User blog comment:Callumthered/Queensland (Australia) Floods/@comment-4727448-20130128234752/@comment-4656717-20130129100226

On behalf of all Australians effected by the floods, I thank you for the kind sentiments, good sir.

To be frank with you, I'm not surprised. When I was holidaying in the US, I noted the...interesting quality of most (key word most) of the news. It was all very local, I don't think I heard a single story from outside North America. And in such an interesting time as this (because the start of a new government is quite interesting and newsworthy), I am even less surprised that we failed to rate a mention.

I love the fact that schools in Carolina were closed due to icy roads. The Queensland Education Department decided that school would start on Tuesday as usual (we're just coming back from our Christmas/Summer break), and only where campuses were directly effected would school be posponed. This was ridiculous, because while the school may be dry, the kids meant to attend can live many many kilometres away, quite often cut off by floodwaters themselves. So they are posed with a conundrum: follow emergency services warnings and stay home, thereby disobeying the education department; or driving through floodwaters to school and disobeying the emergency services!

I'm glad that the floods do get some mention in Britain and Canada. Commonwealth connections are, apparently, about more than having the same face on the back of coins.

And closing this quite long reply, I refer to Yan Hoek, who mentioned the fires of earlier this month. Our Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has been torn between visiting bushfire effected people in Vistoria and Western Queensland, and visiting flood effected people in coastal Queensland.