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| New Brisbane River flood map prepared for Maurice Blackburn Lawyers |
NEITHER side really wants to find themselves facing each other in a courtroom over the 2011 floods.
Courts are expensive, particularly in a case this complex, and ultimately, unpredictable.
Instead, there's a high stakes game of poker under way.
On one side, lawyers for flood victims and their financial backers are using public relations stunts and promises of damning evidence to put pressure on the State Government in the hope of bringing it to the negotiating table.
The lawyers released maps and video fly-bys this week showing who they claim should not have been flooded and deliberately used Government and council data to show the extent of flooding - knowing some of it was wrong.
It was a calculated risk: If the official maps were wrong in places, then why should we trust anything the Government tells us about the floods? Meanwhile it made for great TV.
On the other side, the Government is sitting back and saying absolutely nothing, at least not in public.
But, behind the scenes, it is shoring up its defences by signing up experts in class action lawsuits and hydrology and listening carefully to the advice of Crown Law solicitors and their top-flight barristers.
Both sides are saying: 'See you in court'.
But that's a gambit.
A settlement, if eventually forced out of the Government, is likely to be far below the billion dollars-plus hinted at by litigation funders IMF.
But it suits both sides to make it seem like a huge deal.
If taxpayers believe vast sums of their money are at stake, they'll back the Government line and help save the Newman Administration from a biggish bill and the embarrassment of exposing how little it's done to improve flood mitigation in the State since it came to office.
And the bigger and badder the lawyers' case becomes, the scarier it looks in the corridors of George St and the more likely the Government will blink.
With the case likely to drag on for years, it won't be long before it becomes an election issue.
23.1.13
