I'm far more impressed with Rudd getting his hands dirty than others hiding in Canberra trying to score points by press release.
As an ex-pat aussie looking at this from abroad, at appears as if various levels of Australian government are pulling together and focusing on clean-up. In many other places, things descend into blame and confusion pretty quickly, which is what happened in the US. I'm sure Bush did care what was happening on the ground, but the confused response between the different levels of government was astounding (and surely wasn't the feds fault alone).
For all the internal complaining about who is running the show in oz at various times, the country has a healthy and functional democracy in many ways. And Queenslanders will pull through.. the state is full of tough buggers. Best wishes to all affected back home.
In fairness Katrina was a much more difficult disaster to deal with than the flood. The flood required small-scale evacuations, while Katrina required the evacuation of an entire city. There's always going to be chaos when you try to evacuate an entire metropolitan area within 48 hours... the manpower and infrastructure to do that kind of thing just doesn't exist.
And that's before you consider that there was a storm as well as a flood.
Compare to Bligh in QLD, who was doing two-hourly media stops packed with information, keeping people abreast of what was going on. The second day of the recovery they realised that they had so much volunteerism that they had to tap it - and there's aerial footage of volunteer centers with queues literally over a kilometer long. Compare to Katrina when the feds had no idea what was going on and where they also copped flak - rightly or wrongly - for not letting volunteers help in a timely manner
Even on the information front alone, if people know what's going on, they feel in control of the situation as the 'what ifs' are minimised. QLD flood victims felt acknowledged, Katrina victims felt abandoned.
Katrina was indeed much worse than the QLD floods, but that doesn't absolve a politician of having to provide good leadership.
I guess all reminders of our planet's volatility no matter where we choose to settle.