THE date was Thursday, March 21, 1963. The time was just after midnight. The instigator of action was the famous political reporter Alan “The Red Fox” Reid, a loyal employee of anti-Labor media mogul Frank Packer.
The locale was the Hotel Kingston in Canberra, where a special conference of the Australian Labor Party had been convened to decide whether the party should endorse a new US communications base in Western Australia.
For weeks Reid had been writing articles in the Packer press (notably The Daily Telegraph, which much later was sold …

IT is rare for a political party to achieve a 10 per cent turnaround in the opinion polls in just six months. But this is what has happened in Queensland, where that state’s newly merged Liberal-National Party, the LNP, has injected new life into conservative politics.
This is why, on one hand, the 10-year-old state Labor Government is becoming nervous, while on the other Malcolm Turnbull – aware of the role Queensland must play if he is to become prime minister – is effusive in his praise for the LNP. Indeed, …

IN 1957 the Queensland Labor premier Vince Gair, who had comfortably won two state elections, found himself at war with his own party over the issue of union influence. So they sold him out.
As a direct consequence of the rift – and despite Labor’s previous strong performances – the conservatives soon took power and there they remained for 32 years.
The stoush also precipitated the rise and rise of Joh Bjelke-Petersen and all it meant for the Sunshine State and Labor’s electoral future.
It’s with a chilling sense of deja vu that …