Past perfect - public demands flawless execution

As far as I can tell, no one of note, including the head of the Commission of Inquiry, has said that the SEQ Water engineers at the helm during last year’s Queensland floods dropped the ball. Indeed, the final report states their mitigation efforts were “very close” to the best possible, given the trying circumstances.

Why, then, are the three men in question being hounded and now sent before the state’s Crime and Misconduct Commission? 

What does it say about us as a society that our political and legal processes allow, in fact encourage, persecution for doing your job?

In February 2010, Elmaz Qyra of Brooklyn, was strolling along the picturesque Literary Walk section of Central Park when a large tree branch, weighed down by snow, snapped off and struck him. He died at the scene.

“It was obviously a direct hit to his head,” said a witness, a man from the Upper West side. “There was this big pool of blood spreading through the snow. It was horrifying.”

Shit Happens. Always has, always will. While the Western mind may be able to temper many severe environment risks, it will never eliminate them. 

The proper role of government is to identify the line between what can and can’t be managed. Though not practicable to de-snow all suspect trees in New York city parks, optimising the release of dam water during flood conditions is something we should have a stab at, all the while remembering a perfect result cannot be assured.

Ironically, this point of equilibrium can only been seen if one first accepts, unequivocally, the impossibility of complete control. If the community can’t cope with the innately precarious nature of existence, the lurking fears will eventually manifest a dangerous idealism that diverts scarce time and resources away from more worthwhile causes.

Democracy does no deal well with this quirk of fate. Few political platforms succeed on the basis of a heart-felt admission that life is, in the end, without guarantees. The mob demand certainty, while politicians find it hard to tell us what we need to hear.

Recall Tony Abbott’s frozen fury from last year when asked on camera to confirm Shit Happens has the edge on us mortals. He so wanted to ram home the matter-of-factness, but knew it would be used by his enemies as purported evidence of him being out of touch, unmoved by the ordeals of the common person.

Absent the truth about our limitations, we’ve become so disillusioned and over-sensitive that we’ll believe anything feasible in preference to dealing with reality.

Modernity is a victim of its own lofty expectations. Having flown to the moon and invented the internet, surely we can save people from dying in a flood? Despite the sophistications of government and technological advancements, we are, in a sense, no closer than previous generations to defanging nature.

It’s a spiral of hysteric discontent. To sanction the impossibility of a carefree Utopia risks exacerbating the despair and resentment, while not doing so contributes to irrational over-reaching, reactive and wasteful decision-making and an undue focus on box-ticking that only compromises performance by devaluing personal responsibility. 

We of course opt for the latter, insisting politicians assuage our neurotic state by pretending to be on top of things. 

In a further irony, it will not only be SEQ Water who pays the price for such a craven choice.

We bitch shamelessly about filling in forms, the impersonal nature of modern life, that no-one is willing to trust anyone these days, without realising that the hated dead hand of bureaucracy is the indirect result of populist political inertia, the misguided belief that Shit Happens can be vanquished by simply privileging doing something over doing nothing.

The essence of the ongoing case against SEQ Water relates to – wait for it – paperwork that was inconsistent and completed after the event. 

Guess what happens next flood? Those at the coalface will, understandably, relay all key decisions back to government bureaucrats. As disaster looms, the engineers will take a breather to carefully draft their memos to the satisfaction of Hedley Thomas and ambulance-chasing lawyers.

There is no operating manual in the universe capable of pre-empting the appropriate response to the climatic events of January 2011 in South-Wast Queensland. There is always a context and the formalities, in the end, effectively useless. The experts must make judgment calls, which may or may not be anticipated by the regulations.

Yes, accepting this does leave the system open to abuse. But isn’t this preferable to continuing to drive ourselves into a more cold-hearted, horrifying version of chaos than that which felled Mr Qyra, one where progress is soul-destroyingly inane, being accountable is someone else’s job and the truth is whatever serves our immediate agenda?

Either accept Shit Happens, and deal with its implications, or keep heading up Shit Creek by living out a lie.