We want our leaders to be fair dinkum, as much among us as above us.

Oh, fatherhood has a very humanising effect on a bloke like me in the military. As a dad, you become absolutely aware of your own human frailty and a need to be nurturing and compassionate and fatherly

But the people of the disaster area fundamentally needed to understand that the rest of Australia had noticed their misery and their stoicism and their intense sense of community and determination to arise from the sodden wreckage of their homes, and that Australians would dig deep to help. I helped to describe the community ethos which quickly triumphed over incipient despair. It is this mobilisation of the unifying spirit that thrills us all, even as we mourn.

But it is my total conviction that all the trappings of good leadership are generic and widely applicable whether you are standing in a khaki queue with your mess tins or on an automobile production line.

Let's start therefore with a universal truth: leaders are fundamentally accountable.

Leaders who fail to appreciate this fundamental precept of accountability must also fail to muster the profound commitment true leadership demands.

It's instructive to consider the more spectacular and well-known falls from grace of leaders in the public eye... In the main, the issues behind these falls could be grouped under a lack of competence, a lack of support or loyalty from those they sought to lead, and a lack of failure of integrity. Of all these the last is the most egregious, the most fatal. We so much want our leaders to be unfailingly decent that an obvious or perceived flaw in integrity can be the toxin which kills them off.