Our leaders sell themselves as being able to direct and influence events. Their most dread secret is they are increasingly impotent, Jack Waterford writes.

Poor old Julia Gillard. This time, a year about, she was playing the national leader - and pretty well too - as she spent the days around Australia Day traversing the country and seeking to bind us all around a determination to help victims of the Queensland floods. There's nothing like a bit of natural disaster to evoke some sense of unity, common purpose and memory of who we are (or ought to be) and why. For a leader to take charge and to seem to be in control.

Julia Gillard did it well, if without the tremble in the voice of Anna Bligh at a Brisbane press conference, as she reminded her audience that they were Queenslanders, used to getting handouts from the despised southerners whenever they were in largely self-induced trouble, and pretending that it was their own self-reliance which always saved them.

Gillard was generous, with words of comfort, sympathy and support, and no reproach or blame for state, municipal, corporate and personal recklessness about building houses in floodplains. She spoke of mateship, and of kindness and bravery of ordinary people, shown in extraordinary stories of rescue and survival. She made it Australian, holding a comforting, flattering, mirror back at ourselves.

(I think it was all spontaneous, but note that the resilience people in Attorney-Generals have now got spontaneity into a mechanistic formula. Formerly classified national security public information documents direct that, after an incident, all Commonwealth statements must include statements of sympathy for victims and families, praise for the first at the scene, condemnation of the acts involved, praise for responsible reactions etc, etc. )

Gillard, with or without such help, did not pander, either to sadness or triumph over adversity or the impulse to throw blank cheques around. Queensland would get what it needed, but it would be by cutting or deferring expenditure elsewhere, not by blowing the budget, she said. The Commonwealth would continue to meet its economic commitments, not least to its goal of restoring the budget to surplus. The mood was proud, but also grim. Leader's stuff.

A year on, a good deal of the bump caused by the floods, and fires and tempest, has been largely absorbed, even if not everything is yet restored. Her standing with voters has not improved much, but she has not suffered much from a common phenomenon after a big disaster - the tendency of victims, initially united and resilient, to become impatient, angry, and finally furious at everyone, particularly politicians.

If people resent Julia Gillard, it is not for anything she did or said, or failed to do or say, over the floods. But it is beyond her power to make words evoking that disaster ones which convey much of a warm inner glow, either to the victims, or ourselves. Or to transfer that glow to Labor or herself. As ever, politicians do not get much credit for anything good; she can count herself lucky that we are not actually blaming her.

Some politicians think disasters or crises heaven-sent opportunities. They can distract attention. They create ''new'' beginnings. They allow leaders to manipulate levers and seem to be the ones whose calm, or steady hand, or sense of occasion, saved us all. They can underline the difference between rivals not up to the occasion, or with no opportunity to show how the crisis might have been handled otherwise.

Yet the risks are great, and the rewards for leadership uncertain. Crisis may provide an opportunity to show leadership, but can show how little politicians are really in charge of events, or able, by their actions, to influence them. All the more if the crisis involves nature or has an international dimension.

No Australian politician could, for example, profit from economic crises in Europe and the United States. Our own balance sheets may be in good order, but we cannot insulate them from the US or Europe. The effects are inherently unpredictable. Our central bankers and Treasury officials are capable and well-informed, but can predict economic weather a month out no more than can weather forecasters tell if it will rain next month.

Reading political speeches is a task that is much easier, these days, with the internet. Speeches are rarely quoted at any length during the ordinary news seasons. A sentence or two - usually chosen in advance as a five-second ''grab'' - may be broadcast or printed. Many speeches are bland, with anodyne phrases about how wonderful Australians are, full of cliche and stock phrase about flag, fairness, mateship and sport. Political points usually have the subtlety of a ratcatcher's mallet, and are for form, not effort to persuade. Much indicative voice and no imperative; cold logic but no direct or successful appeal to the heart or the emotions. Little cadence, and, only rarely, a memorable phrase or sentence, let alone a nagging idea. Of how many politicians can we recall a characteristic sentence - as opposed to maddening oft-repeated phrases such as ''moving forward''? Or an image, a syllogism, or a sequence that stirred, or inspired, shamed, or made one sit up? A talker one would travel to hear?

Politicians want to be thought capable of giving a competent, even thoughtful speech. But few have faith that a speech might galvanise or persuade; many are in terror of being thought dazzling. Even more fear departing far from a script. (Though there are some, of course, well-rehearsed in pretending to throw the script away, so that they can speak from the heart.)

They fear being ''punished'' for saying something odd, interesting, out of sync with the leader or the moment, or, perhaps, out of place with the spin doctors' intentions about how the political menu for the day is to be spoon-fed to the mugs.

Gillard gives a competent speech, with and without speechmakers. She has, like John Howard, a good sense of occasion. She knows what needs to be said. But she rarely surprises, and some of the regular fodder bulking out her speeches has ceased to work, if ever it did. For me, for example, the exciting tale of the transformation of a shy and artless migrant with hardworking parents and an alarm clock sounds fake and insincere - irritating many people more than ''moving forward with fairness''. So is the affected girlishness: what is wrong with being thought, rightly, talented, ambitious and even ruthless?

Be that as it may, Australia Day is a time when a leader can lead by talking. It's a lazy time with, generally, only sport to distract: an opportunity to say something thoughtful - perhaps even challenging. By no means necessarily to be partisan - indeed, on Australia Day most of us feel that this is inappropriate - but to give some idea of one's own, and of the nation's character, some sense of where things are going, some sense of the responsibilities of power and citizenship and, perhaps, some guidance, or admonition, about how Australians ought to be responding to important events.

Yet there is, generally, more thought and more attempt to persuade by argument in the Queen, or the Pope's Christmas address than there is, usually, from our leaders. We deserve more from them; they too deserve some attention from us.

I fear the reluctance comes from a fact of which our political leaders are all too aware, but frightened to admit. That they are not much in control of events. That their capacity to change things, even to influence outcomes much, is very limited. That their wisdom, if they have it at all, is not in being able to predict, or to see things more clearly than others, or even in instinct for what to do, but in some discipline of character and temperament and judgment than listens and does not panic when crisis comes. Politicians, after all, are usually talking about themselves even (or particularly) when they seem to be talking about something else.

But the person they are talking about wears clothes designed to impress. They are afraid we will see them naked.

Politicians Adrift In The Breeze