Her political inheritance was replete with riches but the Queensland Premier has squandered it
ANNA Bligh is only surviving as Queensland Premier because there is no one else willing to lead the ALP into near certain defeat at the next state election due in 2012. The Bligh government is a political disaster lurching from one terrible poll result to the next.
There is no doubt the poor standing of the Bligh government was a significant contributing factor to the ALP’s poor showing in the federal election. Based on a post-redistribution assessment, the …

IN political terms, the stakes in the aftermath of the 2010 election have rarely, if ever, been higher. The disunited Australian Labor Party must salvage something from the wreckage of the election after its disastrous campaign left Julia Gillard a damaged leader with her political future resting on her capacity to form government.
The machine men that installed Gillard into the leadership are also sweating on the outcome given that their present, and in some cases aspiring, political careers are hanging in the balance.
Bill Shorten is positioning himself for Gillard’s inevitable …

The hiatus in federal politics since the election last weekend says a lot about the state of the two-party system in Australia.
Clearly, it’s in a state of flux.
As of last weekend, there are now three major parties in Australian politics and that will not change for many years to come. The Greens will be a part of government in Australia for the foreseeable future, as the Liberal Democrats are in England and so will the issues that they represent. Many pundits are saying that this will destabilise good government, but …

You may be interested to know that this fine film-noir front cover photograph of ALAN (“THE RED FOX”) REID almost never saw the light of day because two influential people, who shall remain nameless, did not want to see in 2010 a photo of someone smoking a cigarette! How about that? Yet sadly, although he stopped drinking and gambling, Reid never stopped smoking, and eventually died of lung and stomach cancer.
Speaking of photos, in our biography of Alan Reid the mystery of the ALP’s Faceless Men story and photos has …

READING a biography of the controversial and legendary Australian journalist Alan Reid, it’s hard not to be nostalgic for the days when journos chain-smoked at their desks, wore hats, and got their best tips over the poker table.
Reid, who died in 1987 after covering 20 federal elections, is worthy of a book as he combined some of the best and worst aspects of political journalism. Not only was he a superb chronicler of the news, he was also a player, using his contacts to shape the events themselves.
At the beginning …

DO we really need regional universities? Surely Australians could access all the teaching and research they need online.
True, if you think of teaching and research as a simple commodity, such as wheat or coal, a commodity to be traded in competitive markets.
This is largely how tertiary education has been treated by recent Coalition and Labor governments. Funding cuts have forced universities to behave like big businesses, where vice-chancellors are now little more than overpaid chief executives who spend virtually all their time fund-raising.
But there are never enough funds, particularly for …

LIKE many journalists of his generation, Alan Reid ached to write a novel. He wasn’t thinking of something twee and literary, something that might be praised for its light touches and teasing ambiguities. He envisioned a roman a clef about contemporary political life, blunt and boisterous, the whiff of the abattoir strong in the nostrils, something that would get people talking and cash registers tinkling, as Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory had done a few years earlier. It would be loaded with conspiracies. It had to be. Reid loved a …

A PHALANX of press gallery veterans is expected to turn out next week to the launch of Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt’s biography of Alan “The Red Fox” Reid. The doyen of the Canberra press gallery during the Menzies era, Reid set new boundaries in political journalism, becoming a player as much as a reporter. He organised the photo that led to Menzies coining the phrase “36 faceless men” to describe the 36 Labor delegates who dictated the party’s policies to the exclusion of party leadership in 1963. His standing …

THE Canberra press gallery was once prowled by political reporters said to be more influential than many Ministers.
The biggest scoop, by one of the most fearsome in their ranks, Alan Reid, is chronicled in a new book.
In the autumn of 1963 the major national political issue in Australia was the Labor Party’s response to the Menzies government’s new security agreement with the United States, under which a communications station to control Polaris nuclear-armed submarines was to be established at North West Cape (also known as Exmouth Gulf) in Western Australia.
The …

A BIOGRAPHY of Canberra press gallery journalist Alan “The Red Fox” Reid, by The Australian’s resident professor Ross Fitzgerald and co-author Stephen Holt will be launched by the longest serving NSW Labor premier, Bob Carr, on June 8.
The book reveals the story behind the 1963 photographs of Arthur Calwell and his deputy Gough Whitlam that so superbly illustrated the long-held idea that Labor Party policy was set not by the leadership but by the party’s unelected “faceless men”.
For those who do not know the story, in 1963 the Labor Party …

THE Rudd government’s resource super-profits tax is causing considerable consternation across the world, with global capital markets in utter disbelief.
It is generally recognised that a key responsibility for any national leader is to safeguard the country’s reputation abroad.
For an Australian prime minister this is not only vital for our trade and export relations, but also for our standing as an attractive destination for international capital markets.
Kevin Rudd seemed to recognise this imperative during a visit to Beijing in April 2008 when he observed: “Australia is an open market when it …