Father Peter Kennedy had hundreds of followers and his church, St Mary’s at South Brisbane, was a beacon of enlightened thinking. What business would close down such a successful franchise?
Yet Fr Kennedy’s licence to exercise the rights of priestly office has been revoked and his followers face the possibility of excommunication. Kennedy has been banned from conducting services as a Roman Catholic priest anywhere in the world, while his sidekick, Terry Fitzpatrick, has been banned from being active as a priest in the Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane.
Despite this, almost all …
A NATION in which alcohol was once the local currency was bound to have problems with the consumption and culture of booze.
We’ve come a lot further than rum and the rebellion it provoked, but the debate over the alcopop tax shows that we are a nation in denial. It skirted the central issues and primarily focused on the effectiveness of taxes, ignoring the elephant in the room.
In a fundamental cultural shift, cigarette smokers are now pariahs, but binge and out-of-control drinkers are often tolerated, to the disadvantage of countless …
PETER Garrett must be the most conflicted man in federal parliament. The former Midnight Oil frontman, a protest singer in his day, once opposed the US defence alliance but now finds himself forced to support it. The politician who once hated everything nuclear now approves new uranium mines.
Presumably Garrett thought entering parliament would finally give him the chance to put his principles into practice. Instead he has discovered that the ALP was much more interested in profiting from his popularity than it was in embracing his values.
Garrett’s most successful day …
Voting should be a meaningful activity. Like a good crossword or a Meyers-Briggs test, it should challenge people to engage in a quick but stimulating mental process and then give them a result that clearly registers their input.
It doesn’t necessarily matter if their party or candidate doesn’t win. What matters is that their vote is actually counted. And when the figures go up in the tally room on a Saturday night, they can see that of the total number of votes that a local candidate received, theirs was one …
JUST more than three months ago Anna Bligh led the Labor Party in Queensland to a comfortable victory, winning 51 of the one-house parliament’s 89 seats.
It was far from a landslide victory but it was a relatively good performance nevertheless, especially bearing in mind she was campaigning for Labor’s fifth term. In winning that election, Bligh made history in becoming the first elected female Premier in Australia and she temporarily silenced those critics who had thought the Liberal National Party could win the election.
There was much ALP rejoicing at the …
Peter Costello’s imminent retirement from federal parliament changed the political dynamic inside the Coalition. It seemed to make Malcolm Turnbull’s position more secure.
Because he will no longer have to suffer the inevitable comparisons with Costello, or look over his shoulder every time some MP is annoyed, it also seemed to improve Turnbull’s chances of becoming prime minister.
Yet even before his Utegate allegations turned round to bite him, Turnbull was still well under even money to win next year’s federal election. And there’s not much likelihood of him hanging …
Censorship in Australia did a reverse pike with double twist last month as yet another coalition of the feminist left and the religious right made its move.
‘Kids Free 2 B Kids’, a group of grammatically challenged McMoralists from Melbourne, managed to get the former superannuation executive and Pentecostal senator Steve Fielding to take up the cudgel for them.
The issue was whether and to what extent raunchy, trailer park and lads’ magazines should be sold from petrol stations and milk bars in our Great Southland (or Terra Australis, if you prefer).
In …
VOTERS are discovering another side to Kevin Rudd that those who followed his career in Queensland were already aware of: the Prime Minister has a nasty streak.
Earlier this month a Galaxy Research poll for News Limited metropolitan newspapers found that 43 per cent of voters thought Rudd was someone who could turn nasty if he didn’t get his own way.
Unlike John Howard, who stayed true to the suburban solicitor he started out as, Rudd’s whole life is an artifice. With his blond hair, round face, round glasses and wholesome values, …
THE rugby league sex scandal has gripped the nation by its genitals, and there’s no indication that it’s about to let go soon.
It’s a fairly crude assessment, but then it’s a fairly crude issue that the community is being asked to deal with and digest. Even Kevin Rudd felt compelled to wade in on the matter by calling on all sporting clubs to give women more respect and giving his tacit agreement to the Nine Network’s sacking of Matthew Johns.
At the same time there are many …
The opposition’s failure to strike has only enhanced the government’s economic standing, says Ross Fitzgerald
As the dust settles from the annual post-Budget brawl, a lot of Liberals will be scratching their heads and wondering just how Malcolm Turnbull and Joe Hockey managed to make such a hash of it.
In short, the global recession provided Mr Turnbull and Mr Hockey with the softest free kick in Australian political history.
Consider the conditions in which this budget was framed. The recession has wiped $210 billion from the budget bottom line, …
IN the 1940s, a controversial and idealistic scholar was employed to teach history at the Canberra University College (the forerunner of the Australian National University). No narrow pedant, his interests ranged from J.S. Bach to the latest political developments. Because he questioned conventional ideas, he was accused of being a subversive and attracted the attention of the security service.
Sound familiar? This mini-biography does indeed fit Manning Clark to a T. It covers events that are familiar to the reading public at large, thanks to the sensational 1996 allegations concerning Clark …
