Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has won grudging respect from TV reporters and newspaper columnists for how she led Queensland's response to the floods.
She has been visible and accessible, making sense out of chaos in regular media conferences. She brilliantly mastered her detailed briefings and could explain, reliably, what was happening at grass roots level and in the currents to come. She was even, once or twice, appropriately emotional.
Better than Christine Nixon during the Victorian firestorm, said some. Better than Julia Gillard, said others, unfairly in my view, and here's why. Put simply: it wasn't Gillard's gig. It wasn't her role to 'lead' a uniquely Queensland fight-back.
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I am bloody tired of journalists comparing one woman against another, as if there were a competition to find the 'real' woman leader, a winner and losers. That isn't how women tend to use power: it can be shared, and used for the common good. We saw them doing it, and didn't get it.
It is not easy for Commonwealth and State leaders to share power. We needed a written constitution to make federation even possible. Even now, Australia is a relatively short-lived nest of feisty, autonomous nation-states, among whom the balance of power is not only elastic but a little sticky.
Queenslanders have a view of themselves that is at once annoyingly parochial and powerfully positive when necessary. At crisis, people clamour for authoritative parenting. When we feel the fragility of order, we want and need leaders. And leaders come. But we have to feel they are one of us.
Real leaders don't plan to be there when levees split or planes hit a tower. They act because they are there, and can exercise judgment.
They're not usually the men and women who make excellent policies and plans in more placid times, though we need them too: Brisbane, for example, was not flooded by sewage as well as the river because a project team put sewage controls well above 1974 flood levels, finishing this a month before Brisbane swam.
Nor are such leaders usually those who found office through the ordinary cut, thrusts and betrayals of daily political struggle. The greatest leader in time of war is not usually the one who assiduously sought