Stephen Conroy’s campaign to ‘flush the internet’ is ill-conceived and already old hat, says Ross Fitzgerald — and it is backfiring on Labor
In this great brown land, the whiff of private parliamentary polling is in the air again and although Kevin Rudd’s personal approval rating may be high, that’s not where Labor should be pointing its fortune-tellers. The crystal ball should be aimed at Independents and Greens in the Senate. Judging by the astonishing amount of ill will that Senator Stephen Conroy is generating for his internet filtering proposals, …

A PROVEN method of getting a message across is to repeat it. Whether it’s computers in schools, higher education funding or Labor’s stimulus package, virtually every media release from Opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne concludes: “Australia deserves better than a part-time education minister.”
Julia Gillard has a collection of roles of which any retiring politician would be proud. The difference with Gillard is that she is doing them all at once.
As Deputy PM, Gillard is the second most senior member of the Government, taking on the role of acting PM when …

IN recent years I have supported Lawrence Springborg as the best person to lead the newly merged conservatives to victory in the Queensland state election. Last Saturday, I was proved wrong. The Liberal National Party hasn’t been able to connect with voters in southeast Queensland, which is absolutely necessary if the ALP is to be defeated in the state.
Springborg, a farmer from the Darling Downs, was unable to persuade voters in Brisbane and metropolitan seats that the LNP was not essentially the Nationals under a slightly different name.
This is …

FORMER divinity student, Rhodes scholar and radical barrister Frederick Woolnough Paterson was Australia’s first and only formally communist member of parliament.
Widely known throughout Queensland as “the people’s champion”, Paterson was the member for Bowen in the Queensland Legislative Assembly from 1944 to 1950, when his seat was deliberately redistributed out of existence.
This week, on March 17, Irish Australians celebrated St Patrick’s Day. On another March 17, in 1948, Patterson, while observing a march of striking unionists in Brisbane, was savagely bashed from behind by a plain-clothes policeman and sustained serious …

Ross Fitzgerald recalls the mining disaster of 1902, the largest peacetime loss of life in mainland Australia’s European history until this year
The Victorian bushfire tragedy last month stopped a nation. The personal loss touched all Australians, while the heroism of those who assisted in the rescue efforts has justifiably received widespread praise.
It is perhaps a time to ponder the nature of such peacetime tragedies. One New South Wales group, the Mount Kembla Mining & Historical Society (otherwise known as Mt Kembla Mining Heritage Inc) has been tirelessly working …

JUST more than halfway into the election campaign, many Queenslanders are, despite their annoyance at an early poll, pondering the political mix that will work best: Labor at a state and federal level or a state Liberal National government?

From now until March 21, Premier Anna Bligh will use Kevin Rudd’s $42 billion rescue package as a prop in her election campaign. Labor is also persisting with a negative ad campaign to undermine the economic credibility of Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg, instead of focusing on desperately needed improvements to health, transport …

Australia’s unique natural environment has always engendered human responses to perceived threats to it that are themselves unique. Australians regard our island continent as a special biosphere; it is distant, even disconnected, from the rest of the world. This is but an echo of the primal isolation fear that has always found expression and a political constituency in settler Australia. It’s like whistling in the dark.
Worse still, part of this isolation response has always expressed itself in measures to regulate — where they cannot eradicate — feared risks of contagion …

PETER Costello’s chances of heading the nation should have been extinguished, not because he failed to grab the shadow treasurer’s position offered last week or because he continues to posture around his backbench pew like a Morris dancer, every time there’s a leadership issue in the Coalition. No. He’s blown it via a video featured on YouTube, which has shocked many loyal Liberal voters who are left wondering what the hell he stands for these days.
I’m referring to Costello’s videoed Australia Day address to the Catch The Fire Ministries. There …

Some influential but fundamentally misguided Liberal party politicians and conservative commentators maintain that during the 2007 election, Kevin Rudd sold himself to the Australian public as John Howard-lite and therefore won the approval of the so-called ‘Howard battlers’.
The argument goes that Kevin Rudd morphed into John Howard and, for that reason, the Liberals should now move to the right of the political spectrum in order to differentiate themselves from the Labor federal government. It is a simplistic argument that is not supported by the evidence.
Kevin Rudd made no attempt to …

THE speculation about a March state election has reached fever pitch in Queensland. It seems likely Premier Anna Bligh is preparing the groundwork to send Queenslanders to the polls in March, six months early.
There will be many excuses given by the Government for the early election but none will stack up. The ALP Government has a large majority in the one-house Parliament and there are no Queensland-specific reasons for a poll. Indeed, the latest Newspoll suggests that the Government would be easily re-elected.
So there is a strong argument that, …

‘Sex is still the leading cause of pregnancy,’ quipped Frederica Mathewes-Green on the ‘Wild Words from Wild Women’ desk calendar the other day. It was a timely reminder that for all the moral panic over cybersex and modern reproductive technologies, your basic garden-variety sexual encounters are still like shares in BHP. They’re blue-chip human behaviours that can always be relied upon to produce the goods and consistently engage people.
It’s also a reminder of the fact that sex underlies all religions and cultures, because without it there is no civilisation. And …