Campbell Newman - Notes from Pig City

The stayer

Music, Qld Politics / April 24, 2016 / 7 minutes of reading

There aren’t many retail stores that can lay claim to a small but distinguished place in a state’s political history. Such is the stature of Rocking Horse Records, which won instant infamy on 14 February, 1989: the morning when a phalanx of police descended on the store, in the heart of Brisbane’s CBD, and raided it for stocking allegedly obscene material.

It’s hard to explain, more than a quarter of a century later, in what universe such a thing could happen. Back then, though, Queensland was a universe unto itself: a state where the police force was officially unable to find any of Brisbane’s many illegal brothels and casinos, yet threw the book at a record shop for displaying a popular Guns n’ Roses album.

This was, remember, during the dying days of the National Party’s 32-year rule of Queensland. Incredibly, lyrics in rock records became an electoral issue: later that year Russell Cooper – in his brief tenure as premier, after Tony Fitzgerald handed down his epochal report into political and police corruption – flagged that “pornographic” music would be subject to the state’s censorship laws.

But the raid, and Cooper’s pledge, was a misreading of a fundamental shift in the state’s mainstream middle class, with the National Party suffering a humiliating defeat at the state election the following December.… Read more..

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Why Queensland will never Joh again

As the magnitude of the swing against the Liberal National Party in the Queensland election became clear on Saturday night, one unlikely voice cut through the sea of claptrap and said what his former colleagues would not. While ex-premier Campbell Newman, his potential replacement, Tim Nicholls and federal MP Jane Prentice frothed about the need to re-frame their party’s message in more palatable terms to the electorate, another former state Liberal Party leader – the once ridiculed Bruce Flegg – was prepared to admit the truth: his party had monumentally stuffed up.

Flegg was once the member for Moggill, a suburb of semi-rural acreage on the banks of the Brisbane River that seems to be populated almost entirely by retired doctors and veterinarians. In other words, it couldn’t be more blue-ribbon Liberal territory if you stuck a giant silver spoon on top of the Brookfield Town Hall. Flegg himself is a former GP. Last October, he lost his 10-year hold on the seat to another medico, Dr Christian Rowan (a former Queensland president of the Australian Medical Association) in a pre-selection battle that turned nasty.

So it’s probably not surprising that Flegg wasn’t shy about unloading on his party on election night.… Read more..

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Fare game

Miscellaneous, Qld Politics / December 8, 2014 / 12 minutes of reading

It’s valued at around $60 billion. It operates, at last count, in 45 countries and over 200 cities worldwide. It’s gone to war with powerful taxi cartels, and the governments who protect them. Named tech company of the year by USA Today in 2013, it has just been given an “F” rating by the century-old Better Business Bureau, the American non-profit consumer protection organisation. Its CEO, a 38-year-old enfant terrible called Travis Kalanick, has wondered aloud whether he should have called it “Boober” – a reference to the pulling power, he claims, it gives him with the opposite sex.

Uber – the ride-sharing application which connects commuters with drivers of private vehicles for hire – is everywhere. After launching in San Francisco in 2010, its ascent has been vertiginous. Its runaway success is the product of a perfect technological storm: the ubiquity of smartphones, GPS technology, and peer-rated social media. It’s also undercut and exposed traditional taxi industries with mostly lower prices for passengers, and seemingly generous deals for its drivers.

Uber arrived in Brisbane in April this year, after roll-outs in Sydney and Melbourne beginning in late 2012. Its establishment in Australia has mirrored its trajectory overseas: it has been embraced by the public, in the face of howls of rage from the taxi lobby, which has leaned heavily on governments to crush the new kid on the block, citing concerns over safety, insurance, privacy, and the legality of allowing private cars to operate as taxi services.… Read more..

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Arse-backwards in Queensland’s backwoods

Australian Politics, Qld Politics / January 28, 2013 / 4 minutes of reading

It’s one of those things that gives us poor Banana Benders our backwoods reputation. In 1987, just as AIDS crashed into the national consciousness via the Grim Reaper advertisements, a brawl broke out in the Queensland National Party – its moral façade soon to be torn to shreds by Tony Fitzgerald QC – over contraception.

Mike Ahern, the progressive health minister and future premier, took a proposal to Cabinet to allow the sale of condoms through vending machines. The premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, rebuffed him. When students defied the ban and installed machines around university campuses, police were despatched to rip them from the walls in the dead of night.

Without so much as a shred of irony, Bob Katter Junior – then the minister for Aboriginal affairs in Joh’s infamously corrupt government – defended the ban with these immortal words: “Condoms are despicable things that won’t prevent the spread of AIDS but will encourage the community to have sex with gay abandon.”

A few years later, Katter promised to “walk backwards to Bourke if the poof population of North Queensland is any more than 0.001 percent”, adding for good measure, “Mind you, if the percentage is what they say it is in the rest of Australia, I’ll take to walking everywhere backwards.”… Read more..

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Going the extra mile for the disabled

Miscellaneous / July 27, 2012 / 4 minutes of reading

The same message had been coming up on my despatcher for over an hour, with variations indicating increasing desperation: “URGENT wheelchair booking holding Ransome-Wellington Point. 2 x advantage jobs on offer. Pax waiting. Please assist.”

Good luck with that, I thought. That sounds harsh, I know, but there was nothing I could do; I was in the Albany Creek area at the time, a good hour away from the southern bayside suburbs. And most other wheelchair-accessible taxis, I knew, would be in two places: at the airport or cruising the city, where they had the best chance of finding work. The only way any of them would be making the 45-minute drive to the Redlands would be if another fare took them there first.

And even then they might not want to hang around, 2 x advantage jobs (where drivers are, sometimes, allocated a pre-booked compensatory fare) or not.

The sad, brutal reality if you’re a person with a disability – especially if you live in the outer suburbs – is that unless you want to go somewhere pretty exceptional, it’s often pretty hard to find a cab willing to come to your aid. And mostly, wheelchair-bound passengers aren’t going anywhere exceptional: they’re relying on taxis to take them from home to their local shopping centre, or they’re on a visit to their kids from their nursing facility or respite centre.… Read more..

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Flowers in the wheelie bin

Music, Qld Politics / July 10, 2012 / 7 minutes of reading

In 1977, John Lydon – née Rotten – launched a vitriolic attack on the monarchy that brutally summed up the status of England’s youth in the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee: “When there’s no future, how can there be sin? / We are the flowers in the dustbin / We’re the poison in your human machine / We’re the future, your future!”

God Save The Queen, as performed by the Sex Pistols, is one of the greatest protest songs of all time, but I’ve long pondered over these lyrics. Was Lydon inferring that Britain’s future had been literally thrown out with the garbage, as the nation celebrated? Or making a statement about how great art can be constructed from throwaway refuse – one of punk’s defining tenets?

Or was he saying that art itself is nurtured by the oppression of the state? “We’re the poison in your human machine” is a wonderfully subversive argument to this effect, and it’s a line with ongoing resonance to Queensland. It’s a common assumption, for example, that the 1970s punk explosion in Brisbane, spearheaded by the Saints (who, let’s not forget, pre-dated the Pistols by as much as two years) was a reaction to the excesses of life in Queensland under Joh Bjelke-Petersen.… Read more..

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