I would cut the Prime Minister more slack than that, but I’m sure the opposition won’t. Julia Gillard is starting to look like a serial offender. Succeeding a PM who had a reputation as a micro-manager she appears to be leaning so hard the other way that perhaps the word “management” holds no meaning for […]

The last few months on the south coast of New South Wales have been peaceful, content, full of activity, and a few fresh challenges. It was good to be far away last year, and wonderful to be back in such a benign part of the world. No desperate boat people arriving from other continents, no […]

The chances that Labor might hold Ashgrove at the next election just rose after Campbell Newman’s Australia Day performance in the electorate. While he handled the predictable photo-op with incumbent Kate Jones appropriately, that seems to be where it stopped, at least on the basis of those segments run by the Channel 7 news this […]

Governments hiding information that we taxpayers have paid to produce is nothing new.  It is practiced by both sides of politics, and was one of the issues that sometimes brought me to grief as a public affairs officer in Canberra. The other side of the coin, throwing publications at people who haven’t asked for them, […]

Researchers at Cambridge University, the Zoological Society of London and CSIRO have over-turned theories on Hendra virus in a study of an isolated colony of straw-coloured fruit bats on islands off the west coast of Africa and found that some African bats carry anti-viruses to the disease. Previously it was thought that the virus only […]

Campbell Newman is stepping up pressure on Anna Bligh to call an election later this month by scheduling a very early campaign function for next  Tuesday. It is a breakfast function where he is advertised to “be setting out his vision for 2012 in a year where Queenslanders will be asked to make a choice. […]

I not infrequently drive down Moggill Road in the mornings, and since October or so last year I’ve been intrigued by this roadside shrine. It’s like many that have sprung up around Queensland on the sites of road accidents, but more substantial than any others that I have seen. Earlier this week I took a […]

Iran’s threat to close the Straits of Hormuz has only just hit the news tonight in Australia, and it looks like Australian coverage is pretty much in line with the international news organisations, judging by my google search. It says something about how denuded mainstream media have become of genuine overseas insight that you could have […]

If you divided the number of kilometres on the clock of my Landcruiser by ten thousand and called them years it would be just a little bit older than me. So we share a bit of camaraderie that comes with a few more groans in the suspension than we used to have. I’ve always thought […]

What makes for those blisteringly hot Australian days isn’t so much climate change as geography. Sunlight that falls on trees and grass tends to be absorbed and used by plants and doesn’t heat the air nearly as much as sunlight that falls on desert. So when we get an extremely hot summer’s day in Brisbane […]