The Australian climate does nothing by half measures or tidy averages. Droughts last for years and just when everyone is talking about building new dams or desal plants, it will bucket down for a week, flooding the landscape. Then the talk will be of extending the height of dam walls or designing new flood mitigation schemes. Everyone, particularly politicians, forget about the next to last episode and so, things don't usually get done in the right order or even at all. 

Global warming will likely only worsen the chances of extreme weather and most likely, the responses in Canberra and the state capitals. We already bear the stultifying complacency that came with being a lucky country, never mind what might come next. The Federal Government is full of placeholders and visionless backslapping mediocrities, led by a arch gas lighter. 

We could do much better.