This photo of former Victorian Police Commissioner Christine Nixon in The Australian today is pretty bloody unfair:

christine-nixon

We get it. Nixon went to dinner the night of Black Saturday. Not a quick pizza on the run, mind you, but a bite at her local gastro (read: gourmet) pub, which, reports the Herald Sun today, serves fancy items such as “Hutch’s Corned Beef with Mash, Peas and Whole Grain Mustard Cream Sauce”.

Yes, the optics are terrible. It’s a tabloid treat. But then listen to some of the survivors of Black Saturday who have come to Nixon’s defence, who couldn’t give a toss about mash and peas and say she’s done terrific work as head of the Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery Authority.

But her commendable work doesn’t dispel the damning timeline of that day. Going to dinner is forgiveable — but what about the fact that Nixon, who, under the Emergency Management Act, was deputy co-ordinator-in-chief of the state’s emergency response and state co-ordinator for Victoria’s disaster plan, did not ask for a formal briefing that afternoon?

Today on The Stump, Guy Rundle writes “the truth is that Black Saturday hasn’t really hit us yet. The enormity of what happened, the unnecessary waste of life, the hideous nature of the deaths, are something we shield from ourselves”. He continues:

What has happened seems to be clear. The reality of the deaths was too awful to contemplate —  so attention was diverted to a koala being fed with a bottle. And when an inquiry into what happened found that a similar process of reality avoidance had occurred before the event, and may have contributed to it, the avoidance of contemplating that horror was simply rolled over to it.

Even though it became clear that — however many deaths were inevitable on that day — some or many were caused by a fatal paralysis of action and initiative, a sheer lack of audacity and leadership, an inability to take control in a situation which has totally engulfed and undermined any notion of normality, nothing has really happened.

Many survivors of Black Saturday say they have no time for anger, they’re too busy rebuilding their shattered lives. But what about us? Why does it take a debate over a pub dinner to get us talking about this again? Why have the public stopped paying attention to what went on that day?