by Ross Fitzgerald
When the elites ignore the electorate, a vacuum will form
Among political insiders, I detect some relief that the two-party-preferred Newspoll gap between the Turnbull government and the Shorten opposition has narrowed and a sense that a comforting normalcy may be returning to our politics.
Unlike the Liberal Party base, insiders quite like the current federal government because it doesn’t challenge centre-left orthodoxies the way the Howard government did and the way the Abbott government did to an even greater extent. That’s …
Australians confront a grim choice: a purported conservative who is nothing of the kind and an unctuously insincere main-chancer who makes the skin crawl. Labor doesn’t deserve to win and the Liberals deserve to lose, but one party will — and the country will go right on being stiffed and stuffed
OPINION BY PROFESSOR ROSS FITZGERALD
The federal government’s GST plan, to give the states more money but not to redesign a bad system, shows how degraded Australian public life has become. At …
by Ross Fitzgerald and Rowan Dean.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Australia’s current energy policy is close to being insane. We are the world’s largest coal exporter, but can’t manage to open any new coal-fired power stations here. Or worse, deliberately do not want to. We are one of the world’s biggest uranium exporters, but building a nuclear power station in Australia would be illegal. We will soon be the world’s largest gas exporter, but are about to build an import terminal because too much of our local production …
Why alcohol and drug problems continue to be so severe in Australia
by ROSS FITZGERALD
The idea that drug abuse is confined to illegal drugs is a mistaken one that is often magnified by the media.
The ravages of ice are terrible but the figures show that more than 90 per cent of deaths due to drugs are caused by the legal ones: tobacco and alcohol.
But don’t expect our mainstream media to remind us of that crucial fact. Alcohol is a pernicious drug that is socially acceptable, even as it destroys lives and …
PM MAY BEAT ALP YET LOSE HIS PARTY
by Ross Fitzgerald
Call it the historian’s instinct but, based on more than 40 years’ professional interest in Australian elections, I am starting to think that the government is likelier than not to be returned, especially if Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister is pitted against Bill Shorten as Opposition Leader.
Sure, the government has lost 33 Newspolls in a row to Labor, has a majority of …
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 …
