Now, with the passing of Christmas and the majority of the floods the cogs of ritual are finally grinding forward. The kids are being bundled off to day-care or school, the mind is focused on the regimen of work and play is determined by the period between Friday night and Sunday night.  After indulging at Christmas and New Year, there are now two things we need to reduce, our weight and our credit card. There is little recollection of what we ate that brought about this “bloom” nor is there any recollection of what we purchased for the debt. Yes, unfortunately we are all preparing for the serious grind of the year ahead and picking up those things that we left off last year at that fabulous moment where we walked out the door for the Christmas break.

Not one to cry in my beer, but my break finished with the start of the rain. So it was more of a distant u-turn then destination holiday. Now the files are sitting on the desk that needs to be dealt with in the political sphere. The old work that has to be completed is the continued deliberation on the Murray Darling Basin. Will the Government grasp the nettle and change the Act so that we get a different outcome to the former Draft Plan or will they prevaricate and stumble around and hope that everyone falls asleep and forgets that they are actually responsible for the water portfolio. Will the regional towns come to Canberra to demonstrate against the economic dislocation of their town by reason of the imminent draft to the Murray Darling Basin Plan or will they, exhausted just slump to an inevitable capitulation? Will the debt that is currently at $178 billion start to reduce or like a disease with the return of Parliament and return to work, continue its prolific growth of the previous year? Will stability come to the fore within the government or will they once more be wracked by division, turmoil, plotting driven by the insatiable requirements of egos and fraught ambition.

With the warmer weather around, will all the carpet fleas, those who back brief against colleagues to the media for their own personal advancement, be hard at work around the fourth estate at Parliament house whilst trying to allay the paradox that these are supposed to be the same people with the required nobility to hold high office.

What will be interesting, by reason of the recent devastating floods, is how the alternate political parties deal with the issue of mitigating the effects of the future devastation of floods. The Greens have already started with an absurd statement that the floods were caused and should be paid for by Australian coal miners. This is no more than an opening partisan barrage to comfort their core constituency at the expense of any factual relevance whatsoever. I’ll be very interested to find out how the coal miners caused the far greater floods of 1893. Maybe Bob could have blamed that on the tin mining industry. In the meantime, is Bob going to blame the loss of the Ashes in cricket on some other inspired nefarious conspiracy?

The Greens will say that floods should not be mitigated by the construction of dams because it interferes with the natural course of events. I’m glad that Florey was not versed in this argument when he developed penicillin, to stop the natural cause of bacterial infections, for medicinal use. There will be a perverse argument placed by some that says dams are evil and the rights of fish reign supreme over the rights of the property and person of those in flood ravaged areas; perverse because a dam can have both flood mitigating, commercial and an environmental capacity. They will demand that the resource that could generate so much wealth be allowed to flow unimpeded to the sea, even if that is via your living room. If it was instead utilised in such areas as irrigation or industry, we could pay for some of the expenses now apparent.

In St George, like many towns we have a form of flood cabin fever. There is only so many times that you can take your kids to the part of the road that is blocked off by the floodwaters and be anxious for what lies beyond.