Queensland opens floodgates Campbell Newman takes a tour of the flood damage in North Bundaberg. There was a moment, as I was listening on the ABC to the latest flood coverage from Queensland, that I thought Campbell Newman was excusing most Australian taxpayers from the need to reach deep into our pockets to help our brother and sister Australians in Queensland. Again. Apparently this time Queenslanders were going to do it themselves. These rugged drawling self-reliant individualists didn't need our help to rebuild from the flood damage. There was Campbell Newman, in best Joh, Wayne, Peter or Anna Bligh-style, talking - again - about how wonderful Queenslanders are, and how "we" (by which he meant Queenslanders, not "us") were going to rebuild after the devastation caused by the latest evidence of God's being filled to the back teeth with Queensland and its bipedal population. Queenslanders, Newman was saying, were hardy and intrepid people, brave and resolute, and blah blah blah . It was stirring stuff if you happen to be a Queenslander. It did not seem to attract the same tear to Newman's own eye in the manner a similar declaration by Anna Bligh did, during her floods a few years ago, when she defiantly reminded the world that "we" were Queenslanders and would bounce back. They did, of course, but "we" paid the bill. I'm not a Queenslander, and this faux patriotism makes me sick. Sometimes indeed it makes me think the benighted Queenslanders should be left to sink in their own primeval mire, without our having to dig deep to rescue the ungrateful and ungracious sods over and over again. The amount of money that has over the years subsidised the delusions and the follies of banana-benders far exceeds the costs of establishing and maintaining a Canberra. In absolute terms, indeed, more than maintaining a Tasmania. And given the propensity of Queensland politicians to abstract anything that is not nailed down - and the unwillingness or incapacity of federal auditors-general to track down the destination of anything after being mailed to Brisbane - we have paid again and again for their roads, school improvements, agriculture and inveterately substandard schools, even when they have not been consumed by wind or floods or fires. Only Queenslanders ever refer to themselves as Queenslanders before they mention they are Australian. Or instead of Australia. Only Tasmanians (who are in fact often a bit different from the rest of us and apparently need more money per bicapita) vie with them for claiming exceptionalism, or a special case for being treated differently. But even Tasmanians are not seriously in Queensland's league for the need, seemingly experienced by all Queenslanders, for constant reassurance that they are great, good and in the right. It is true that we fortunate few who live in the nation's capital are collectively regarded with disdain by many other Australians - Sydney Telegraph readers and writers in particular. But no chief minister feels the need to constantly pander to our paranoia, or our smugness - or even to give us a pep talk reminding us of where we live. No advertising campaign invites us to feel superior to Victorians or Croweaters - even to West Australians or Tasmanians. Croweaters or Victorians or New South Welshpeople, routinely invited to regard themselves as better than others because of who we are, or, more accurately, where we happen to live at a particular moment. Most of us do not identify strongly with our own state or territory. It is, incidentally, a sure sign that a Northern Territorian is only a recent blow-in, as most Territory people are, that they identify noisily as Territorians and affect to hate southerners. Queensland chauvinism is nearly as sick making as the constant refrain of citizens of the United States that theirs is the greatest country in the world, with the best this, the biggest that and the first whatever. It bespeaks complete insecurity, a dawning understanding that it ain't so, and a belief that constant denial of the bleedin' obvious will hold back the forces of fact, evolution and Mexicans. America is a fine country, and Americans are fine folk, but it also has more than its share of the world's greatest collection of whackos and fruit loops, among the loopiest of whom are its supposed super-patriots. In our Deep North. this does not seem to be a party political thing. When Joh Bjelke-Petersen was not playing to his notion of Queenslanders being special, he was blaming southerners for everything from communism to fruit fly and daylight saving. Wayne Goss was probably only cynical in being more Joh than Joh for parochialism. Likewise Peter Beattie, Anna Bligh and Campbell Newman - particularly the latter - definitely know it to be nonsense, but seem to feel the occasional pep talk to the vegetables is expected and required. I actually heard Newman speak some sense last week. This happened at a time when he was conscious of addressing patrons, instead of the patronised, and no doubt thought at least some humility was in order. Talking of the extra $6 billion sent in from outside the state to fix up roads and infrastructure after the floods a few years back, and the promise, already on the record that another $6 billion or so was on the way for the latest disaster, he wondered if the federal government - other Australians - would forever be happy "to keep writing cheques to repair the same roads over and over again. How many times do they want to write a cheque for the same section of washed-away Bruce Highway? How many indeed? The correct political answer is probably that we will do it happily, or unhappily, forever. Common sense and justice hardly arise when state chauvinism is involved. One does not hear words of warning or common sense when the federal Treasurer, Wayne Swan, is panicking about the seat he will be lucky to retain in September. Kevin Rudd, a whilom Ganymede to Wayne Goss, is there to invigilate him. Australians are rarely judgmental when it comes to the misfortunes of others. Unlike our prime minister, or our minister for family services, we rarely think ill of those who have partly courted their misfortune. Nor do we help only the "deserving poor." We just give, particularly when the need is clearly acute. There are even those who speculate that the economy of the Kimberley, Darwin and Far North Queensland are utterly dependent on a regular natural disaster as a source of virtually unaccountable "reconstruction" money. In any event - despite the tosh emanating from Canberra about "resilience" - there is never the slightest sign that anything improves much in terms of reducing vulnerability to destruction. Certainly not at the instance of federal or state bureaucrats. Likewise with fires in Victoria, Tasmania and NSW. (For those who will rush to point out that Canberra had its own major conflagration in 2003, I invite you to remember that John Howard did not see fit to dig deeply into the national treasure to help rebuild the city. If I remember correctly, the Commonwealth sent in a $10 million "donation.") But it would not matter much if we had been treated as generously as people living in marginal seats. It's the sort of thing citizens do. That we do. It's an incident of nationhood. It's a form of collective insurance, and it is, or it ought to be, one of the things that bind us all together, and make us one people. Not eight. If Queensland wants to bind only other banana-benders to each other, fine. But not at our expense - especially when a good deal of unique Queensland folly has compounded the will of God.