Occasional articles relating to a particular weekly column
Knowing how newspapers work on the inside, and sometimes wishing that I didn’t, it is a fair bet that all newspapers had two versions of Page One ready to run after the second State of Origin. It’s a hell of a tight deadline, with commercial television stringing it out so they can catch the morning audiences in the UK and stack the broadcast with as many ads as possible. The game didn’t start until 8.15,…
We discovered a bottomless pit of Australian political history while mining data for this week’s Friday on My Mind. I searched “Paul Keating opens McArthur River Mine” because I could not remember the year it happened. What I found was a Federal Government archive of all speeches made by Australian prime ministers. I asked my trusty ideologue and research assistant Little Brother to plough this fallow field. He remarked: “Mate, that’ll be like pushing a…
The Obi Obi Gorge zip line proposal will ultimately be submitted to Sunshine Coast Regional Council for development approval, with opportunities for public comment. The Department of Tourism contacted Friday on My Mind this week to assure us that a high level of scrutiny would be applied to the proposal at local, state and federal level “because it is in a national park and it is the first time.” For those who just came in,…