Lawrence, welcome to our blog. I think we may well be making some sort of history here. It’s rare for political leaders to consent to any form of one on one debate. I’m sure it’s never been done north of the Tweed in an online forum. I’m hoping that you will stick around to see […]

Some more gratuitous advice to Lawrence Springborg – if you are going to accuse others of dishonesty be “squeaky clean” yourself. Lawrence Springborg keeps insinuating that I have done something dishonest in my reporting of his research; and that I cannot be an “independent commentator” because I am “factionally aligned”, as demonstrated in the following […]

Lawrence Springborg questioned my integrity on radio this morning. I also received an interesting email from Sean Parnell a Courier Mail journalist who wrote a significantly different story based on the same research. I’ve issued an invitation to Springborg to put his side of the argument on this site. As yet there has been no […]

Springborg’s Pineapple Party amalgamation concept ought to be fruit salad, according to leaked internal research. The report is by Toby Ralph, a top level Liberal Party operative who has been associated with every federal Liberal campaign since 1996 and was one of the team that masterminded the 1995 Queensland state election result. I’ve never run […]

Liberal MP for Herbert, Peter Lindsay, thinks the answer to the Palm Island riots could lie in reforms to land tenure. He’s not alone. Former Mayor of Palm Island, Robert Blackley, raised this issue in a talk that he gave to the Brisbane Institute on the 13th March, 2001. On a recent Australia Talks Back […]

Every day Lawrence Springborg is looking more like the Chris Skase of Queensland politics. Skase (and other ‘entrepreneurs’ like Alan Bond) made a career of propping up shaky businesses by acquiring even larger businesses which they controlled via a pyramid of debt. They specialised in things like back-door takeovers, where you took control of an […]

Recent reports say the ALP is looking for a new research outfit after their federal election loss. Well, they could do no better than appointing our blog www.ozelections.com and our On Line Focus projects as their official pollsters. We’ve been even-handedly doling out free advice to both sides of politics for three years now, and […]

Lawrence Springborg’s quest to merge the two non-Labor parties in Queensland is Quixotic in the full sense of the word. Not only is it doomed to failure, but it is misguided and represents a disconnect with reality. Nothing demonstrates this more than the results of the last federal election. Under Springborg’s plan John Howard would […]

Might seem an absurd proposition, but that would be the effect of Sarah Stephen’s call to “make our opposition [to Howard] felt through better organised and more determined protest movements.” Stephen’s diatribe, under the healine “Howard has no mandate” is an exercise in the sort of logically attenuated reasoning that contributed to Labor’s defeat. Mandate […]

Congratulations to Wayne Swan on winning the Shadow Treasurer’s position. I’ve never admired his grasp of economics, but frequently been awe-struck by his political skills, including the use of the strategic non-sequitur. I am sure that “Jobs not GST” was one of Wayne’s inventions, which illustrates both my points. No matter; the job of Shadow […]