National Party

The stayer

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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Arse-backwards in Queensland’s backwoods

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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Reflections on the Queensland election

I don’t get excited about Queensland politics the way I used to, which explains why I haven’t bothered to blog about the state election until now, with the dust settling on the result. They just don’t make politicians like Joh Bjelke-Petersen any more, although Bob Katter did do his best to hold up his end of the agrarian socialist/social reactionary bargain with a campaign that lurched from the bold to the bizarre.

Actually, I have to credit Katter – at least he addressed some of the real issues Queensland is going to have to face in the next decade: I admire his feisty representation of suppliers in the fight against our supermarket duopoly, and he’s spot on, too, in his concerns about the management of the mining boom (especially coal seam gas) and how to balance that with agricultural interests. I’d add environmental interests, of course, except Katter would have all environmentalists buried at sea if he could.

But then there was his anti-gay marriage ad, which reminded me that he was still a Katter, the same one who said (back when he was a minister in Bjelke-Petersen’s government) that he’d walk backwards to Bourke if there were any gays or lesbians at all in his former electorate of Charters Towers, and added that condoms were despicable things that would do nothing to help prevent the spread of AIDS, but would encourage the community to have sex with gay abandon.… Read more..

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