Last night the Liberal Party hurtled further down the path first taken when Don Lane and Brian Austin defected to the National Party after the 1983 election with the party splintered, and the epicentre of the quake somewhere around Clayfield. The Party effectively rejected the plan to merge the National and Liberal Parties into a […]

You know an issue has gone too far when it becomes a reason for everything. Greenhouse emissions have just about reached that place. A report in today’s Courier Mail says that the Traveston Dam should not go ahead because it will produce 400,000 tonnes of CO2 per annum. The University of Technology Sydney report said […]

The results in the Gippsland by-election have to give a few people pause for thought. By-elections this close to elections generally punish the candidate associated with the party that causes them, in this case the Nationals. However, they were rewarded with a 7% two-party preferred swing to them. Both the Liberal Party and the ALP […]

One of the lesser mysteries of the proposed Liberal National Party is why the Santoro faction changed from being opposed to its most enthusiastic proponents. Afterall, when Mal Brough first mooted his ambition to be Liberal Party President they targetted him for being pro-amalgamation. To date the theories that I have heard have focused on […]

The NHMRC is about to change its definition of what constitutes “binge drinking” and Kevin Rudd is getting the blame. When I started this piece earlier today that was unfair, because the NHMRC is an independent body that the Prime Minister has no control over. By this afternoon, Kevin deserved the blame as he suggested […]

The Queensland Liberals are busy polling their members on whether or not they want a merged party. The plebiscite is non-binding and is extra-constitutional. There are some potential problems with the plebiscite. The largest is what exactly members are voting for. The voting paper is fairly bald. The proposition is: Do you support merging the […]

We’ve heard a lot from Senator Brandis about the proposed merger, and little from other senators. Ian MacDonald is one of the moderates in the Queensland Liberal Party, he’s also a long-time proponent of merger. This is the text of a letter that he sent to party members and supporters today. TO MERGE OR NOT […]

Yahoo news picked up the irony. Australian troops have started arriving home from Iraq at the same time that Iraq has its most peaceful month for four years. I never thought that invading Iraq was the best idea, but I did agree with Colin Powell that “If you break it you own it.” On that […]

When there’s a serious contest for Queensland Liberal Party President it generally ends up being a close-run thing. Not this time. Mal Brough won 309 votes to Greg Spence’s 152. That’s 67% of the vote. Not only that, but he also had a team elected that he can work with. The Vice-Presidents are Bob Harper […]

It looks like Brough might win the Liberal Party presidency. He and his supporters have won every vote that counts so far this morning. First was the decision whether to exclude 30 or so delegates from the Centenary branch (there are a total of 460 delegates at the convention, so we’re talking about 6.5% of […]