History of Queensland’s ‘Red North’ recounted
by Jim McIlroy
The recently re-published classic history of radical politics in Queensland, ‘The Red North:The Popular Front in North Queensland’, was launched at a series of forums in Melbourne, Brisbane and Cairns over the past month.
First published in 1981, ‘The Red North’ by Diane Menghetti is now back in print in a new edition published by Resistance Books.
South of the border, Queensland may be better known for the reactionary Joh Bjelke-Petersen regime …
The unwritten rule that the PM broke now protects him
by ROSS FITZGERALD
It may be far too early to declare Malcolm Turnbull a potential winner of the next federal election but it’s not too early to declare that it’s now a real contest.
Despite Prime Minister Turnbull’s long losing run in Newspoll (we’re up to 32 now), with a strong and united federal election campaign the gap is now bridgeable and there’s every chance that the super-Saturday of …
‘So Far, So Good : An Entertainment’
BY ROSS FITZGERALD & ANTONY FUNNELL
HYBRID PUBLISHING : MELBOURNE, 2018,
ISBN 978-1-925272-97-0. $22.95.
The new Grafton Everest adventure ‘SO FAR, SO GOOD, which is released on May 1 2018, centres on our hapless professor’s obsession with food and fame; his relationship with his increasingly independent wife Janet; their wayward (and soon to be married) daughter Lee-Anne; and his much-loved terrier Maddie.
This cleverly plotted satire exposes the sad state of universities and of what now passes for politics in the West. Our obsession with technology, our …
BY ROSS FITZGERALD
It’s become conventional wisdom that the Abbott-Turnbull contest is the Liberals’ version of Rudd versus Gillard and a key question is whether the Liberals might complete the parallel by restoring Tony Abbott or installing another conservative to save the furniture at the next election.
But there is a more instructive parallel that turned out to have a different ending. Today’s Abbott-Turnbull rivalry has at least as much in common with that between John Howard and Andrew Peacock …
It’s time to legalise vaping
ROSS FITZGERALD
In 2003 Hon Lik, a Beijing pharmacist, developed an electronic cigarette which attracted interest from industry. Decades before, Hon Lik had become a heavily addicted smoker after authorities banished him to the countryside. All his attempts to quit smoking failed. Hon Lik knew that it was the nicotine in the cigarettes that had kept him smoking but it was the tar in cigarette smoke that would eventually kill him. A pharmacist and gifted technician, …
Malcolm Turnbull is a single Newspoll away from failing the leadership test he himself set. “We have lost 30 Newspolls in a row,” he said on the day of the coup that toppled prime minister Tony Abbott. “It is clear that the people have made up their mind about Mr Abbott’s leadership.”
If losing 30 Newspolls disqualified Abbott, it disqualifies Turnbull too. If the Prime Minister keeps his job, it will be because no one is stalking him in the way that he stalked the man he deposed.
These days Turnbull says …
THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE CANBERRA, ACT.
by ROSS FITZGERALD
Malcolm is fast approaching his own ‘me too’ moment.
Back in 2009, when Malcolm Turnbull lost the federal Liberal leadership, the feisty Bronwyn Bishop said that the members had ‘lent’ Mr Turnbull the party but now they wanted it back. The big question, with Turnbull having lost his 28th Newspoll and with 30 straight losses looming four Mondays hence, is who will call time on this failed prime minister?
To justify his anti-Abbott coup, Turnbull cited his predecessor’s loss of 30 successive Newpolls as clear …
To stay or go?
by ROSS FITZGERALD
Senator Lucy Gichuhi’s decision to sit with the Liberal Party is a small but important step militating against the fragmentation of centre-right politics. She’s obviously decided that she can achieve more as part of a government or potential government than as a lone or isolated voice crying in the wilderness. For Malcolm Turnbull, this is the sort of consolidation he’d like: a new MP that should make it slightly easier for him to get legislation through the Senate. The question, though, is how much unity …
Professor Dr Grafton Everest’s latest outrageous entertainment takes us to London and New York after a series of hilarious meanderings in the land of Oz.
So Far, So Good centres on our hapless professor’s obsession with food and fame; his relationship with his increasingly independent wife Janet; their wayward (and soon to be married) daughter Lee-Anne; and his much-loved terrier Maddie.
This cleverly plotted satire exposes the sad state of universities and of what now passes for politics in the West. Our obsession with technology, our fear of outsiders and our distrust …
It’s an iron law of politics that disunity is death. If you can’t keep your own team together, you never win elections. The NSW Liberal Party is about to make decisions that should seal its fate at the next state and the next federal election.
On February 10, the Liberal Party’s state council will decide whether its rank-and-file members count or whether it will remain, in John Howard’s words, a “closed shop” where factional insiders make the key decisions. If the party doesn’t change, its members will continue to desert, …
by ROSS FITZGERALD
Australia took some important but long delayed steps in 2017.
We recognised same sex marriage nationally, allowed Voluntary Assisted Dying and approved a trial of a Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Victoria and approved – in principle – a trial of pill testing at a youth music event in the ACT.
These decisions all involved increasing personal autonomy and were supported by a majority of the community.
Some critics argued correctly that improving national economic policy could potentially benefit more people.
But for some members of …
