The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The disastrous floods in Queensland have brought out the very best and the very worst in people. The good news is that the best by far outweighs the worst. Most Queenslanders took to the streets over the weekend to help out family businesses and homes that are coated in mud, quite literally mucking in to help friends, family and often total strangers. Many of the stories in The Weekend Australian were heart-warming. One involved a 14 year-old girl spending all her hard-earned pocket-money on sausages to help her mum provide a free sausage sizzle for all the workers. Why? “We’re Australians,” she said, “we help each other.” Other stories are emerging of incredible bravery, including the truckie who risked his own life to pull a mother and daughter from their car as it was being carried away by the inland tsunami in the Lockyer Valley. Many of course were also heart-breaking. The 21 month year-old girl who was ripped out of her mother’s arms as a torrent of water smashed through a brick wall and a large glass window and tore through their kitchen. Baby Jessica is missing, presumed dead.


Then there are the stories that are heart-breaking for a different reason, because they represent the depths of depravity some will sink to, even in times of crisis. Reports of people using boats to loot businesses still under water, scams involving others falsely claiming to be collecting for the State of Emergency Service for Queensland flood relief. How people can be so cruel, so heartless at a time when everyone most needs to pull together and help each other out of disaster is utterly beyond me, and the majority of Australians. Hopefully they will be caught – and, despite the Australian way of not being a dobber, looters are being reported by a disgusted public – and sentenced harshly. The Police Commissioner, Bob Atkinson, announced last week that the maximum penalty for looting is doubled to 10 years in times of natural disaster, and that will certainly be upheld.

The ‘low-life’ looters, as Atkinson termed them, are but a miniscule percentage of the largely good-hearted, brave, resilient Queenslanders, most of whom are rallying together to help clean up and rebuild a shattered state. I wish therefore to end with words spoken by Premier Anna Bligh, who has shown great strength and leadership throughout the floods; “We’re the people that they breed tough, north of the border. We’re the ones that they knock down, and we get up again.”