Fool’s Paradise, an extract

Historian and author Ross Fitzgerald has written a new novel, Fool’s Paradise. Picture: Renee Nowytarger Source: The Australian

GRAFTON Everest is Professor of LifeSkills and Hospitality at Mangoland University and unwilling biographer of the state’s former premier Sir Otis Hoogstraden. Grafton’s day job as is under threat from the economically and sexually rapacious vice-chancellor Deirdre Morrow. And …

IN the 2000 Boyer Lectures, then chief justice of Australia Murray Gleeson QC said: “The essential purpose of the criminal law is to keep the peace, so people can lead their lives, and go about their affairs, in reasonable security.”
If that is so, then is it not the case that, in so far as children and other vulnerable people (such as those who are cognitively impaired) are concerned, the aim of the criminal law should be to ensure that their security is absolute?
Yet these people are often the least protected …

Not easy to be jester in court gone mad

IT’S getting harder and harder to write satire. Those of us trying to think up wildly absurd ideas are constantly being undermined and gazumped by reality.

The “real” world has become so absurd. Conservative gays forming the Gay Shooters Party? Look up the Pink Pistols in Wikipedia. Cane toad leather goods? Check out eBay. What about a rock opera based on Milton’s Paradise Lost? Improbable? Well, it has recently been …

IT may only be a part-time position but appointing former Queensland premier Peter Beattie to the newly created position of resource sector supplier envoy is a smart move by the federal government.
Beattie has a strong history in resources and value adding. He changed Queensland’s energy policy in 2000 by requiring 13 per cent of Queensland’s generated energy to come from gas leading to the state’s billion-dollar coal-seam gas industry. Another 2 per cent of generation had to come from renewables. It was a …

AUSTRALIA has long been considered a safe and attractive place to do business. We have a transparent rule of law, strong public institutions and democratically elected governments.

Add to this a record of stable and generally sound policy-making, and we have enjoyed an environment where businesses have a high degree of certainty that their investments will not be subject to inconsistent and bad government decision-making.
Put simply, government, or sovereign, risk in Australia has generally been low.
Unfortunately, this is no longer the case.
Under …

“Wake up, Australia,” Grafton Everest exhorts viewers every morning on Australia-wide breakfast television.
This doesn’t please those he attacks like wily former premier Hoogstraden, whose biography Grafton is forced into writing.
Grafton’s day job as Professor of LifeSkills and Hospitality is under threat from the economically and sexually rapacious Vice-Chancellor Deirdre Morrow.
And Lee Horton, head of Australia’s newly privatised Secret Service (trading as SpyForce Australia) is worried too. He knows that Grafton has trouble lying.
And nothing is more dangerous than a man who habitually tells the truth.
Grafton Everest is a wonderful creation …