It beggars belief that in the coming national election the chronic state of Labor in NSW will not translate into a gain for the Coalition of some federal seats, possibly Robertson, Eden-Monaro, Dobell and Bennelong.

Given the federal election will be held well before the NSW election, there is every possibility that voters will punish federal Labor for the sins of state Labor.

Kevin Rudd was supported in his bid to win the 2007 election by the powerful NSW Labor Right but this year, with the web of links between Labor ministers, staff and advisers at both levels of government, there is a risk of electoral contamination for federal Labor.

Unlike NSW Labor, whose electoral situation seems terminal and whose defeat will most likely lead to Keneally being replaced as state Labor leader (probably by Frank Sartor, the former lord mayor of Sydney), Queensland Labor may still have a chance of turning things around in that state, where the government of Anna Bligh is very unpopular.

While there will be state elections this year in South Australia and Tasmania (on March 20), as well as in Victoria, the two least popular state governments in Australia will not face the people until next year in the case of NSW and 2012 in Queensland.

Nevertheless, the poor electoral standing of both governments will have an important effect on this year’s federal election. These NSW and Queensland Labor governments are far too big a target for the Liberals and Nationals to ignore. At the same time, it will be fascinating to see whether, and how, the Prime Minister attempts to distance himself from his state Labor colleagues in NSW and Queensland.

As well as highlighting the hopeless state of Labor in NSW, the feisty, straight-talking Tony Abbott will zero in on state Labor in key federal regional Queensland seats. These include Dawson, Herbert and Leichhardt, where state Labor’s plan to sell Queensland Rail is most unpopular. This is because if Abbott is to defeat federal Labor, it is in Rudd’s home state of Queensland that the Coalition will need to pick up seats.

In Queensland, in particular, the merged Liberal National Party is polling strongly but largely on the back of an unpopular government. The opposition has yet to show to Queenslanders it is ready to govern and this year the LNP will come under increasing pressure to demonstrate it can be a strong alternative government.

There is already some internal criticism emerging from within the LNP parliamentary wing — from two or three maverick backbenchers — about the lack of policy and preparation for government. This will gather momentum if state Opposition Leader and member for Surfers Paradise John-Paul Langbroek and his experienced, country-based deputy Lawrence Springborg don’t lift their game substantially.

The Queensland government has slightly more than two years to run before the next state election. Bligh has decided to tough out her decision to privatise Queensland Rail and port assets against the opposition of a significant bloc of unions, mainly from Bligh’s left faction, and from a vast majority of Queenslanders.

This year will determine whether this move is politically smart and electorally astute.

The other challenge facing Bligh is whether she is able to do what her mentor and predecessor Peter Beattie did in late 2000 and early 2001 when he confronted a large electoral rort scandal in his party. Beattie not only reshaped the state ALP but also the political landscape to win the largest number of seats in the ALP’s history in Queensland at the 2001 election.

To save her government in early 2012, Bligh needs a significant political shift in her fortunes this year and next. Indeed, how she manages the sale of the assets will help determine whether she is still Premier at the end of this year.

Bligh has been saved in the short term by the reluctance of possible alternative leaders, such as Speaker John Mickel, to challenge her. In the long term, trade union opposition to the assets sale will determine whether that reluctance continues.

On the other hand, Langbroek has to prove to Queenslanders he has the policies and character to be premier. To do so, he has a lot of work ahead.

But rest assured, the federal election campaign will have a big influence on the futures of Langbroek and Bligh. If both perform poorly this year there may be a totally different leadership team in Queensland by year’s end.

The situation in Western Australia is more complex as the Liberal Party won 11 of the 15 federal seats in the 2007 election.

There are five marginal federal seats, four of them held by Liberal members who have strong local links. Don Randall, a seasoned campaigner in Canning, has a 4.3 per cent margin but is up against a former state Labor minister, Alannah MacTiernan. However, there is talk that the Liberal Party has attracted an outstanding candidate for the Labor-held seat of Hasluck, which is one of the most marginal seats in the country.

Labor’s new industrial relations laws are playing out very badly in the west, where Abbott’s deputy Julie Bishop is performing well. The return of union militancy in the mining and resources sector and on construction sites near Perth, and large wage claims with no productivity gains, are early signs of the return to the bad old days of union strikes and industrial anarchy that damaged WA’s reputation as a reliable exporter of commodities in the 1980s.

Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard, with her refusal to acknowledge the risks to the local state economy caused by her new workplace laws, will be one of Labor’s biggest liabilities in WA.

More generally, it also remains to be seen whether this year Rudd’s political focus and electoral popularity holds up under the blowtorch of a rejuvenated, Abbott-led opposition.

The Weekend Australian, February 27, 2010

This is despite the fact that NSW Liberal Party leader Barry O’Farrell is a conspicuous underachiever and a lacklustre media and parliamentary performer.

The fact is the NSW Labor government has well and truly lost its way. It is clearly on the nose and is widely perceived as divided and incompetent. It’s simply not listening to the concerns of voters and not acting decisively on their behalf. Under Keneally, it still seems unable to get any positive messages out into the wider community about what it may be doing reasonably well.

It is also not properly utilising its two most talented parliamentarians, former Sydney lord mayor and present Environment Minister Frank Sartor and, especially, its hard-nosed numbers man John Della Bosca, who has been banished from the ministry. Ironically, with the NSW cabinet largely devoid of listeners who can initiate decisive action, Della Bosca’s position on the back bench could be to his long-term political advantage.

In NSW’s Legislative Council late last year, Della Bosca made a highly public declaration of love and public apology to his wife, Belinda Neal, a federal Labor MP, after his affair with a 26-year-old woman, an affair that had led to his resignation as health minister. Significantly, a large number of women seem to have been impressed by his apology.

This is important because for all his personal faults, Della Bosca is one of two politicians who could get NSW back on track (the other being Sartor). Indeed, Della is arguably the most talented and politically astute state Labor MP in NSW.

When former premiers Bob Carr and Morris Iemma wanted something difficult done, they called in Della Bosca, their Mr Fix It.

As disability services minister, he negotiated the biggest increase in disability spending in the state’s history: $1 billion for more respite and permanent care places. As the minister responsible for the motor accidents authority, he made changes so that no matter who’s at fault, anyone catastrophically injured in a car accident now gets the long-term care and support they need.

As minister for industrial relations, he led the NSW fight against the Howard government’s Work Choices, and won. In education, he introduced tougher measures to get children to school, led the work on raising the school-leaving age, and provided more options for young people wanting to pursue a vocational rather than an academic path.

In WorkCover, Della Bosca was handed a scheme that was bleeding business dry and yet wasn’t helping the people who were injured at work. No one got everything they wanted but the scheme was fixed through balanced decision-making and consultation, and so far it has been sustainable.

In health, Della Bosca was refreshingly honest. He admitted NSW could no longer afford a health budget of $15.1 billion a year, which represents almost 30 per cent of the state budget, and which is growing exponentially. He would often say, “We have to use taxpayer dollars more wisely.” In less than 12 months, he visited hospitals throughout NSW, sat down with doctors, nurses and other health workers and listened, then acted. Before he resigned from the ministry, he had begun introducing measures that enable doctors and nurses to return to doing the thing they do best, saving lives, not wasting their talents on time-consuming paperwork.

A comparison of Della Bosca with successful Queensland ex-premier Peter Beattie is salutary. Both Della Bosca and Beattie were handed the poisoned chalice of health, and unlike almost every

state politician in recent memory, both performed extremely well in this difficult portfolio. Under Della Bosca, Labor invested heavily in health and as a result NSW now has the best emergency department and elective-surgery performance in Australia, according to the federal government’s data.

Despite some highly orchestrated local and regional complaints, even the Australian Medical Association agrees that NSW is a standout performer. Compare this with Queensland’s recent dismal record in health.

The truth is that any government worth its salt requires experience, enthusiasm and balanced leadership. NSW has a crucial role to play economically in the nation. It also needs to act as a leader in the important work that the Prime Minister is undertaking to refashion the Federation.

After Labor loses the next state election, it seems more than probable that the NSW Labor Party may be forced to call on Mr Fix It, especially as he will not have been tainted by any membership of the Keneally government.

Good government is driven by good policy and balanced decisions. Although Della Bosca hasn’t always played it safe as a minister, he has a track record of consultation and collaboration to come up with the best solutions. That’s his style, an inclusive approach.

Maybe next year Della Bosca could be the person to save state Labor from utter demolition. This is despite the fact that tradition seems to be against him. Usually the parliamentary leader comes from the Lower House, but a precedent has been set by Liberal prime minister John Gorton, who moved from the Senate in 1968, and Barrie Unsworth, who vacated the Legislative Council after he became Labor premier of NSW in 1986.

In the end, does it matter whether the best person for the job of running the state is in the Upper House at present? If anything, it makes a premier (or shadow premier) more accountable to the people because he or she would have to front both houses of parliament and have no place to hide.

In any case, if Della Bosca is drafted to the state Labor leadership in 2011, there will be plenty of time to arrange for the wily, number-savvy member of the Legislative Council to move to the NSW Legislative Assembly.

By then, if recent history is any guide, all and any of Della’s personal indiscretions will be well and truly behind him.

Published in The Weekend-Australian, January 2-3, 2010. Ross Fitzgerald is a member of the NSW Expert Advisory Group on Alcohol and Other Drugs, which was established by John Della Bosca as health minister.

Few of its residents know that their suburb’s name means “red earth” in Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of our most populous neighbour, and was named after a notorious prison camp in Dutch West New Guinea.

Given our current, closer, relationship with the Republic of Indonesia, it is timely to reflect on the contribution to Australian and Indonesian history made by the 500 internees and their families from Tanah Merah who were interned in different camps around Australia, including one at Wacol, several kilometres from the current suburb of Tanah Merah, some from 1943 to 1947.

The prison camp Tanah Merah was a disease-ridden hellhole known as “the Dutch Siberia” deep in the jungle north of Merauke in the then Dutch New Guinea. It had been started in the 1920s to house political prisoners. The Dutch evacuated in 1941 as the Japanese advanced, leaving the prisoners completely isolated for two years. At the end of this time its population, including women and children, totalled more than 500.

In 1943 Charles Van der Plas, the Chief Commissioner of the Netherlands East Indies government- in-exile in Melbourne, fearing the occupants of Tanah Merah could become a fifth column assisting the Japanese, decided to evacuate them to Australia. The Australian government was reluctant, so Van der Plas went over their heads to the American South-West Pacific Commander-in-Chief, General Douglas MacArthur, who gave his consent.

The internees, men, women and children, were taken to the Horn Island quarantine station in Torres Strait, some by boat and others in eleven flights in a flying boat from May 27 to June 2, 1943. However, weight restrictions on the aircraft only allowed them minimal luggage—which was destined to have grave health consequences later on. From Torres Strait they came, by boat and train, to their primary destination—Cowra, in the central west of New South Wales. At Liverpool railway station one managed to slip a note detailing their plight to a railwayman, who passed it on to his union, which, in concert with others, promptly began lobbying the Curtin federal Labor government for their release. On arrival at Cowra on June 17 the internees were marched for an hour before reaching the camp, which already housed Japanese and other internees.

The Official Visitor appointed by the New South Wales government to the camp concluded that, “the winter weather at Cowra is much too cold for the Indonesians and the fact that they are interned in such a climate is in some cases responsible for their deaths”. At one time 130 of the internees were hospitalised. Fifteen died.

During their stay at Cowra there was a rising tide of pressure from trade unions and civil libertarians to release them. This happened belatedly in December 1943 and April 1944 when they were dispersed to various locations: those with women and children to Mackay; to Dutch-run hostels in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne; to the Dutch Hospital at Turramurra, Sydney; while most of the rest were sent to work in the 36th Australian Employment Company based at Wallangarra on the New South Wales–Queensland border, or to the Casino camp in north-east New South Wales. Recently unearthed documents confirm that some were also sent to Wacol, near Ipswich in southeast Queensland, in 1944.

But eighteen internees from Cowra were not released, on Dutch advice that they were “dangerous psychopaths”. They were taken to Liverpool camp where they petitioned the Official Visitor to release them. This prompted the Commonwealth Director- General of Security, Brigadier William Ballantyne Simpson, a barrister, along with the Solicitor-General George Knowles, to advise the External Affairs Minister, Dr H.V. Evatt, that the Tanah Merahans had been illegally detained from the start of their internment. Evatt replied: In my opinion … there is no satisfactory ground for the further detention in internment of the Indonesians … The whole thing will have to be thoroughly investigated for the sake of the reputation of this country. I do not think there should be a moment’s delay …

BRIGADIER SIMPSON arranged a secret inquiry by the Advisory Committee set up under the National Service Regulations and presided over by two judges to determine whether or not the Detention Orders applying to the internees were valid. The committee confirmed Simpson’s opinion by ruling that Colonel Harold Redvers Langford, who had supervised the evacuation, had not, as he was statutorily obliged to do, exercised his discretion in deciding that all of the internees constituted threats to Australia’s national security. Thus the Detention Orders were invalid, allowing the internees to appeal against their internment. Eighteen of them did so on June 15, 1944.

The hearings of all the internees, before a judge and two committee members, took place on July 20. Although they had initially been separated from the other Tanah Merahans on the word of the Dutch that they were “dangerous psychopaths”, the committee asked no questions about those allegations. Rather the internees were asked about their political beliefs and whether or not they would work for the Dutch or the Australians. Most stated that they had been interned without trial before being sent to Tanah Merah, and that they would work for the Australians but not the Dutch.

All five judges who sat at the hearings expressed misgivings about the justice of the proceedings. One of them, Justice Edward Erskine Cleland, claimed:

On the one hand the Committee had before it the oath of the person detained subject to crossexamination and on the other hand the unsworn reports of one or more anonymous individuals (nearly always described as “a particularly reliable agent”).

The upshot was that four were released but the rest were considered unfit for release owing to, “the bitterness owing to the treatment they had received, the trouble they had caused in the internment camps and their poor English”.

The eighteen appellants became nine through death, illness and displacement, and were still interned in February 1945. Then General MacArthur, having been advised by General Thomas Blamey that, “their continued detention in Australia … is embarrassing to the Commonwealth government”, directed that they be transferred to an area of the Dutch East Indies under Dutch control. Consequently the Australian Army turned a blind eye to their repatriation to Merauke soon afterwards.

Over the years 1943 to 1947 the Netherlands East Indies government-in-exile seems to have been constantly moving internees from one camp to another. Wacol, “Camp Columbia”, was one of these, along with Chermside, Lytton and Gaythorne in Brisbane. Some Indonesians, probably including some of the Tanah Merahans released from Cowra in April 1944, were taken to Wacol as early as 1944 and stayed there until repatriation in 1945 or 1946.

When they learned that Indonesia had declared independence from the Dutch, many internees went out on strike, including several hundred at Casino in September and 230 at Wacol in October, who claimed that independence meant the Dutch could no longer hold them in detention for they were technically not POWs (although they were treated as such by the Dutch) but civilians—as they constantly reminded the Australian government—and under no obligation to the Dutch.

The Wacol internees complained that they had not been paid the local awards for the work they were doing in Brisbane inside and outside the camp and that the Dutch had purloined money and personal belongings before, during and after their travel to Wacol. Their cause was taken up by Brisbane trade unionists, who were still on the case in 1947.

ONCE THE WAR was over and the Republic of Indonesia was at last a reality, the Australians and the Dutch realised they had to do something about the thousands of internees released from Cowra and elsewhere. However, they failed to agree, the sticking points being the tenuous legality of the internees’ detention, the growing numbers of Indonesians on strike all over Australia, and the burgeoning practice of the Dutch abducting groups of internees and taking them to Dutch-held areas of Indonesia.

Meanwhile Tanah Merahans had caused trouble at Wallangarra, where an attempt was made to blow up the railway tracks. One of them threw a grenade at an

Australian soldier, and there was a strike over the refusal to allow them to light a funeral pyre for one of their dead. Such incidents continued and in November 1945 fifty-five of the suspected ringleaders were taken to Gaythorne camp near Brisbane for repatriation by sea.

One of the repatriation boats was the ship Esperance Bay which, with a human cargo of 1400 Indonesians, including some Tanah Merahans, set sail for Kupang, Java and Sumatra early in November 1945. The Dutch had agreed to this itinerary but changed their mind while the boat was still en route to Kupang. The Dutch and Australian governments reached a compromise whereby forty-four of the passengers considered by the Dutch to be “extremists” would be disembarked at Kupang. However, when the ship berthed, the passengers physically prevented the removal of the “extremists”. So the ship sailed on and eventually disembarked the passengers at Batavia (now known as Jakarta), except for the extremists, who were returned to Kupang. News of this debacle among Indonesians seriously impaired the goodwill generated by the Australian government’s repatriation efforts.

Following Indonesian independence the armed resistance of the nationalists to the Dutch re-occupation continued. This meant that the Australian government, one of the first to diplomatically recognise the new republic, had to prevent any repatriation of Indonesians by the Dutch to Dutch-held areas. The danger of this occurring is borne out by incidents that occurred at Casino.

There are different accounts of what happened on September 10, 1946, in the compound, a jail within a jail for the most anti-Dutch of the internees at the Casino camp, when guards found an internee, Soerdo, dead. In order to arrest Lengkong, Soerdo’s alleged killer, the Dutch marched the prisoners in single file past the gates where a guard was posted to apprehend Lengkong as he passed. Just as he neared the gates of the compound, some of the other prisoners caused a distraction by moving towards the guards, who told them to stand back or be shot. The unarmed prisoners continued to advance on the guards, who shot volleys into the air and the ground. Meanwhile most of the remaining prisoners threw themselves on the ground. However, the others began to mill around the guards crying, “Up With Republic Indonesia”. When a guard, hard-pressed by the mob, was seen to fall, the other guards fired towards them and three of the prisoners were hit, one of them fatally.

Thirteen of the Indonesian internees, whom the Dutch claimed were implicated in Soerdo’s death and the subsequent riot, were segregated and placed in close confinement until midnight on November 7, 1945, when they were driven to the Evans Head air force base and flown to Batavia to face courts martial. However, the Dutch later admitted they did not have enough evidence to secure a conviction and took the thirteen back to Timor, where they were jailed until 1948.

The ALP Immigration Minister, Arthur Calwell, was furious when told of this abduction. In an internal memo he said:

the incident is regarded as a grave abuse of hospitality … No Australian authority … was informed and this failure to inform … can only be construed as a deliberate attempt to circumvent the Australian Government … This action is bound to react most unfavourably against the interests of the Netherlands and prejudice the development of good relations.

During 1946 and 1947 the last of the Tanah Merahans were repatriated on Australian ships. This was finally a happy ending to the rather sad story of a group of civilians wrongfully interned in a foreign country for some three years. Although their actions and indeed their existence are largely unknown to Australians their influence on Australian and Indonesian politics is worthy of recognition.

When this research into the Indonesian evacuees began, the fiercely anticommunist President Suharto was still in power. As 213 of the 273 male Tanah Merahans were allegedly communists, the dozens of letters sent to the internment survivors requesting information about their experiences remained unanswered because, even after so many years, they were still afraid of retribution. However, with the advent of a more open government in the Republic of Indonesia with whom Australia now has good relations, surely the time has come to tell their remarkable story.

Just as the growing affluence of the Japanese, Koreans and now Chinese has enabled them to visit Australia, so in the future we may see many Indonesians here as cultural tourists. Wouldn’t it be good if, by that time, the lands where the internment camps stood had been transformed into small remembrance gardens with plaques in them to tell the internees’ story to their descendants?

Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at Griffith University, Ross Fitzgerald is the author of thirty-one books. Graham Irvine is the author of none but has written chapters in books and articles for scholarly journals and has had a long career in academia and radio current affairs.

QUADRANT MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 2009

Nestled in the main street of Junee in rural New South Wales, the Athenium picture theatre has seen better days. Once the lifeblood of the community and a hub for theatre, films and the latest newsreels, the cinema is now boarded up and in disrepair. While it crumbles, the Heritage Council of NSW and Junee Shire Council try to work out what to do with this faded jewel.

Listed on the NSW State Heritage Register in 2003, the theatre is recognised as a regional architectural treasure, virtually intact, if fraying at the edges. Despite heritage grants from the State and Commonwealth Governments, the necessary works are still to be implemented, and the perennial shortfall in funding threatens its future.

The grand old cinema, which contributed so much to the social fabric of Junee, was built in 1929 by Nick Laurantus and Ben Cummins. Laurantus was a Greek immigrant from Kythera, and the theatre was one of a string of venues owned or leased by the Laurantus family throughout regional NSW. These included the Globe at Narrandera, the Montreal in Tumut, the Rio Theatre in Lockhardt, and the Gundagai Theatre. In its day, the Athenium at Junee was a local landmark. After 1950 it was renamed the Broadway by new owners the Pollard brothers. In 1959, major modifications included the removal of the original proscenium arch to provide a wider opening for Cinemascope presentations, but it retained its seating, dress circle and street-facing shops. The Broadway ran until 1971 when the operating licence was finally cancelled. Slowly the building fell into disrepair.

A passionate section of the local community fought hard to save their beloved cinema, forming the Junee & District Development Association in 1977. The group raised $20,000 to purchase the building and an additional $45,000 from community donations to transform it into an indoor sports and social centre. However, by 2000 Junee Council began planning the demolition of the theatre for a medical centre, to meet modern community needs. The stage was set for the final curtain, but the community kept up their calls to save the cinema, then known as the Jadda Centre.

This campaign was supported by highly respected cinema historian Dr Ross Thorne, who identified the Junee theatre as one of the better ‘survivors’, 11 in total, of some 351 cinemas once boasted by NSW country towns. The loss over time was horrific; this class of buildings was once as important locally as the police station, the lockup, the church and the school. In fact, in Junee the cinema fulfilled many of the functions that a town hall would have done, including providing the venue for local balls. Again the petitions came in, and after consideration by the Heritage Council and the then minister for planning, in 2003 an interim heritage order was placed on the building. The intention was to buy time so its significance could be better understood. Representations by the National Trust, the NSW Ministry for the Arts and the NSW Film & Television Office called for urgent action.

Sadly, Junee Council fought against calls to save the building, openly canvassing for its demolition. The opinion of the townsfolk was mixed. Today, five years after the Heritage Council weighed up all the arguments and listed the theatre on the State Heritage Register under the NSW Heritage Act 1977, locals’ views are still polarised.

Because the Athenium (later Broadway and then Jadda Centre) was built from cheap available materials, it doesn’t rank alongside Australia’s greatest architectural treasures. But this is perhaps part of its charm, a direct equivalent of the grand theatres serving wealthy Sydney patrons of the time.

The Junee theatre harked back to a more provincial, functional style popular immediately before the advent of the Art Deco period. It still contains traces of its former Greek owners through distinctive grapevine and trellis motifs. A brick building, the interior shows a fondness for flat timber panelling and plaster decoration. The architects, Kaberry & Chard, were established in the picture theatre game during the Twenties and Thirties, and their Junee commission is recognised by experts as a fine example of that local style.

The Athenium opened two weeks before the New York stock-market crash of 1929. This was followed by waning community interest in the silent films of the late Twenties. During the Great Depression the theatre suffered, but with the arrival of the talkies things started looking up. Dr Thorne’s research revealed that in the 1930s the itinerant unemployed were allowed to stand at the back of the seating area for a few hours if only to warm up, while financially crippled farmers could come and see a movie at half time for half the price. By 1938, movies were being shown six days a week, except when dances or concerts were staged.

Patronage reached a high point during the second world war. Movietone newsreels were a lifeline for communities as they eagerly sought news of the battles raging outside Australia.

Heritage listing of the Athenium Theatre led to an initial injection of state government heritage funding. The heritage branch of the department of planning contributed $125,000 in 2004, matched by Arts NSW for urgent repair and restoration works. Junee Council did well to attract a $250,000 grant from the Commonwealth Government under its regional partnerships programme by 2007. Although Junee Council had earmarked $250,000 of its own money to support the works, by the end of 2008 little had been done.

Last month, Gabrielle Kibble, the new chair of the Heritage Council of NSW, flew to Junee to try to resolve the problem. ‘This council is facing all the hardships endured in regional NSW at present, with an economic downturn, job losses and general uncertainty,’ she said. ‘Expending considerable resources into a heritage item is a problem that the Heritage Council, State Government and the local community must tackle together.’

The council has identified blowouts in costs since the grant monies were awarded, as well as difficulties in meeting current national building codes while retaining the historic authenticity of the building. Works have now started on repairing the roof to address water damage and the council has identified a practical staged restoration programme. This aims to get the building back to a state where it can be used by the public, raise its profile, and return a unique asset to the people of Junee.

The current financial dilemmas rekindle memories of the Depression, but the theatre has outlasted challenges before. Mrs Kibble has offered the full support of the Heritage Council’s expert technical panels to find a solution to the restoration and adaptive re-use of the theatre.

‘This cinema was a local icon in its day, not grand by any means, but it survives as a representation of a past community way of life,’ she said.

The Heritage Council and the NSW Heritage Branch hope that, in time, the inhabitants of Junee will be glad that a number of concerned citizens pushed for the Athenium’s salvation.

The Spectator Australia, 10 January 2009

This is something our health ministers should urgently consider.

According to a recent commonwealth report, the annual cost to Australia of alcohol abuse in terms of policing and health care is $15 billion.

In NSW, the chief health officer estimates alcohol causes 1220 deaths and 47,000 hospitalisations a year.

Last week, NSW Health Minister John Della Bosca called for a public debate about drinking and restrictions on alcohol advertising.

“I am not interested in a wowser’s approach to this issue, nor do I accept extreme views such as prohibition – people should be free to enjoy a drink – but it is time for a cultural shift on alcohol,” Della Bosca said.

As a nation, we are under the influence of alcohol. Many Australians still accept that excessive drinking, unlike the use of other drugs, is socially acceptable.

We have made considerable progress in reducing cigarette smoking but Australia needs a broad alcohol strategy that includes education about the dangers of risky and excessive drinking, a firm stance on liquor licensing, coupled with the provision of proper treatment services and adequate police action to curb alcohol-related violence.

We have not seriously looked at the way alcohol is promoted, especially to the young.

“It is the next generation of drinkers – older children and teenagers – who are being influenced by the sophisticated promotion and advertising of alcohol and the distorted messages about success, popularity, sophistication and attractiveness,” Della Bosca rightly says.

Despite restrictions on the timing of ads on television, data shows that in 2005-06 children under 12 were exposed to one in three alcohol advertisements seen by adults. In addition, research by the NSW Centre for Overweight and Obesity found that alcoholic beverages were the single most advertised consumable product on billboards within a 250m radius of primary schools.

International evidence shows that advertising leads to higher alcohol consumption and that restrictions would be likely to reduce harm.

While the issue is contentious, there is evidence of community support for change. According to the 2007 National Drug Strategy Household Survey, more than 72 per cent of people aged 14 and older supported a ban on alcohol ads before 9.30pm, and almost 50 per cent supported banning alcohol sponsorship of sporting events.

Such a move has the support of the Royal Australian College of Surgeons trauma committee. Deputy chairman John Crozier said: “We are in strong support of a Minister (Della Bosca) who has the courage to make a statement that alcohol advertising restriction is in the interest of the Australian community.”

As the alcohol industry seems unlikely to take a responsible approach, the time is ripe to debate advertising, especially since advertisers are eagerly trying to impress consumers with ever more dazzling and expensive campaigns to increase sales.

An obvious starting point should involve looking at the impact of banning alcohol ads. To be successful with a total or partial ban, we will need a national action plan. A partial advertising ban could significantly reduce alcohol consumption, road fatalities and the social costs of alcohol abuse, while a full ban would be even more effective.

Importantly, as well as traditional advertising mediums it is time to include new media. Corporations are increasingly blurring the lines between advertising and entertainment, developing content-based movie clips with sophisticated storylines that can be downloaded on the internet or through mobile phones.

A ban on ads and restrictions on sponsorship can’t be a panacea for all our drinking-related woes. But such actions would be an important part of a broader strategy to reduce the levels of risky drinking. With alcohol-related emergency department admissions among teens to 24-year-olds increasing exponentially, the influence of ads can’t be underestimated.

A report from the NSW chief health officer reveals that the level of risky drinking by adults has decreased from 50 per cent to 30 per cent of men and 37 to 27 per cent of women.

If we can achieve these results with adults, why not with teens and young adults? Della Bosca’s courageous stance deserves widespread support.

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 parts of the ALP, 51 years later and 1000km south in NSW, are seeking to target Morris Iemma as revenge for his efforts to modernise the state’s antiquated electricity industry.

Like Gair, Iemma has served three years in the top job, has the support of his cabinet and faces an Opposition which is only slowly turning itself around. Also like Gair, he’s challenging the ALP’s industrial wing by asking, “Who’s running the show?”

Iemma started this fight in the open, staring down the party’s annual conference and its 800 delegates. But he faces the ugly reality that the ensuing battles are now being waged behind his back, by senior members of the party executive who don’t like being ignored.

Vulnerable MPs have already had their preselections threatened, wild leadership speculation makes the daily news, and ambitious MPs are being promised promotions. With such predictable tactics set to continue, prepare to see regular leaks of “internal party polling”, naming scores of MPs who’ll be “wiped out” at the next poll if they don’t join the putsch.

Iemma’s fight is about the future of power in both senses of the word: whether to restructure the electricity industry, and whether Labor MPs should be dictated to by extra-parliamentary forces. The NSW union movement, led by John Robertson, has ideologically opposed any suggestion that the structure of the energy industry be changed.

That’s despite most of the workforce he represents lining up, hands out, for the generous incentives on offer.

Union delegates make up over half of the votes at the ALP’s annual conference.

In the face of an overwhelming majority at the May conference, the recently elected general secretary of the NSW ALP, Karl Bitar, chose to vote against the Premier and with the unions to deliver an ultimatum to the elected Government.

Iemma has pushed on regardless. After such a public showdown, and with their egos now stung, who could doubt that Robertson and Bitar had to be seen to be hitting back.

Ironically, they were the very people who anointed Iemma to replace Bob Carr in the first place.

But like the electricity debate, Iemma’s detractors don’t seem to know what outcome they’re trying to achieve.

Surely they should be worried about where they will end up when the shooting stops?

After all, it is ALP practice in NSW that outgoing heads of the party executive and the union movement wind up with seats in state parliament after their terms end.

Treasurer Michael Costa and former premier Barrie Unsworth both walked into parliament at the end of their reign at Labour Council.

Both have this year played key roles in advocating strongly for Iemma’s electricity package.

Costa and Unsworth entered parliament and shook off their union bias by embracing issues that were in the overall community interest, not just the industrial community.

Many might say that Costa sometimes goes too far, but who can doubt his commitment to reform?

His successor Robertson plans to be the next union boss to enter the NSW parliament. Talk of his premiership ambition runs white-hot within the NSW caucus.

MPs wary of his planned career trajectory, at the expense of their own, say he’s already eyed off several possible seats where he could be inserted.

But with the Work Choices campaign now a distant memory, and a widespread wish that the electricity debate should be over, the credibility gap he needs to jump to get to parliament is wider than his predecessors’.

Robertson’s hostility to any form of electricity restructure has not seen him produce any alternative or compromise.

Further, he actually forced Iemma so far on to the back foot that the embattled premier had no choice but to fight back without new concessions, lest he looked like he’d folded.

Robertson knows his image needs reinventing.

That’s why it’s worth carefully examining his 11th-hour intervention in the threatened Sydney rail strike during this week’s World Youth Day celebrations. Robertson was nowhere to be seen over two days as the strike threat was whipped up, instead allowing an antiquated rail union secretary to barrel his way through fiery and inflammatory justifications.

As the issue hit fever pitch, Robertson calmly entered stage left, shoehorned his battered and confused union colleagues out of camera shot, and simply announced that a solution would be found. For two days he hadn’t called for calm, or urged further talks. Maybe he spent the time waiting for the critical moment to intervene, while fine-tuning his “peace in our time” news grabs.

This could be one of the first signs that, after the bloody fight between the union movement and himself against the NSW premier and most of the parliamentary Labor Party over electricity, Robertson is beginning to more carefully stage manage his persona.

In doing so, he seems to be engineering a two-pronged approach. Move Iemma to the sideline, and move himself to the frontline.