When Campbell Newman lost his seat

Queensland heads to the polls tomorrow, four years and nine months after the historic defeat of Campbell Newman and the LNP Coalition. I thought it would be interesting and educational to revisit those restive times, when Campbell Newman became only the second sitting Premier since Federation to lose his seat. Mr Newman’s seat of Ashgrove was taken by Kate Jones, who ironically is quitting politics in 2020 to pursue other interests. The Tourism Minister’s last…

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Deadline Stress On The Road To Winton

An old friend emailed me to say that when he saw a book review in the Sydney Morning Herald, he immediately assumed it was (a) my memoirs or (b) The Best of FOMM. As he found out when reading the review, Friday on My Mind is a book by music writer Jeff Apter about the life of George Young. The late founder of the Easybeats wrote ‘Friday on My Mind’, a major hit around the…

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Journalism and Bees In a Bottle

One of those ubiquitous news portals this week outed The Australian Women’s Weekly for a string of what we in the journalism business used to call ‘howlers’. The AWW meekly apologised for mis-naming TV personality Richard Wilkins as ‘ Rachael’ in its front cover feature, one of several glaring errors. The knife job from Mumbrella (the news portal to which I originally referred), drew sharp comments from (ex) journalists. As the auld wifies used to say…

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Bushfires, Methane and the Climate Crisis

You’d think those with an interest in promoting the climate crisis would have made more of James Murdoch quitting the family media business. While there is much to be wary of when considering Murdoch Jnr’s defection, he did make it crystal clear that he and his wife Kathryn disagreed with News Corp’s climate agenda. The first real signs of family business friction emerged last year. James accused News Corp of promoting climate denialism during its…

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