PETER Costello’s chances of heading the nation should have been extinguished, not because he failed to grab the shadow treasurer’s position offered last week or because he continues to posture around his backbench pew like a Morris dancer, every time there’s a leadership issue in the Coalition. No. He’s blown it via a video featured on YouTube, which has shocked many loyal Liberal voters who are left wondering what the hell he stands for these days.
I’m referring to Costello’s videoed Australia Day address to the Catch The Fire Ministries. There …
Some influential but fundamentally misguided Liberal party politicians and conservative commentators maintain that during the 2007 election, Kevin Rudd sold himself to the Australian public as John Howard-lite and therefore won the approval of the so-called ‘Howard battlers’.
The argument goes that Kevin Rudd morphed into John Howard and, for that reason, the Liberals should now move to the right of the political spectrum in order to differentiate themselves from the Labor federal government. It is a simplistic argument that is not supported by the evidence.
Kevin Rudd made no attempt to …
THE speculation about a March state election has reached fever pitch in Queensland. It seems likely Premier Anna Bligh is preparing the groundwork to send Queenslanders to the polls in March, six months early.
There will be many excuses given by the Government for the early election but none will stack up. The ALP Government has a large majority in the one-house Parliament and there are no Queensland-specific reasons for a poll. Indeed, the latest Newspoll suggests that the Government would be easily re-elected.
So there is a strong argument that, …
‘Sex is still the leading cause of pregnancy,’ quipped Frederica Mathewes-Green on the ‘Wild Words from Wild Women’ desk calendar the other day. It was a timely reminder that for all the moral panic over cybersex and modern reproductive technologies, your basic garden-variety sexual encounters are still like shares in BHP. They’re blue-chip human behaviours that can always be relied upon to produce the goods and consistently engage people.
It’s also a reminder of the fact that sex underlies all religions and cultures, because without it there is no civilisation. And …
IN LATE 1959, as a precocious 15-year-old student at Melbourne Boys High School, I wrote to Fidel Castro, Prime Minister of Cuba, offering myself as an economics adviser. One afternoon, shortly after my Collingwood football-playing father, Bill Fitzgerald, had returned from work as a fitter and turner at the State Electricity Commission in Richmond, an officer from the Victorian Special Branch, which had intercepted my letter, knocked on the door. My father, who I later realised was a DLP (Democratic Labor Party) supporter, was mortified. Angrily, he accused me of …
In Queensland, the populist Peter Beattie first led Labor to power in 1998. Premier Beattie then won three more landslide victories in 2001, 2004 and 2006, and now the state ALP government led by Anna Bligh has a huge majority in Queensland’s one-house Parliament.
Labor has 58 of the 89 seats. It actually won 59 seats at the last state election, but Ronan Lee, the member for Indooroopilly, defected to the Greens last year.
The 2008 redistribution of Queensland electoral boundaries significantly favoured Labor, which now has probably 63 or 64 notional …
Ross Fitzgerald on the efforts to save a crumbling rural picture palace.
Nestled in the main street of Junee in rural New South Wales, the Athenium picture theatre has seen better days. Once the lifeblood of the community and a hub for theatre, films and the latest newsreels, the cinema is now boarded up and in disrepair. While it crumbles, the Heritage Council of NSW and Junee Shire Council try to work out what to do with this faded jewel.
Listed on the NSW State Heritage Register in 2003, the theatre is …
ON Thursday, Karambir Singh Kang, the general manager of Mumbai’s signature Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel, will return to work.
This will take considerable stoicism and fortitude, as during the 90-hour terrorist attacks in Mumbai, which began in the afternoon of November26, Kang’s wife and two sons were killed. These three tragic deaths were among the 178 fatalities in Mumbai that included Indian residents and visitors from the US, Britain, Australia and other countries.
Along with India’s tourism authorities, Kang faces a huge task in turning around the vast drop …
In The Best Australian Essays 2008, David Marr presents 31 offerings, including a piece by himself — supposedly because ‘the publishers insisted’ and he ‘didn’t fight’!
Not unsurprisingly the result is a curate’s egg, although it does seem clear that a disproportionate number of essays hail from the Monthly, which like this book is published by Morry Schwartz’s Melbourne-based Black Inc. This means that much of this volume is intellectually inbred.
But enough carping, let’s deal with some of the positives.
Two of the most promising pieces in the collection are ‘To Hell …
IF 29 countries, including France and Germany, can completely or partially ban the advertising of booze and in the process reduce alcohol consumption, why is Australia dragging the chain?
This is something our health ministers should urgently consider.
According to a recent commonwealth report, the annual cost to Australia of alcohol abuse in terms of policing and health care is $15 billion.
In NSW, the chief health officer estimates alcohol causes 1220 deaths and 47,000 hospitalisations a year.
Last week, NSW Health Minister John Della Bosca called for a public debate …
