The state election campaign was a shambolic affair, and it was almost lost. Despite an inept performance, Labor was re-elected primarily because the “jobs” theme and the promise to continue to invest in public infrastructure despite the economic crisis touched a chord with voters. Anna Bligh made much of standing up to credit rating agencies.

So why the turnaround? A couple of factors are at work. The first is Bligh’s inability to set her own direction, adopting rather the path of least resistance recommended by right wing apparatchiks in her office. Let one grumpy voter in a focus group whine about debt, and, well, forget the election promises. Secondly, there’s the misplaced obsession with “strength”, driven by the same advisers. This apparently means tossing Labor policy out the window and pursuing supposedly popular brawls with unions.

This mob have an inability to understand that Labor governments always need to pursue a direction contrary to that favoured by the big end of town to be a success. Talk of ‘reforms’ in the context of short-sighted privatisations is quite risible in this context.

Nor is Bligh apparently capable of learning from the past. Wayne Goss’ government was defeated not by the ‘Koala road’, but in large part because years of managerialist lunacy alienated the public sector vote. Similarly, the slashing of services in outer suburban and regional areas and decisions such as the one to close down the QR workshops in Ipswich in the midst of a recession and deep structural economic change had a lot more to do with the rise of One Nation than some innate Queensland redneckism.

Peter Beattie knew all this.

The irony – or rather, one of the many ironies – is that the government and top bureaucrats have recently been pontificating about the need for public sector spending to create demand in a sluggish economy. That seems – insofar as it means anything – only to apply to bricks and mortar and roads and bridges and to completely eschew people’s livelihoods. All ‘Bligh the Builder’ is paving the way for at the moment is her own defeat.

Here are some images licenced under Creative Commons from flickr. Two aren’t actually of the most recent storms, but for those who aren’t used to a classic Brisbane storm, they might provide a bit of a lightning flash of illumination. Over at Circulating Library, there are also some contemporary photos to look at. Taking photos might be a tad risky, actually, as one of the two deaths from the storms has been a young man who unwisely tried to photograph a stormwater drain at Chermside on Sunday night. Via Stilgherrian, you can also have a squizzy at archived radar images of last night’s storms here. When I checked at around 5pm it was impossible to get on to the BOM site to check tonight’s storms on their way, and the site also couldn’t cope with the traffic just after the ABC weather at the end of the news.

<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/brisbane-storm-1.jpg"

courtesy of Garry’

<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/brisbane-storm-2.jpg"

courtesy of supernicko

<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/brisbane-storm-3.jpg"

courtesy of Michael Henderson

We’ve been fairly lucky here at New Farm – although getting off the bus just before I experienced the hail and the alarums and the torrential downpour and the water rushing down the streets first hand. Things have been fairly tough for folks in The Gap and now Paddington and some of the other Western suburbs, and other parts of South East Queensland, particularly around Ipswich where the Bremer River is at levels not seen since the 1974 floods. Most people I talked to today had a story about the downpour that hit at around 1am last night, and a lot of people seem to have slept very badly… but certainly one of the outcomes of these sort of events is a little more chatting to and smiling at people in the neighbourhood than happens routinely.

The authorities appear to have been responding well – much better in many ways than the last (isolated) freak storm in 2004. But given the flooding of the inner city bypass tunnel and also the closure due to flooding of the King George Square bus station this morning which had me and a friend hiking up to Roma Street station to get the bus to CI at QUT, Campbell Newman might like to reconsider the tunnel obsession. Contingency plans for transport don’t appear to have been ideal, and again – I’m as little of an engineer as I am a climatologist, but you do have to wonder whether the design of recent transport infrastructure really anticipated what occurs when heavy rain falls. It might not happen with the rather ominous regularity and intensity we’ve seen over the last few days and nights, but we are in the subtropics after all. My flatmate and I were just discussing how well our building – put up as were so many New Farm apartment houses in the 1960s by Italians – has coped. We’re of the view that the garages would have been flooded had it not for basically very well thought out design.

There are no doubt tons of links and stories around, but I’d be very interested in local people’s stories, and any photos and personal blogs people might have seen or written. Anyway, fingers crossed that if we are hit by another wave of water late tonight, it doesn’t add too much to the wreckage and destruction a lot of people are already coping with.