One Sydney novelist is proposing a subscription model to alleviate our perpetual publishing crisis, says Ross Fitzgerald
They say there’s a publishing crisis in Australia, but that’s nothing new. Publishing has always been in crisis in Australia because, for a start, the population has never been large enough to fully support a local industry: not for quality literary titles, anyway. The book trade has always been dominated by imports, initially from British companies, then American, now joined by German- and French-based multinationals.
Writers in Australia are often a desperate bunch, struggling for …

AFTER the budget, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would do well to consider a reshuffle of his ministry, to drop the deadwood and give an opportunity to some who have performed well in junior roles.
While the pressure has been off Wayne Swan in recent months as the Opposition has been busy distracting itself, no Treasurer since the Depression has had to present a budget like the one that’s coming.
Swan’s task is to make it credible that a $70 billion-plus turnaround in 12months to the budget bottom line is …

RELIGION may figure strongly at the next federal election. The electorate has had enough of self-opinionated bishops and crazy imams, and many citizens are fed up with the way the main parties bow and scrape to religious groups.

George Pell’s recent pronouncement, which supported the Pope’s claim that condoms do nothing to stop HIV transmission, puts him in the same league as flat-earthers and creationists. Educated middle-class voters are tired of this anti-intellectual stance from people who are supposed to inhabit the high moral ground. Pell even termed the AIDS epidemic …

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 …

Manningham City Council Gallery, 699 Doncaster Road, Doncaster, Melbourne, 6.30 pm Thursday February 26, 2009
As if my wife of 35 years, the ex Australian model of the year Lyndal Moor, and my own good self, didn’t feel old enough already, the New South Wales premier, at Parliament House, launched GROWING OLD (DIS) GRACEFULLY to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Seniors’ Week!
Yet one of the advantages of being seniors is that we can say what we like – which is precisely what Lyndal and I and all other contributors have …