With Councillor Tim Nicholls winning Liberal Party preselection by two votes for the state seat of Clayfield I now have a 66.66% success rate on my prediction that Santoro, Caltabiano and Nicholls would all attempt to enter state politics at the next election. Actually it’s really 100% because I wasn’t putting any money on the […]

The only thing Bligh and Beanland have in common is the first letter of their names, and the fact that they both figure in issues I wanted to mention today. Beanland Bundaberg Hospital Inquiry Head Geoff Davies has indicated that he is likely to make an interim finding critical of both sides of politics for […]

I’ve been ruminating about the likely result of the new Queensland Coalition which, according to its proponents is really a “partnership”, and I think its result might be Queensland’s first female Labor premier. My thought processes run like this. The Coalition agreement, that is really a partnership, isn’t going to stand up too well to […]

The Liberal Party should have gone into the coalition negotiations determined to ensure that whatever happened they had the run of the metropolitan areas, the National Party the bush, and they shared the regional areas between them. Queensland politics will be out of joint until the non-Labor side of politics is run by the major […]

The Queensland Liberals and Nationals today announced the formation of a new coalition. The “Coalition of Equals” as they call it in their joint press release wasn’t a good result for the Liberals and robs them of much of the momentum that they gained by winning the Redcliffe and Chatsworth by-elections. The term “Coalition of […]

Mark Latham thought that Labor lost in 2001 because of the small target strategy, and in 2004 because of…well, whatever…it was it wasn’t his fault, or not much of it anyway. Research by ANU and QUT reported in The Australian this morning provides a better idea. It also partly explains why Labor seems so strong […]

Mark Latham is pitching for history, not the present, with his diary. Its style suggests that it was designed to be published right from the very beginning, and if that is the case, while Mark appears a little fevered in his media interviews, the book shouldn’t be written off as the work of a madman. […]

You can tell that Barnaby Joyce has only agreed to the selling of Telstra under extreme pressure. Give him half an excuse and he will look to back-out. Once more he’s on the news with his concerns about selling Telstra: I am not trying to be melodramatic but I am backing away a bit because […]

Helen Pringle explores the provenance, and some more, of words attributed to Voltaire in this article. He was alleged to have said, but never did, that he would defend a man’s right to say something to the death, even if he didn’t agree with it. Another phrase that is attributed to a famous 18th Century […]