Painting Fakes

Well friends, you'll be happy to know that the Great Barrier Reef has been saved.   Over the past few months our government has been pulling out the stops to prevent UNESCO from listing the Reef as 'In Danger'.  The Government's 'Ambassador for the Reef', Cairns MP Warren Entsch, took a bunch of foreign ambassadors on a tourist jaunt to some choice snorkeling spots.  Meanwhile the woman who holds the title of Minister for the Environment, Sussan Ley, hopped on a RAAF jet with a bunch of advisors and visited capitals around the world, twisting the arms of the governments of the 21 countries on UNESCO's World Heritage Committee.  In the end, at least 11 countries voted to delay a decision for at least another year.  The list apparently includes Saint Kitts and Nevis, Ethiopia, Hungary, Mali, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russia and Spain. Minister Ley said : “Our concern was always that UNESCO had sought an immediate ‘in danger lis...

 A few years ago I read and reviewed Neil Woods' Good Cop, Bad War, the story of his work as an undercover police officer in the UK infiltrating illicit drug networks.  Woods tells the story of his 14 years as an undercover operator, beginning in the early 1990s.  It's a hair-raising tale of subterfuge and danger written with a clear purpose.  Woods was the chairperson of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an association of former and current police and customs officers campaigning for drug law reform, and he wanted to use his own experience to highlight the futility of the 'War on Drugs'. I recently came across a Queensland equivalent to this story, Drugs, Guns and Lies: My Life as an Undercover Cop, by Keith Banks, published in 2020.  Banks was a Queensland police officer from 1975 to 1995, entering the academy as an innocent, naïve 16 year old intent on helping the good guys by taking out the bad guys, and leaving in 1995 with a more realistic idea of who ...

So after all my letters to our esteemed Prime Minister I've been neglecting his State colleagues here in Queensland.  Of course, they are making a better fist of climate policy than Scomo and his mob, but that's not saying much.  So I thought that in this new era of Commonwealth/State cooperation (and with an eye to our State election which is just around the corner) I would adapt my latest missive for the Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk. Dear Premier I trust you and your family and loved ones are well and thriving through the COVID crisis.   I would like to thank and congratulate you and your government, along with your State and Commonwealth colleagues, on your astute handling of this crisis.   It’s been reassuring to see the speed and effectiveness with which our governments have reacted, and the success this has brought about in keeping the number of infections low.   No doubt there is a long way to go and there will be twists an...

After spending a couple of depressing Saturday evenings over the past three years watching election results in which the Liberals/LNP gained substantial majorities, followed by months of pain as they set about shredding their respective governments' already feeble efforts towards equity and ecological responsibility, I finally get to talk about some good news! It's interesting that all the commentators, even the ABC's seasoned election analyst Anthony Green, were stunned at the size of the swing.  Green's initial flummoxed response was that he didn't trust the numbers he was seeing.  They turned out to be correct.  After sweeping the pool in 2012, the LNP has clearly lost its majority.  At last we have seen Annastacia Palaszczuk with a genuine, unforced smile . What's really interesting is that the opinion polls have been saying this for some time but no-one, including me, believed them.  We all assumed that come the election the undecided voters would ...

The other day I was listening to ABC Radio and a talk-back caller told us about his daughter.  She is, according to her biased Dad, an intelligent young woman and wanted to think seriously about who she was voting for.  Like any young digital native, she went online and looked at the policies of the major parties.  According to her Dad, what she found is that one party (the LNP) had a set of constructive policies which outlined what it would do in government while the other (the Labor Party) just seemed intent on criticising their opponents. Now it's possible this man was an LNP plant (all the parties do this at elections) but it's also possible he was genuine.  If so, our young digital native has let herself down badly.  Perhaps the message is that what our young adults gain in comfort with the online world, they lose by having short attention spans.  Nothing to do with the rise of social media, and everything to do with being 18.  All that grey ...

It's taken until the second last week of the election campaign, but I finally have a piece of literature from my local LNP candidate, Leila Abukar. I like that the LNP has pre-selected a woman of Somali origin for my local seat, but it's depressingly familiar (no matter which party you talk about) that she's been nominated for a seat they are unlikely to win.  The LNP won Yeerongpilly in 2012 by a very slim margin, and within a year their succesful candidate, Carl Judge, resigned from the party in disgust.  He is running this year as an independent but it seems almost certain the seat will return to Labor. Still you can't accuse them of skimping on her campaign.  We've been reading about how much the LNP has out-fund-raised Labor and this is evidence right here. All Labor could afford on behalf of Mark Bailey was an ordinary, old-fashioned letter.  Enclosed in Abukar's letter, on the other hand, is a glossy, carefully crafted four-page A4 brochure and a...

Talking of local campaigning , last week I got a letter from Mark Bailey, the Labor candidate for Yeerongpilly. The opening sentence reads as follows. The upcoming election is an opportunity to make sure Yeerongpilly is represented by someone who will stand up for us and fight hard for our local area. Then he lists some negative local impacts of LNP government decisions over the past three years - loss of hospital beds and nurses in two of our major hospitals, the level of youth unemployment, increased electricity bills, the closure of a local high school.  Then he goes on. As a local resident and former local Councillor, I'll fight for more local jobs and to restore much needed funding for our frontline health and education services after Campbell Newman's savage cuts. I will always put the interests of our local community first just as I did as the Moorooka Ward Councillor.  That's my commitment to you. When Mark Bailey was the Councillor for Moorooka  I was...

Given current polling, one of the possible outcomes of the coming State election is a hung parliament, meaning that government will need to be formed with the support of independents and minor parties. Our major parties both hate this idea, and try to persuade voters against it.  Both parties are currently saying they won't form a minority government with the support of the cross-benches.  I don't think that promise is worth the air it was spoken into.  If we have a hung parliament, at least one of them will do a deal, even though they don't like it. They say they don't like minority government because it creates instability, but actually it's just because they are so bad at negotiation.  Plenty of countries have multi-party governments as a matter of routine, and they include some of the most stable democracies on the planet. The Queensland electoral system makes things difficult for minor parties.  We have no upper house, and a lower house made up exclus...

I mentioned in my previous post that the LNP has been working hard for the past three years to create a climate of anxiety.  One person who doesn't seem to need much help to become anxious is Labor leader Annastacia Palaszczuk. Every time I have seen her in the media over the last three years her face has worn an anxious, harried expression.  She even wears it in the election advertising that has appeared on our TVs this week.  The only time it left her face was in the press conference she gave following the announcement of the election date.  Presumably she was told by her media advisers that she should smile more, so she tried one at the end of the conference.  It wasn't convincing. Of course she has a lot to be anxious about.  She was a low-profile cabinet minister in the Bligh Government - her most senior post was as Minister for Transport and Multicultural Affairs in the final year of the government.  Then following the electoral rout of ...