Writing Someone Else's Words: What Political Speechwriting Actually Looks Like
I have been writing speeches for other people since 2005. Their words, mostly, are not mine. My words, on the page, are theirs. The relationship between those two facts is the substance of the craft.
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The Monolith on the Horizon: A Queensland Heritage Throughline
For most of my life, the drive home from Brisbane to the Mary Valley took about three hours. The road climbed up out of the coastal scarp, slid through Gympie, and dropped you down into the valley along a route I had been driven on as a child long before I could drive it myself. Somewhere on the las
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History as a Policy Tool: How a 1960s Beef Roads Scheme Came Back Fifty Years Later
I want to set down, carefully, a small story about how a piece of mid-century Australian policy resurfaced as a contemporary federal programme. I am going to be careful with the credit. A lot of people contributed to the eventual programme, in offices I never set foot in, over a period of years after I had left the office where the conversation I am about to describe happened.
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Three Days In: An Electorate Office in September 2001
I started my first job in federal politics, in the electorate office of the Federal Minister for Agriculture, three days before 9/11. The office was in Maryborough, in the seat of Wide Bay, in southern Queensland.
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The 1pm Welcome: How the RACGP Got Itself Heard in Canberra
For most of the last forty years, the medical voice in Canberra was a single voice. The Australian Medical Association had its own building down the road from the Parliament, a sustained Canberra operation, and a long-standing convention that, when a Federal Health Minister wa...
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The 80 Per Cent: How Australian Policy Actually Gets Made
If your only window into Federal politics is the six o'clock news, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Australian Parliament is two opposed teams shouting at each other across a chamber. Question Time is loud, partisan, and televised. It also bears almost no...
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Midnight Madness: The Demolition of the Belle Vue Hotel
Just after midnight on 21 April 1979, a wrecking crew pulled up on George Street opposite Parliament House. By morning, the Belle Vue Hotel was substantially gone.
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The Forgotten Premier: How Frank Nicklin Modernised Queensland
Frank Nicklin governed Queensland for eleven years and remade the state's industry, education and infrastructure. Almost no one wrote about it. Here's what the thesis found — including the chapter a Queensland publisher asked me to remove.
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Fifteen Years On: What Australia's Food Security Report Got Right, And What It Got Wrong
In March 2011, Horticulture Australia Limited and Growcom published the first substantive food security report produced in Australia. Fifteen years on, how well did it hold up?
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