Where is Queensland up to with flood management?

Society's interests would surely be advanced if we took strong steps to manage the escalating costs of flooding. In bad years like 2010-11, these are now measured in several billions of dollars in Queensland. Monetary levies are struck to pay for restoration tasks, development projects are postponed because money has to be diverted to repair functions, and insurance premiums rise dramatically. The spectre is raised of even greater disaster when people who can no longer afford to insure are struck by flooding.

Queensland is allowing the flood problem to grow while making only piecemeal attempts to manage it. Sooner or later, we will have to take a stronger approach: the costs of not doing so will mandate it. But the longer we take to make the change the costlier it will be.

We would be best served by recognising that flood management is not just a matter of building structures, but something larger. It is the management, indeed, of communities in ways that allow people to live better with flooding. Community development should seek to reduce vulnerability to disaster, not allow the quantum of vulnerability to grow while tackling it only at the margins.

Sadly, we seem incapable of recognising that the longer term might see flooding, already the most dollar-costly of all the natural perils in Australia, get more serious. Scientists predict that severe floods are likely to become more frequent in Australia. There is a current problem, then, and potentially an even more worrying future one.

Queensland's flood management paradigm needs fundamental modification. Future generations, contemplating the impacts of the floods they will inevitably have experienced (and here we beg the question as to whether flooding will have become more frequent or severe) will be justified in concluding that we failed to make the most of the opportunity that the floods of 2009-13 presented.

It is possible to observe the debate on climate change and wonder whether the world will ever institute effective measures to tackle the risks it poses. It is also possible to look at flooding as both a major problem in its own right in Queensland and as a subset of that even bigger problem and to ask whether we have the wit to address it comprehensively. So far we have preferred to allow it to grow ever larger and to be left largely for future generations to manage.

Just like the wider world in managing climate change.