Bartlett's Blog

I was so focused working on the Queensland state election campaign, (relieved by the occasional brief break of feeling despondent about the Queensland state election campaign), that I didn't get around to blogging about it. Now that that election is over - although counting is still being completed - it's straight into the local government election campaign, with an extra serving of unexpected by-election happening in the seat ...

Fundamentally, I don't greatly care about the outcome of Labor's leadership travails. As my previous post indicates, the bigger issue is that the ALP is being fundamentally damaged by the toxicity of this brawl, and the fact that the brawl is happening in this way is a sign of some much greater problems within Labor. Whatever the immediate outcome, I think those problems are likely to continue.  The ...

As is usual with elections, there has been a lot of coverage on the personalities and the contest and not so much on the policies and issues.  Still, the unusual strategy the Liberal-Nationals have adopted of having their leader and proposed Premier campaigning from outside of Parliament has invited an even greater focus on Campbell Newman himself and also on the seat of Ashgrove which he is contesting. Regardless ...

Having had a couple of months break from this blog thing, I thought I'd have a go at trying to use a bit like I did when I first started it out back in 2004 - giving some occasional updates of things I've been doing. A few months ago I became Convenor of the Queensland Greens, which has meant I have become a lot more immersed in the internal, ...

Barack Obama's visit to Canberra this week has generated a lot of attention.  But I was much happier being  in Canberra last week for the Senate’s historic vote to pass the package of legislation that will finally start moving Australia towards a clean energy future. I partly wanted to be there as a way to bear witness to the efforts of so many members and MPs of the Australian ...

This week I had the privilege of having Greens' Senator Scott Ludlam in the studio for an interview.  Together with my regular interlocutor, Mr Peter J Black, we spoke about the recent carbon pricing announcement, the internet filter and the NBN, and nuclear waste, nuclear power and Fukushima. You can listen to it all by clicking on this link - (unfortunately due to copyright laws I have to edit out ...

Today marks the day the Greens officially gain sole balance of power in the Senate. It also marks the thirtieth anniversary of the day the Democrats first gained the Senate balance of power back in 1981. Many people focus on the difficulties and disappointments of the Democrats declining years, and it reasonable to consider how the Greens might best avoid this fate. But it is equally important to remember ...

I haven't posted one of these here for a while, but each week on my radio shift on 4ZzZ FM I do an interview with QUT law lecturer and obsessive follower of social issues and media, Peter Black. The topics covered include the Greens taking on the balance of power in the Senate and how they might fare compared to the Democrats; a few other things happening in federal ...

Despite being far more interested than politics than most people, I have often struggled to get overly interested in state elections. In an ideal world, I think Australia would be better off without the states - or with many more, smaller state/regional governments, alongside a local government (one that is genuinely local) which is recognised in our Constitution. One of the less-noticed aspects of the agreement reached between the ...

The Greens got a very positive result in the by-election held today for the Brisbane City Council ward of Walter Taylor.  The Greens candidate, Tim Dangerfield, came in second with 23.5 per cent of the vote, with Labor at 16.8 per cent and the Liberal Nationals on 57.1 per cent.  The Greens outpolled Labor in every booth (apart from a tie at the Kenmore South booth), with their ...

Looking through the votes in different polling booths across an election gives a reminder of just how diverse our community is, even within a single electorate. I was certainly pleased that the Greens managed to break the 20 per cent mark in the seat of Brisbane. This is obviously well above the 9 per cent I managed when I stood for the seat as A Democrat candidate in 1996, ...

Last Tuesday night, I was part of an election forum on climate change with the other two main candidates for the seat of Brisbane.  It was quite well attended, and included media representatives from the Courier-Mail, Brisbane Times and ABC Online. It also used a question format where people wrote down their questions and then had a moderator group them in topics and ask them, rather than questions ...

It's been such a long time since I started this blog, and both I and the blog have been through so many transitions I'd forgotten what time of year it was that I started it. So it was a complete coincidence that I thought I might look to see when the first entry was, and discovered it was precisely six years ago. I started this blog as an experiment ...

As I noted in my previous post, this week's Newspoll saw the Greens register 16% support - the highest that party has ever achieved, comparable to the Democrats best Newspoll result of 17% back in 1990. History suggests it is unlikely that this peak will be maintained right through to election day (or even the next Newspoll) but it is part of a continuing trend of solid Greens ...

The latest Newspoll may turn out to be an outlier, but the marked drop in support and approval ratings for both Labor and the Liberal-Nationals, and their respective leaders, does seem to have a logical connection to the diminishing credibility and increasing cynicism and shallowness which both party’s leaders have been displaying of late. The 16% support level recorded for the Greens is not just a record for that ...

It’s a fair while since it was announced that I was contesting the House of Reps seat of Brisbane for the Greens at the upcoming federal election.  Since then, I’ve spent a fair bit of time preparing the foundations for that campaign, as well as working within the party on our overall campaign in Queensland.  Whilst I’d love nothing more than winning the seat of Brisbane, my first ...

With the UK election happening this week, I recently wrote a piece for New Matilda about some of the parallels (as well as some of the differences) between the rising third parties of the Liberal Democrats in the UK and the Greens in Australia.  You can read the full piece at this link. For space reasons, I had to leave out a couple of other points I was going ...

It’s Official: Tasmania really is different!! Parochialism seems to be part and parcel of the human condition, and is part of what gives rise to people making exaggerated claims about how different their city, state or country is from all the others, and also to exaggerate how different (usually in a negative way) other places are.  Living in Queensland all my life has shown me plenty of examples of ...

The fascination with the still unresolved post-election situation in Tasmania has drawn some attention away from the somewhat more run of the mill situation in South Australia.  With the Rann Labor government gaining a clear, albeit slightly unexpected, victory in the South Australian election, and the Liberals in that state quickly reverting to type and engaging in internal squabbles, it is fair enough that the curious Tasmanian situation ...

It's nearly two years since the last election, when the Democrats lost all their seats, and over sixteen months since I finally left the Senate,  as did the Democrats as a party.  After a lot of thought,  I’ve decided to get back into party politics and contest a seat at next year's federal election. It was formally announced today that I will be running in the seat of Brisbane, ...