Wivenhoe won't stop

The flood, but we need to raise

Joh so the sun shines :)

thinker 2,
the inability of many consumers to appreciate that others actually have an ability to look ahead i.e. foresight is what's causing so much stupidity. If you believe the Joh Government was corrupt then how would you describe the Goss, Beatty & Bligh outfits. They make Joh's gang pale in comparison.

It's interesting that, so many years later, Sir Joh still prompts quite emotional discussion. Some love him, some hate him.

Interestingly, from my personal experience, many of us who were too young to live through the Joh era (I moved to QLD in 1992, when we were in the midst of the Goss administration) are strongly in favour of the old guy. We have the benefits of his administration with very few of the pitfalls. We live with the impression that he brought Queensland kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. We have him to thank for much of the good stuff we enjoy or take for granted in Queensland.

It's the people of my parents' generation - the baby boomers - who seem most vocal in their opposition to Sir Joh, especially here in North Queensland. A colleague and good friend of mine, who grew up in the Burdekin, says that she is still ashamed to be a Queenslander because of 'what that peanut farmer did to us'. She was, I suspect, part of the generation most affected by the strictures of his regime. Her uni days - traditionally one's days of activism - fell during the apparently (I say apparently because I cannot speak from experience here) oppressive period of his tenure. From the people I have worked alongside and called friends, I suspect that it is disgruntled baby boomers who - as a result of Joh - keep inept Labor governments in power in this state and have done so almost continuously since the late 80s.

I, for one, can thank Sir Joh for his foresight in infrastructure development. The fact that my family had water to drink during the drought, and is not yet underwater, must be credited at least in part to his actions.

A man who should have ended his life in prison.
Who had a police minister who should have been with him.
And a police commissioner who was filling his pockets and a criminal.
I do not think so.
Strange truly, how such a person can be praised.

I was somewhat perplexed to see the relatively recently proposed Traveston dam mentioned in the context of this thread. Wasn't the relevant dam the proposed Wolfdene dam, for which virtually all the land had already been acquired, the one cancelled as one of the very first acts of the Goss government elected in 1989, after old Joh had been rolled as Premier by all but eight of his own?

I was even more perplexed to see the seeming conflation of the Bjelke-Petersen government of yesteryear which had advanced the Wolfdene dam storage, with the LNP of more recent times that is credited with most effectively opposing the Traveston project. Back in 1989, the then Liberal party had also opposed the Wolfdene project. Back in 1986 Joh (the Queensland National party) had been elected, with the aid of a few Liberal party defectors, to government in its own right, and there was just nowhere for an aspirant political egotist, Laberal or Libor, to strut its stuff! Things just weren't fair!

I thought I had better do some checking, lest my memory was failing and my preconceptions were leading me astray into thinking that those really were the good old days. So I doodled on my Google in my very own way, sifting all the stuff that it was sending me, hey!

My search revealed this website: http://wivenhoesomersetrainfall.com/new_page_7.htm . I would recommend it as an aid to understanding, on a longer term basis than the electoral cycle, the determinants of water storage and flood mitigation in the Brisbane river catchment.

If I don't oversimplify what the author of that site says, it seems that for the Wivenhoe dam to operate in the flood mitigation role for which it was designed, while simultaneously sufficient water storage for Brisbane's foreseeable requirements is able to be held, there was a concurrent need for another dam such as was already in the process of being provided at Wolfdene.

Those who knew better than Joh thus couldn't empty Wivenhoe in readiness for the inevitable heavy rain event.

Strange truly, how such a person can be praised.
Belly,
Joh is not being praised here, only people who know better & are capable of seeing this man's foresight are stating that he did for Queensland what no single Labor Politician has ever managed. He did some good things. Can you Belly state one thing that Labor has done which isn't to the detriment of Queensland?