Editorial: Queensland deluge holds lessons for us

The Lucky Country? Just two years after New Zealanders were stunned by the ferocity of the Victorian bushfires, they have been shocked anew by a natural calamity across the Tasman. If this country is far from immune from flooding, it has seen nothing to rival the deluge that has inundated more than three-quarters of Queensland. Nor has it experienced anything like the sudden eight-metre flash flood - the "inland tsunami" - that hit Toowoomba with devastating results. Brisbane's great flood of 1974 was thought to be a one-in-a-hundred-years event. All too soon that prognosis, and the flood protection measures subsequently put in place, have been proven to be hopelessly optimistic.

There is a terrible irony in a continent wracked by drought for much of the past decade now suffering an onslaught of flooding. If meteorologists predicted a powerful La Nina effect would deliver intense monsoonal rains to Queensland this summer, there was little to suggest the initial incidences of flooding would balloon into unprecedented destruction. The impact on the state and the national economy will be far from minor. Crops in southern Queensland, one of Australia's food bowls, have been ruined. The impact will be felt internationally. Cotton exports will also tumble, as will production from flooded open-cast mines. Already, about 75 per cent of Queensland's coal production has stopped.

In relatively short time, that will recover. But the road back for shell-shocked and sometimes grief-stricken residents will be far longer. They will have many questions about how, for example, Toowoomba, a city of almost 100,000 people, could have been so vulnerable. Yet, in reality and whatever the warning, only so much can ever be done to provide protection against every contingency when such a catastrophe strikes.

Inevitably, there will be calls for more dams to be built. But they offer only so much, and at a high, possibly prohibitive, cost in a land where the ongoing problem is a shortage of water, not a surfeit. For most of the time, such dams would stand empty.

The biggest lesson may be that too many Queenslanders were not prepared for flooding on this scale. The initial reaction of many people as waters rose steadily in most areas suggested the extent of the problem was much underestimated. So, too, did the death toll as people chose to attempt to cross rising waters by foot or car. Buildings erected in flood-prone areas also betrayed a degree of complacency at an official level.

The toll of drownings and destruction is sure to rise over the next few days. The task for rescue workers will, as Queensland Premier Anna Bligh suggested, be "gruesome". It is, however, something to which Australia is becoming almost accustomed. Every year, it seems, the continent is afflicted by hardship from natural causes, whether it be drought, bushfires, cyclones or flooding. Climate change, the harbinger of more extreme weather events, suggests there will be little let-up.

That, in turn, means New Zealand should be awake to the lessons of this deluge, just as it should have learned from the Victorian bushfires. As befits the bond between the two countries, the immediate aim should be to provide as much support as possible to the people of Queensland. But we should also be alert, especially, to steps that make people more flood-ready and stop houses being built in potentially risky areas.

Australian resilience and a never-say-die attitude, so evident on the sporting field, will ensure the cities, towns and communities of Queensland are rebuilt. New Zealand should do as much as possible to spare itself the same task.