173 people die in a terrible natural disaster. A Royal Commission is established by the relevant government to “investigate the causes and responses” of the disaster. Evidence emerges of systemic failures — including failures of leadership at the very top — that may have prevented some or many of the deaths. The government’s barrister tells the commission, in his summing up yesterday:
“We don’t see the issues that this commission is concerned with are issues of leadership … Notions the captain going down with the ship and leading the charge from the trenches — some sort of romantic notions of military leadership — don’t have anything to do with the sorts of issues this commission is concerned with, or with the solutions.”
A government that establishes a Royal Commission to investigate the causes of a major disaster, yet believes the commission should not be concerned with “issues of leadership”, sounds very much like a government bereft of leadership, whose captain may well find himself “going down with the ship” when he faces the voters in November.
The whole thing is looking very Arthur Miller at the moment
As usual Labour Party apologists such as Burnside and Kennan are trying to shift responsibility away from Nixon and Rees from what will be the devastating conclusions of functional incompetence arising from the Commission’s analysis. The failures of leadership are palpable yet these advocates are trying to tell us that individual leadership is not important
Nixon was the state’s DISPLAN coordinator and if she had been functionally competent she would have understood that symbolic leadership in time of crisis is so important to those doing the fighting. Nelson died on the deck of his flagship amongst his men. Wellington risked death on the battlefield with his men . He had blood his boots because as a leader he was in there with his men.
If one lesson comes out of this whole mess is that senior appointments should be on the basis of leadership capacity and intelligence and not a reward for political correctness, mateship or cronyism.
I don’t think having the top people on duty would have been just symbolic.
I’m sure that the highest ranking people who were hands on would have been incredibly busy. They would have been busy implementing the system.
As we all now know, the system was not good enough.
A person at the very top would have been able to stand back from the hands on activity. They could have asked questions that would have had to be answered, and this might have bought to light that some of the systems were failing.
And if a system was not working as planned, they were the only people with the authority to change the system.
Though the Victorian Labor government should loose votes for this debacle, I’m sick and tired of the assumption which the MSM will present that these votes should go to the Liberals.
The classic case of this MSM spin is every time that our train system has a major failure. We hear the government excuses, and then we hear from the opposition saying that this is not good enough.
The MSM never questions the opposition about what they would do to fix things, and, in the case of rail it is very simple to see that the problem is that both Liberal and Labor support the privatization of rail, minimal investment in track and signaling, and as few new train services as they can get away with.
I mention the train example because it is clear cut – it makes no difference if you vote Liberal or Labor, if you really want a change vote Green.
So if we look at all the government incompetence shown up with the royal commission, is there any reason to think that things would be much different under the Liberals?
Oh yeah, and when John Howard lost the election in 2007, that was because he had lost the trust, the respect, the confidence, the whatever, of the people of Australia, on the war in Iraq. There had to be a hanging, a fall guy, a loser, someone excluded, sent-to-Coventry, made to wear the burning tyre. All to make us feel better about the lives wasted in the war, some war, some fake international posturing to appease someone grieving, a fake massage for some ego, a fake calming for some idiot. Fakery is not lying. Fakery is posturing. It’s what we pay politicians to do, undertakers too. The plumber unblocking your loo. And just about everyone (myself included) writing here. We’re posturing around like Basil Fawlty. We are Basil Fawlty.
I’m with Brumby on this one. Our whole society failed on Black Friday. We all stood back in awe, wondering if those few dozen people in orange suits and dinky trucks, no matter who was ‘directing’ them, could save us – save us from today’s unconscionable derogatory commentary that we knew would be airing itself for years after the event. We don’t need to sacrifice someone just to appease the grief of those who think there must be victims out there, somewhere. Let’s work towards devising a system that is idiot-proof before replacing the previous failsafe one.
I’m probably talking to myself now (as Crikey no longer link to this story on their main page), but I find it interesting to think about who made the recent leaks.
As always, the most likely is the person with most to gain.
This leads me to think that it is the Vic government who leaked.
All the bad news is now out in the open, but with it all only being a recommendation from council. Nothing has the stamp of authority of being in the official report.
So, in a few months time, when the official findings are released, all the bad findings are old news. The only new thing is that they are now official findings.
World class spin management from the Brumby government (but, as always, used for evil).