In September 1973, Mike Evans (Country Party President), called a press conference at a city hotel in Brisbane, at which the Country Party announced terms for the integration of the two parties (the Country Party and the DLP). This story appeared in the Australian the next day under the heading “State Country Party swallows the DLP”. The […]
[Read more →]
Tags:Joh Bjelke-Petersen·Labor·Political Parties·Politics·Queensland
How bad then was the Bjelkemander in comparative terms? One means of measuring this is by the Dauer-Kelsay Index which calculates the absolute smallest percentage of electors which, in theory, could elect the government. The 1972 Queensland redistribution measured 44.9% on the Dauer-Kelsay Index, compared with a theoretically perfect redistribution of slightly over 50%. (This […]
[Read more →]
Tags:Democracy·Elections·Gerrymander·Politics·Queensland
There weren’t many smiles back in October 1970 when members of Bjelke-Petersen’s own County Party cabinet moved against him. He had been premier just two years, was pushing sixty, and had failed to make the grade as a popular premier. The party had lost two by-elections – Isis and Albert – and members were understandably […]
Tags:Chair·Challenge·Deciding Vote·leadership·Politics·Queensland·spill
Interjecting a brief homily on the art of politics, (Long) declared: “What the politician had better do is stay a politician. That is law number one with him – the law of self-preservation.”
[Read more →]
Long: “You will find that you cannot do without politicians. They are a necessary evil in this day and time. You may not like getting money from one source and spending it for another. But the thing for the school people to do is that if the politicians are going to steal, make them steal […]
[Read more →]
Tags:Education·education policy·Electoralism·means and ends·Politics·pragmatism
Long: “They say they don’t like my methods. Well, I don’t like them either. I really don’t like to have to do things the way I do. I’d much rather get up before the legislature and say, ‘Now this is a good law and it’s for the benefit of the people, and I’d like you […]
[Read more →]
Of Roosevelt (Long) said scornfully: “I can take him. He’s a phony… He’s scared of me. I can outpromise him, and he knows it. People will believe me and they won’t believe him. His mother’s watchin’ him, and she won’t let him go too far, but I aint got no mother left, and if I […]
Tags:belief·Politics·Promises·Shame·Trust
They were too deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had spun themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not of those deeds of which they accused themselves. There was no way back for them. Their exit from the stage […]
Tags:Democracy·Ends and Means·Ethics·groups·morality·Politics
‘Show us not the aim without the way. For ends and means on earth are so entangled That changing one, you change the other too; Each different path brings other ends in view.’ FERDINAND LASSALLE: Franz von Sickingen
Tags:Democracy·Electoralism·Ends and Means·Politics·pragmatism
‘My point is this,’ he said; ‘one may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions. That is the first commandment for us. Sympathy, conscience, disgust, despair, repentance, and atonement are for us repellent debauchery. To sit down and let oneself be hypnotized by one’s own navel, to turn up one’s […]