Support for recognition of local government is very high in Queensland (and, relatedly, among Nationals voters), but shaky everywhere else. However, the 2008 survey found the public would be highly favourable “if changes state there must always be a system of local government, set rules and standards of accountability, and guarantee a reasonable level of funding for local government”.

• The High Court has published its reasons for finding in favour of the GetUp!-backed plaintiffs who challenged the early closure of the electoral rolls introduced by the Howard government in 2006. The ruling restored the old regime under which new enrolments and changed details were accepted during the first week of the campaign, obliging the Australian Electoral Commission to accept over 100,000 applications that would otherwise have been frozen until after the election. There is a summary here and full judgement here. The court was finely poised on the issue, with Chief Justice Robert French and Justices William Gummow, Virginia Bell and Susan Crennan forming the majority, and Kenneth Hayne, Dyson Heydon and Susan Kiefel making dissenting judgements.

• Daniel Kreiss and Philip N. Howard probe the laxity of regulation surrounding political parties in the English-speaking world in “Political Parties and Voter Privacy: Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and United States in Comparative Perspective”, published on the online journal First Monday.

• An Australian Parliamentary Library report tells us that a federal redistribution in South Australia should occur during the current parliament, with the seven-year time limit on the existing boundaries expiring this month. Other than the Victorian redistribution that has just been finalised, this is the only redistribution likely for the current term.

• The Queensland government has produced an 18-page paper entitled Reforming Queensland’s Electoral System, which canvasses “on political donations, caps on expenditure by candidates, parties and third parties, and automatic enrolment of eligible voters”.

• The Democratic Audit’s Joo-Cheong Tham has published a paper on regulation of NSW local government elections.

• The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has initiated its inquiry into the 2010 election, and will accept submissions until February 16.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

3,320 comments on “2011: episode two”

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  3. Antony, K and Rod H,

    Thanks for that taking the time out to explain it to a dummy!

    It is really quite frightening to watch. Nature can be a cruel master.

  4. Another factor is the extent to which ground is covered by impermeable structures. In a town like Toowoomba the actual surface area available for soakage is effectively massively reduced by all of the roads and buildings. All of the increased run off ends up in artificial drains. If Toowoomba is like many ofther towns this presumably is then all redirected into what were once the creeks.

  5. SK

    Glad you are OK.

    Antony is right, it depends on where rain falls and the shape of a catchment. A creek drains all the catchment area upstream of it. Suppose the area is 1 square kilometre, and the rain falls at 100mm per hour. If all the catchment water will reach the same point in one hour of overland flow, that point must drain:

    1000m x 1000m x 0.1m/hr = 100,000 m3 of water PER HOUR.

    That is, 1,666 m3 of water per minute, or 28 m3 of water per second. If the catchment is several square kilometres, the numbers go up from there.

  7. Lizzie

    Go to google maps and click on “Terrain” under “More”. Google Earth is better for 3D views if you have it installed.

  9. Socrates,

    The maths is certainly incredibly frightening. Especially when they were saying yesterday that the flooding at Fitzroy River is 15klm across. Could you imagine the total devastation that would cause if it started to surge?

  11. SK

    One thing to bear in mind is that, the bigger a catchment gets, the less likely all the water is to arrive in one place at the same time, because from different parts of the catchment it will have different distances to travel and take different times to get there. So the worst case is whatever is the most intense rainfall that will last for the time of concentration of the catchment. The more spread out a ctachment gets the longer this all takes, because water flows overland sower on flat areas than steep areas.

    Unfortunately for Murphy’s Creek and the Lockyer Valley, they are just to the east of the very steep part of the dividing range that Toowoomba sits on. So intense rain on that range will run off very quickly into those valleys, combine in the creeks, and flood them. Generally, the steeper the valley, the faster flowing the creek, and the higher above it you should site any house to avoid flooding.

  12. It’s unrealistic, but my mental vision is that all the water is flowing from N Qld down to the south and into NSW. Started slowly in the north, and gradually increasing in speed.

    We haven’t heard from Dee yet.

  13. Thanks SK for the update – having a quick scan before going to work. Got an email from my brother last night – one road up the hill is closed but the other one is still open. Good to hear that the weather has broken for now. Forecasts seem to be predicting less rain in the south east over the next few days. I guess the only question now is whether the airport stays open if the Brisbane dams overflow.

    Will be checking periodically at work. Thinking of all the Qld folk. Stay safe if not dry!

  14. One eye witness, now in Gatton
    [“There’s water still pouring down from the hills, covering the roads… the dams are all busting their banks and have just flown over the roads.
    “The bitumen is all lifted on the road, the creek banks have washed away.
    “When all the water goes down the amount of land that farmers would have lost will be huge. There’s irrigation pipes, all sorts of livestock and equipment just rushing down the river.”]

  17. Apparently the floods will severely impact the coal/mining, so no doubt the miners will cry double-poor. But the tax is on profit, not income. They just don’t want to understand. 🙁

  18. Another example of a do-nothing government failing to prevent natural disasters.

    The Coalition had a plan for dams (cunningly kept under wraps until now), but Labor has nothing.

    And when is the first “Floods would have washed away NBN” story going to appear in the OO?

  19. This country needs that MSPT money asap. They are here for the good times to make their money, they can be here for the bad times to put their hands in their pockets.

  20. Of course, in Perth there is huge bushfire, although I heard only 4 homes has been lost so far, but it is out of control and has burned through 2000 hectares of land.

  21. To give you some idea of the Fitzroy situation, SK, the catchment for the Fitzroy covers some 142,537 sq kilometres. (see http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/7470/Fitzroy.pdf )

    It can receive a phenomenal amount of water, but it takes days for the stuff from the further reaches to reach Rockhampton, so you get big, long lasting, floods, but they tend to come up much more gradually for the most part than in areas where the local terrain is more constrained. You can still get localised surges, but they don’t come from the whole body of water falling in the catchment.

  22. SK

    [It is really quite frightening to watch. Nature can be a cruel master.]

    There is no ‘GAIA’. There is no ‘Mother Nature’. There is no ‘Nature’ as in ‘master.’ The laws of physics and chemistry apply, and the operation of these laws are not affected by the human condition.

    STOP CO2.

  23. 2000 ha is not a ‘huge’ bushfire, except if you are in it or near it, IMHO. It is all relative, but IMHO, huge bushfires in Australia are the ones that burn several hundred thousand hectares.

  25. [2000 ha is not a ‘huge’ bushfire, except if you are in it ]

    Well, it is all relative, so maybe not the word ‘huge’ as I was repeating from ABC24. Media sensationalism I suppose, but it is huge for the poor damned wildlife caught in it. It is suspected the fire was deliberately lit.

  26. Boerwar @72
    A relevant article by Goffird, Steffen and Finnegan.

    http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/42794.html

    [A critical feature of Earth System Science is to recognise that human activities now form a major interactive part of the functioning and evolution of the entire planet. This is a significant departure from the past where humans have been studied separately from the environment around us. ]

  28. I hear that the big Aboriginal community at Cherbourg (worryingly just below the spillway of the Bjelke Petersen dam) is now completely cut off, following a similar experience at Woorabinda the other day.

  30. [The Coalition had a plan for dams (cunningly kept under wraps until now), but Labor has nothing.]
    Really this sort of rubbish needs to be kicked out of the public debate. Civil engineering has moved on from the days when the solution to every flooding problem was building a dam. Most of the feasible dam sites were built by the 80s in any case.

    In the right place, depending on the geography of the catchment and what you are trying to protect, dams can work well. In very wide flat catchments they may do very little good, while having lots of adverse impacts and likely to silt up. In Qld, the best dam sites had all been identified by the late 50s. The only two major ones that were not already built were in the Mary River Valley (Traveston killed off by irate locals) and Wolfdene (rendered unusable by correupt subdivision approvals given to build houses in what would have been the inudndated area under Russ Hinze). Meanwhile North Pine Dam was largely lost for water supply thanks to algae blooms caused by unsewered residential allotments built in the catchment from approvals by Yvonne Chapman. So the main causes of loss of dam sites in SEQ were corrupt National Party Councils.

    Other engineering works can help protect towns besides dams. Levee banks may help with low lying towns. Lining and realigning creeks can improve their ability to get floods away to the ocean safely. But the best solution is sensible planning regulations that have teeth. Identify flood prone areas and don’t permit people to build houses on them. Of course, that requires future councils to not be corrupt and cave in to developers and mates and permit them anyway. A tall order to stop that over a 30 year timeframe.

  31. lizzie

    Thank you. That point is complementary to what I was saying. Humans can change the nature and number of inputs to the systems but they cannot control the laws of pysics and chemistry that determine how the systems operate. The majortiy of governments are still run by people who make decisions as if the laws of physic and chemistry will somehow go away in relation to climate.

    Hubris is as hubris does.

  33. I should point out that what I’m saying in the previous post is that the existence of the Dam actually poses a major threat to these communities when it overflows, not that dams are a good way of avoiding floods, though when they are empty they reduce the frequency of such events.

  34. Socrates
    [Really this sort of rubbish needs to be kicked out of the public debate. Civil engineering has moved on from the days when the solution to every flooding problem was building a dam. Most of the feasible dam sites were built by the 80s in any case.]
    The AFR has a half page OpEd piece on this very point from Chas Keys, a former deputy director-general of NSW SES and a flood management consultant. Seemed a good read.

  36. [It’s unrealistic, but my mental vision is that all the water is flowing from N Qld down to the south and into NSW. Started slowly in the north, and gradually increasing in speed.

    We haven’t heard from Dee yet.]
    I hope Dee is OK too.

    It is not the water, but the clouds that are headed south; the floodwaters in central and southern Qld are already running off to the east and west. Even so, the Tweed Coast south to the McLeay River is very flood prone too. People there should be getting prepared (or leaving) now. A lot of low lying land has been developed in recent years in Tweed Council. I hope they did their drainage works properly…

  37. [MFARNSWORTH | 32 seconds ago
    Bligh: This is not the time for me to be visiting flood sites – we are still in a desperate search and rescue situation.]

    Bligh seems to be coming across as authoritative and in charge. I wonder if we’re about to see a turnaround in the polls?

  39. [The WA Government is scrambling to apply for more Federal funds for flood relief after it bungled its first application and then tried to blame bureaucrats in Canberra for its mistake.

    Acting Premier Kim Hames confirmed yesterday the State would ask the Gillard Government for more cash for flood-hit farmers and businesses in Carnarvon to help with clean-up costs and repairs.]

    Aside from Colin Barnett himself, who in the WA government is remotely competent? They all seem to lurch from one own goal to another.

  40. Very heavy rain has been falling since midnight, and is continuing to do so, some 30 km east and west of a line from Maroochydore to Warwick, extending down into NSW. BOM warning says [Currently, an intense slow moving band of rainfall extends from about Maroochydore to Warwick. Rainfall rates in this band are reaching 80 to 100 mm
    per hour.]
    This is east of Toowoomba, and more or less straight over Ipswich. Look here for radar. Yellow, orange and red are bad news :

    http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDR663.loop.shtml#skip

    Wivenhoe flood collection capacity will be full soon, from this current rainfall, then Brisbane will cop it.

  41. SK

    I just finished listening to the news conference by Anna Bligh, and her emergency services crew. Also a gentleman from the weather bureau explained the weather event that occurred in Toowoomba.

  43. ABC24 (with other media) trying to blame the weather bureau for not warning of the flood in Toowoomba. He said wtte that there had been a general warning out for days but extreme local incidents were very hard to predict.

  46. [Energex says 18,000 customers are without power in flood zones across south-east Queensland.
    Most are in the Brisbane and Lockyer Valleys.
    Authorities say infrastructure will have to be rebuilt in some areas before electricity can be reconnected.
    Emergency services are also appealing to people in flood zones not to make phone calls unless absolutely necessary.]

  48. [ domslashryan Anyone in West End near the river should IMMEDIATELY move to higher ground (via @QPSmedia)
    19 minutes ago via web]

  49. victoria

    I heard an earlier news conference, not, I think, the latest. He sounded defensive and did the usual “we will go over it all again when the present crisis is over”, but implied that the Toowoomba surge could not have been predicted with the current detail available on their computer. But I think the words “flash flooding expected” were to cover all eventualities.

  50. lizzie

    yes, that is the news conference I am referring to. As I said earlier. I am amazed that people don’t respect the science, but then expect absolute certainty from it at all times.

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