NEWLY discovered letters that Tony Abbott wrote to his Melbourne-based mentor B.A. “Bob” Santamaria illuminate his inner struggle to decide which major political party to join.
They show that the person we know as a roguish right-winger during his university days and now as a highly combative Opposition Leader could have ended up a Labor MP.
In his 1994 inaugural parliamentary speech, Abbott described Santamaria as the person who first sparked his interest in politics. This was in the mid-1970s, when Abbott’s power base in student politics was the Democratic Club at …

DESPITE Bob Katter’s hopes of holding the balance of power in the Queensland election that was held in March, Campbell Newman’s Liberal National Party won in a landslide.
This meant Katter’s Australian Party only finished up with two of 89 seats in Queensland’s one-house parliament. More crucially, the latest Newspoll shows that support for Katter’s party has plummeted from the 11.5 per cent share of the vote it gained on March 24 to a mere 1 per cent!
Bob Katter was widely seen as an avuncular and eccentric patriot from the far …

Stephen Eugene Clarke (‘Steve from Gordon’).
Sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous for 48 years;
House painter when it was a noble trade.
Born Sydney, November 19, 1926.
Died Sydney, September 20, 2012. Aged 85
THERE were five great loves in Stephen Clarke’s life. First, his wonderful wife, Dawn; second, his beloved daughter, Kerry; third, his adored grandson, Larry; fourth, the South Sydney Rabbitohs; and finally, and perhaps most importantly, Alcoholics Anonymous, which made everything else in his life possible and enabled him to be a sober member for 48 uninterrupted years.
Widely known as “Steve from …

SOME amazing things have been happening recently in Queensland. A little more than six months ago, the Newman government swept to office with a historic majority, devastating and humiliating the Labor government of Anna Bligh.
Informed commentators predicted the ALP would be in the wilderness for a generation as Bligh deserted the party and resigned from Queensland’s one-house parliament, forcing a by-election.
At the federal level, things looked extremely bleak in Queensland for the ALP. Indeed, polls indicated that Labor could lose all its federal seats in the state, including Kevin Rudd’s …

IN 1977 I was living in Brisbane. Under the remarkable coaching of tea-drinking Tom Hafey, my beloved team Collingwood had come from wooden spooners in 1976 to playing in the grand final.
How I would have loved to have been there (standing room was only two dollars).
For only the second time in VFL history, the premiership battle resulted in a draw.
I can still see ”Twiggy” Dunne at the 32-minute mark of the final quarter standing like an oak in a pack of seven and taking a mark Walter Mitty would have …

IN a desperate effort to hold off a leadership challenge from Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard has combined her ruthless disregard for the long-term future of the Labor Party with her ferocious desire for self-preservation, the now familiar hallmarks of her leadership.
The Prime Minister has demonstrated that she is prepared to break solemn promises, walk away from long-held principles and policies, do “whatever it takes” to cling to her job and thereby prevent a Rudd return.
There have been rumours for months that Rudd and his supporters have been making the case …

LAST September, with some fanfare, Julia Gillard promised by mid-2012 she would present a white paper on Australia in the Asian century. We are still waiting.
There is speculation its chairman Ken Henry and his team prepared a draft but it was sent back for a rework.
Whatever its fate, the federal government’s blueprint is a keenly sought addition to Australia’s engagement with Asia. This is because, effectively, Australia has no choice but to bet its future on the Asian century.
With two decades of economic instability looming in Europe and the US, …

STATE of Origin football is long dead in the Australian Football League. A thriving national competition and the reluctance of clubs to share top players for what seemed to be a near meaningless pursuit saw the state versus state exhibition brought to an end.
This is in stark contrast to the National Rugby League, where representative competition remains the pinnacle of the sport.
The AFL and its clubs are right in ignoring calls to resurrect state-based representative football and tonight at ANZ Stadium, when my beloved team, the mighty Collingwood, clash with …

AT some point soon the penny will drop for most of the federal Labor caucus. Julia Gillard will not be leading them out of the wilderness into which she has taken them.
Like a doomed traveller lost in the desert, the Prime Minister is on a constant search for the oasis that might deliver her from danger, but her flawed judgment constantly takes her off in pursuit of yet another mirage.
Thus far, Gillard’s dispirited colleagues have trudged along behind her, glumly content with her constant reassurances that things will soon turn …

WHEN I visited the famous psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung’s son, Franz, some years ago, I was very taken with the inscription over the front door.
It had been put there by Jung Sr himself and it read: “Called or not called, God is always there.”
It’s the sort of statement that his mentor, the great Sigmund Freud, might not have approved of and it marks Jung as a mystic, whereas Freud was very much a pragmatist, obsessed with sex and sceptical of the metaphysical.

Born in Switzerland on July 26, 1875, Carl Jung …

ROSS Fitzgerald is one of Australia’s better known recovering alcoholics. He is Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at Griffith University and the author of 35 books, including his recent memoir My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey.
My Name is Ross chronicles Professor Fitzgerald’s struggle with alcoholism and other drug addiction from the age of 14 until he stopped drinking and using other drugs at the age of 24. Since then, Professor Fitzgerald has been sober, drug free, and a member of Alcoholics Anonymous , a fellowship which he still …