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Are the bushfires Scott Morrison's Hurricane Katrina moment that he can't live down?
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Candidate
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| Contributor | IndyGeorgia |
| Last Edited | IndyGeorgia Jan 19, 2020 08:50pm |
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| Category | Analysis |
| Author | Laura Tingle |
| News Date | Saturday, January 4, 2020 09:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst natural disasters in US history. It displaced hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The damage was estimated at $US100 billion, and more than 1,000 people are thought to have died.
When it struck, US President George W Bush was on vacation on his ranch in Texas. The two days it took for him to decide to cut short the vacation and return to Washington was a disaster of a different kind.
It was not just a political disaster for Bush, but a disaster for public confidence in the agencies responding to the storm.
Blame games erupted between Washington and state and local authorities about why the response was so slow.
A decision to publish a picture of him surveying some of the damage from Air Force One backfired badly.
"That was not how I felt. But once that impression was formed, I couldn't change it."
Some analysts say Bush's reputation never recovered.
As people yell at the Prime Minister when he visits their devastated communities, or howl for his blood on social media, the story of Bush's failure to immediately recognise a catastrophe and the urgent need for leadership it represented tells us what problems are created by Scott Morrison's perplexing failures of political and policy judgement in recent weeks.
People are frightened and angry. Some have lived through a fire or just faced the anxiety of trying to evacuate family through massive traffic jams. |
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