August 25, 2009 – 11:19 am
The Queensland government has tried their best for a quite a few years to ignore the calls to change the state’s laws on abortion. However, whatever your views are on abortion, the issue in Queensland can no longer be avoided by the Queensland Parliament.
The situation for individual women seeking an abortion and for doctors prepared [...]
I’ve often felt calls to ‘stop all coal exports’ were far too unrealistic. But it is just as unrealistic to think we can even begin to make the necessary cuts in greenhouse emissions while governments continue to invest large amounts of money into “maximising coal exports”. So it’s no surprise that climate change campaigners like [...]
The last unresolved seats from the Queensland election have finally been declared, nearly two weeks after polling day.
Spare a thought for John English, the former Labor member for Redlands, who after two weeks of nail biting, ended up losing his seat by a miserly 34 votes. To make it even worse for him, according to this [...]
February 18, 2009 – 1:21 am
Media speculation that an early state election will be called in Queensland has been going since before Christmas. I guess if people keep predicting an election is about to be called, they’ll be right eventually.
Certainly the fact that there has been a steady stream of state Labor MPs announcing they will retire at the election [...]
January 15, 2009 – 4:57 pm
In this era of wide awareness about the need to reduce greenhouse emissions and debates about using pricing and market mechanisms to help achieve this, the state of Queensland maintains an absurd, expensive program of subsidising petrol by about eight cents a litre.
Of course it is politically very difficult for any government to abolish, because [...]
December 20, 2008 – 9:28 pm
There was some curious and occasionally concerning commentary in Brisbane’s Courier-Mail this week regarding migration intake into Queensland. Many people are quite rightly urging that governments do not react to the current economic difficulties by winding back the openness of their economies. Yet calls to slash migrant numbers can sometimes equate to another path to [...]
November 27, 2008 – 12:51 pm
If you ever wonder why people get cynical about politicians and the media, look no further than the current debacle regarding the Queensland government’s approach on recycling purified water back into the drinking supply.
After The Australian newspaper ran a determined, prolonged fear campaign for a full month recycling all the usual rubbish about ‘toilet to [...]
November 3, 2008 – 10:36 pm
I haven’t been a big fan of the current Queensland government’s environmental record, but their decision to ignore the easy scaremongering and invest in recycling water is probably one of the best decisions they’ve made. But it’s not just the water being recycled. The arguments against water recycling have been thrown up and debunked so [...]
October 5, 2008 – 5:49 pm
It is an interesting development to see Ronan Lee, the Member for Indooroopilly in the Qld Parliament, announce today that he has left the Labor Party and joined the Green Party. This gives the Greens their first MP at state or federal level in Queensland.
Ronan was scheduled to speak at the same event I spoke at [...]
