Flooded Queensland flags ‘postwar’ reconstruction (Second Lead)

SYDNEY - Australia’s flood-ravaged Queensland Thursday flagged a public works programme of “postwar” proportions after a month-long rolling disaster that left the state’s coal mines and farms awash and its biggest city strangled by rising waters.

“We’re facing a reconstruction task of postwar proportions,” Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said after as many 15,000 houses and businesses were wrecked by Brisbane’s worst floods since 1974.

In Australia’s third-biggest city, more than 115,000 premises were without power, commercial life was at a standstill and thousands were in evacuation centres not knowing whether their homes were repairable after metres of water had gone through them.

“There will be some people that will go into their homes that will find them to be never habitable again,” Bligh warned.

The worst natural disaster in the state’s history has seen successive towns hit by swollen rivers on their way to emptying in the Pacific Ocean.

Fifteen people have been confirmed dead in the past week alone with upwards of 50 still unaccounted for.

Two-thirds of Queensland - an area bigger than France and Germany combined - is under water. Highways are damaged, railway lines cut, ports out of service and the airport servicing Rockhampton, a city of 90,000 people, unusable for the next two weeks.

The repair bill has been put at 5 billion Australian dollars ($4.9 billion) and lost production at over 9 billion Australian dollars.

Matthew Johnson, an economist at the investment bank UBS, said the disaster would have a bigger impact on the Australian economy than Hurricane Katrina did on the US economy in 2005 with output shaved by 1 full percentage point in the first quarter of the year.

The federal government is expected to pick up around a quarter of the tab, a burden that would jeopardize its chances of fulfilling an election promise to bring the budget back into surplus by next year.

“This is a very grim situation, and Queensland is going to need us to stand shoulder to shoulder with Queenslanders over months and months and months of recovery,” Prime Minister Julia Gillard conceded.

The blow to economic activity - Queensland is the world’s largest supplier of the coking coal used in steelmaking - has seen the local currency fall against the US dollar and money market players take bets that interest rates will fall to get growth going again.

“We’re a large part of the Australian economy and we’re seeing major industries catastrophically affected,” Bligh said. “The coal industry will take several weeks and in some cases months to get back to full production. The agricultural industry - we have seen a number of sectors lose entire crops.”

Federal Employment Minister Chris Evans was looking on the bright side, hoping that the recovery effort would generate jobs and income to make up for what was lost in the deluge. “Longer term, clearly there’s going to be growth in work associated with the recovery,” he said.

Queensland’s tourism industry - the state is home to the Great Barrier Reef - is smarting at lost bookings after television pictures flashed around the world showing streets turned to torrents, queues for sandbags and relatives grieving for their lost loved ones.

“As we weep for what we have lost … I want us to remember who we are,” Bligh said. “We are Queenslanders. We’re the people that they breed tough, north of the border. We’re the ones that they knock down, and we get up again.”

One such model Queenslander was husband-to-be Andy Lukas, who was bearing up despite having this weekend’s wedding plans squelched by the floods.

“We’re still hopeful. It’s a bit of bad luck,” Lukas told the Nine Network television channel. “But there’s much bigger tragedies out there at the moment. People are losing their lives, their homes and their livelihoods.”