WARNING, WHAT WARNING?

Australian tourists Pamela Whyte, 59, and her niece, Karen Marks, 25, have returned to Melbourne after a week stranded at the New Orleans convention centre where they had to scavenge food and water to survive. But, why hadn't they evacuated?

"We didn't hear any of the warnings".

These two obviously aren't exactly tuned in to the world around them. How the Hell could they not know?

Even had they known about Katrina they claim they couldn't have gotten out and are none too happy with Federal MP Wilson Tuckey for suggesting they should have evacuated:

"If we had heard the warnings we would have said 'hey no we're not going', so his comments don't apply to us, or probably most of the tourists that were there, because we simply had no way of getting out of there."

Ms Marks says there was no way out of the city.

"The flights were completely booked, and they stopped at midnight on Saturday," she said.

"We arrived at eight o'clock at night and obviously there was no more hire cars available, and there wasn't much petrol left in the town either."

So, these two claim they couldn't get out of New Orleans before Katrina hit but the expectation is that the Australian government should have rescued its citizens from the centre of the greatest natural disaster in US history. Some people just expect too much from their government, and not nearly enough from themselves.