Christine Nixon is Australia’s Equivalent of Mayor Ray Nagin

Last year’s “Black Saturday” bushfires in Australia were the near equivalent to the Aussies as Hurricane Katrina was to the US.  And just like with New Orleans’ Ray Nagin, the Black Saturday fires were made worse by governmental incompetence:

CHRISTINE Nixon was hired as our police chief not because she was a great leader.  She was hired first of all because of her politics – and with the added advantage of her gender – and on Black Saturday it showed. Showed disastrously.

As she was hired, so she failed, in an emblematic indictment of these Days of Seeming, not Doing.

To be brutally honest, she seems to have panicked. When this burning state needed saving through action, not group hugs, she realised she was useless. Unneeded.

And so she fled, first to her office, where she hid for 90 minutes doing unrelated paperwork, and then, minutes after being warned many people would die, to a restaurant.

“I had to eat!” she’s protested.

So as Kinglake burned, she went to dinner. And by the time she pushed away her plate, Marysville was in ashes, too, and most of Black Saturday’s 173 victims were dead.. [Andrew Bolt]

You can read more about this police chief’s incompetence at the link, but the bushfires destroyed a number of communities I am very familiar with since I lived near these small towns.  It just amazes me that while the citizens of these small towns were being burned alive the state’s police chief decided to go out to eat with friends and call it a day afterwards.  As incompetent as Mayor Nagin was when Hurricane Katrina hit at least he didn’t just call it a day and go home, which makes Nixon’s incompetence that much worse.