When we are in the middle of a major crisis such as the flooding that is now hitting Brisbane or The Storm in November 2008 here in the Kedron Brook valley the crisis management systems and emergency relief wheeled in with enormous effectiveness by the Queensland Government Brisbane City Council Moreton Bay Shire Council the Federal Government (Defence forces) make a huge difference.
Also critically valuable are the media at these times providing continuous information and accurate stories and visual images of what is happening to keep people informed. Also to give instructions on where to go (such as the current instructions to so many Queenslanders to leave their homes and go to emergency centres before the floods); phone numbers to ring for the State Emergency Services and the like.
People will be enormously affected economically as their work and businesses are severely disrupted or destroyed – they will still have debts and liabilities to meet. And they’ll have lost so much including in many cases the roof over their heads or vehicles. Government flood relief is a huge help.
Here we are as a Transition Town with a focus on local and it is humbling and salutory to see how much better our lives are with the benefit of this big government systems help. In fact it is a wonderful comfort.
This is not to say that people aren’t doing everything they can to help themselves help each other (neighbours friends family…) in their own communities. We see Lord Mayor Campbell Newman and the Premier Anna Bligh encouraging us to do exactly that: plan make our decisions ourselves help each other. We have had people ring from all over Australia to check if we are all right and it is very heart-warming to have them do so.
We also see the huge campaigns for raising relief funds that people are absolutely willing to contribute to and to dig deep for across the nation.
Can we always rely on living in a country and a world where these big system/ big government support will be able to come to our aid in a time of such crisis? We all hope so. We all want and value that sort of help when we need it. In a very real way we’d be stuffed without it. It would be SO much harder.
But will it always be there just like the sun always comes up? Is big government coming to our aid in times of need just something we can automatically take for granted? Or are we very very lucky to have it but let’s also work on our own resilience.
For example with these huge floods across most of Queensland and also at the same time across Carnarvon and Kunanurra (other major food-growing areas of Australia) we are seeing huge amounts of our food-growing regions knocked out in one go. We rely on Woolworths and Coles being full of food to buy every time we go there. We complain about them complain about prices are picky over whether the fruit is perfectly unblemished. But what if they couldn’t get supply of enough food to stock the stores? Food is in short supply right across the world right now before these floods.
Our government has to get the money for all the flood relief services from somewhere and one of it’s big sources of income are coal mining revenues (yesthe dreaded coal that is also the dreaded carbon emissions). Right now the coal mines are all flooded the train lines to carry coal out are flooded.
Basically the State and Council and Federal budgets for this year will now be completely stuffed with all these floods. Somehow they will be trying to help us deal with the immediate emergency then trying to rebuild lost infrastructure and lives all at the same time as income has taken a huge blow. Then we give them a hard time at the ballot box! We’ve got to be kidding!
Nobody’s saying it very loudly at the moment but the Queensland floods do have some elements of climate change and as insurance companies are telling us very loudly – these things are just getting more and more and worse and worse. Insurance premiums go up and up but it won’t be possible to recover from all the crises and get back to an equilibrium where things are just as good as they were before.
If some of our big system supports and government services started failing or not being available and we had to manage emergencies like a flood or drought or bushfire more within our own local resources alone it would be very very hard. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about it and how we would try to deal with some of these things.
In the meantime it sure makes me very very appreciate of how lucky we are to have all these big system/ big government supports while we do have them. Thank God to live in Australia.