Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has won grudging respect from TV reporters and newspaper columnists for how she led Queensland's response to the floods.
She has been visible and accessible, making sense out of chaos in regular media conferences. She brilliantly mastered her detailed briefings and could explain, reliably, what was happening at grass roots level and in the currents to come. She was even, once or twice, appropriately emotional.
Better than Christine Nixon during the Victorian firestorm, said some. Better than Julia Gillard, said others, unfairly in my view, and here's why. Put simply: it wasn't Gillard's gig. It wasn't her role to 'lead' a uniquely Queensland fight-back.
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I am bloody tired of journalists comparing one woman against another, as if there were a competition to find the 'real' woman leader, a winner and losers. That isn't how women tend to use power: it can be shared, and used for the common good. We saw them doing it, and didn't get it.
It is not easy for Commonwealth and State leaders to share power. We needed a written constitution to make federation even possible. Even now, Australia is a relatively short-lived nest of feisty, autonomous nation-states, among whom the balance of power is not only elastic but a little sticky.
Queenslanders have a view of themselves that is at once annoyingly parochial and powerfully positive when necessary. At crisis, people clamour for authoritative parenting. When we feel the fragility of order, we want and need leaders. And leaders come. But we have to feel they are one of us.
Real leaders don't plan to be there when levees split or planes hit a tower. They act because they are there, and can exercise judgment.
They're not usually the men and women who make excellent policies and plans in more placid times, though we need them too: Brisbane, for example, was not flooded by sewage as well as the river because a project team put sewage controls well above 1974 flood levels, finishing this a month before Brisbane swam.
Nor are such leaders usually those who found office through the ordinary cut, thrusts and betrayals of daily political struggle. The greatest leader in time of war is not usually the one who assiduously sought power through the manipulation and approval of their peers, but the one who is animated by the demands of the hour; who has the means of influencing the outcome, and is decisive.
Wartime great Winston Churchill had been a tipsy, narcissistic political failure until Hitler warred on England. Only then did sly intelligence and opportunism allow him to become the wartime hero to a resilient and adaptive people.
Queensland's flood pain was Queensland's alone, until the rest of the country heard its voice. Bligh was a visual symbol: utilitarian shirt-sleeves, casual hair drifting across an animated face, spontaneous, and clearly across every detail of what was happening. This was reminiscent of Gillard on her feet in Parliament when she was deputy PM, roasting the opposition over a slow fire, or standing up for women's rights at work.
Bligh showed leadership, exuding authority, not charisma. She behaved like a monarch; an ennobling, arbitrary, tender and organically human institution.
When Elizabeth I was confronted by an apparently unstoppable Spanish Armada, she rode down to the cliffs of Dover and into a plot for her murder, and told her soldiers, and all of her people, that though she had the weak and feeble body of a woman, she had the heart and stomach of a king.
In modern times we give spontaneous affection, not loyalty, to a monarch, because she is there, the bearer of our dignity, the embodiment of the people as we wish to be and even, perhaps, a kind of mascot.
At such times, a monarch has no political vision because she does not have any interest in manufacturing or selling illusion, which is an ordinary politician's business, but instead has a sense of urgency and purpose. In a time of crisis, a queen is order, empowerment, cooperation and an enforced equality.
I would think of Bligh's press conferences in terms of the film The King's Speech: and as a career highlight in which neither Botox nor sound bites played a part. It was all human weakness and pluck.
The King's Speech is less fact than a fable about a relatively ordinary man who did not want the throne yet felt both duty-bound and completely unfit for it: a man who learned, through the exchange of love, encouragement and endurance, the confidence to do and say the right thing at the right time.
We thank God now both that his Nazi-sympathising brother, Edward VIII, was not king at the time of war, and that 'Bertie' King George VI had no real power at all, for doing was not his forte. George VI was 'authority' and earned it by pursuing a worthwhile purpose, exercising judgment, and making sound decisions when the outcome was most uncertain.
This kind of authority requires more than looking good on television or manufacturing well-scripted sound bites, which are part of a different kind of political life. A good leader of the former kind is for the moment, but not necessarily for the whole journey. Britain needed a Churchill in war, but politicians with a different kind of guts for the reconstruction
So, let us praise Bligh, but not at the cost of Gillard, who was in a different role, which does not particularly suit her. Remember and observe how Gillard had to stand back, and that she is still struggling to be both prime ministerial and an unscripted, natural leader.
Crises bring out the best, and sometimes the worst, in our elected leaders (Menzies, for example, in war-time was a drip). Gillard hasn't really had one (other than the last election).
One swallow does not a summer make. As Churchill famously said: 'Wait, and see.'
Moira Rayner is a barrister and writer. She is a former Equal Opportunity and HREOC Commissioner. She is principal of Moira Rayner and Associates.