Roger Scott

QUIZ QUESTION: What does an aged public administration academic do when he is at a loss for words about Australian politics?

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For city folk in the south-east, the pandemic has narrowed the focus from Labor’s five years in power to its performance in 2020, even though border controls matter less in the northern seats linked to the mining industries. (more…)

Queensland elections are always different from other states in that regional issues often take pride of place, and personalities often seem more important than policy differences between the parties. (more…)

Two by-elections and the state-wide local government elections went ahead last month with outcomes that returned most major party candidates but encouraged only the Greens and One Nation. The process was abysmally managed, with chaos and uncertainty on the day and results still not finalised. (more…)

There is so much else happening, Queenslanders and the media can be excused for being uninterested in two by-elections which are scheduled to be held alongside state-wide local government elections on March 28. But the future of both major party groupings could be dramatically affected if there is a viral-like surge of opinion away from the norm.

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The podcast ‘Trust Me, I’m An Expert’ (10 September) is one of The Conversation’s rare forays into Queensland politics. It is a podcast from a much-valued series of gatherings held regularly at the Avid Reader bookshop in Brisbane’s West End. (more…)

Queensland has delivered a killer punch to the Australian body politic, not for the first time.    (more…)

David Solomon and others have correctly identified the coming election as a simple moral choice about the role of government. Queensland voters face the same challenge, but the perspective varies as widely as the character of the state. My wife and I are working in the trenches in the leafy electorate of Ryan. This ought to be a lost cause but isn’t..   (more…)

Events in Canberra over the past weeks call into question the quality of governance which Australians can reasonably expect from our politicians. By contrast the Queensland political system and its parliamentary processes can be seen to offer the Westminster model functioning in optimal fashion. Could this be attributed to the relative significance of female politicians at the core of decision-making? (more…)

Conservatives in Australia are up for a fight. They are determined to recapture their heartland, reclaim the political right from the progressive interlopers: they are marking out their territory and it is as much about identity as ideology. (more…)

The World Congress of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) was held jointly with the annual conference of the Australian Political Studies Association (AuPSA) in Brisbane in July 2018. The papers on Australia provided a snapshot of the breadth of scholarship and also underlying attitudes among political scientists towards the political system within which Australian universities function. (more…)

Fundamental questions are starting to be asked by governments everywhere about the value-for-money of tertiary education in general and about various components of the humanities and social sciences in particular. A world congress of political scientists meeting in Brisbane confronted this topic from a number of different perspectives and noted growing expectations that political scientist academics should be focussing their efforts on making an impact on the policy process. (more…)

Many Brisbanites even mildly interested in national politics woke 0n Sunday morning with a sense of satisfaction that the PM had not been rewarded for his guttersnipe tactics.  As Greg Jericho pointed out on Sunday, “he may not be as vulgar as Trump but Turnbull uses the same playbook.” (Jericho G, The Guardian, 29.7.18) His choice of playbook may seem inappropriate for Harbourside Mansions; his assumption must be that it is appropriate for vulgar unsophisticated Queensland. (more…)

Until this week, JANE PRENTICE was not on the roll of women prominent in Queensland politics, a short list which includes two ALP Premiers but also a number of women of alternative political persuasions, starting with Lady Flo and including two current party leaders. (more…)

‘We’ve turned our unis into aimless, money-grubbing exploiters of students‘ [Ross Gittins, Canberra Times, 17 September 2017]

Part 1 of my response to Gittins’ article dealt with the human side of the current university scene and noted pressures to conformity and uniformity, but this underestimates the element of underlying  competitiveness. (more…)

This is the season for personal nostalgia. In my case, personal perspectives inevitably shade into the political. On 1 January Queensland Cabinet papers from 1987 were released; and as a further reminder of that era, on 4 January a state funeral was held for Lady Flo Bjelke-Petersen who had died shortly before Christmas. (more…)

The last rites were a long time coming but can now be pronounced with confidence. On Monday night, the TJ Ryan Foundation held a post-election function advertised as ‘Who Won and Why’. Even then, over a fortnight after polling day, no-one was absolutely sure, despite Antony Green’s cautious prediction on election night. Counting was painfully slow because of the expanded engagement of minor parties and there were unpredicted preference flows. It took 13 days before the Leader of the Opposition conceded defeat. (more…)

The Scotts live in an affluent electorate where the longer-established residents have consistently manifested Liberal tendencies, occasionally tinged with green because of the presence of a university. A recent redistribution has expanded its boundaries, adding middle-class voters less enamoured of conservatives and suddenly our long-serving Liberal incumbent is looking decidedly shaky. (more…)

If Week 2 of the Queensland election campaign was dominated by parochialism and regional development, Week 3 was about statewide preference deals and the price to be paid by the LNP as it seeks to bolster its sagging fortunes by agreeing to a list of One Nation demands. In addition, one or two of the chaotic events on the national stage caught the attention of locals, after Canberra being invisible earlier in the campaign. These also related to the LNP’s new-found friends. (more…)

The Queensland election could be occurring on another planet, as far as the locals are concerned. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation may exercise a morbid fascination but the bigger current issue is the link between the infrastructure proposed for the Adani Carmichael mine and the railway which would link it from the middle of nowhere to the edge of the Great Barrier Reef. (more…)

Personalities are increasingly significant in political contests, particularly as voters in all countries are abandoning the dominant parties. Politics in most Australian states are firmly controlled by capital city interests. Queensland has been slightly different, in this as in so many other ways. (more…)