‘Dear Mrs. Ford,’ the correspondence often begins, then follow accounts of misfortune and privation:

During the floods our home was an inch out of the water and the river four miles wide. We lost heavily in cotton but the stock are alright, though they were standing in water 3 ft. deep for a day and … 8 pigs lived on the verandah for two days.

The drought was so bad that water was scarce and baths unknown. We had to do what we could with a wet sponge. But I missed vegetables most of all. Fruit one learns to do without, but the memory of vegetables used to torture me.

We certainly had a terrible experience in the cyclone. [We] lost everything but our house. The sea rose 20 feet over high tide mark and swept through our little home, destroying everything and drowning my poultry. I took the children on to a high piece of ground and put them in the flanges of a large stump while I tried to rescue my poultry. My husband stayed at the house tying down the roof.

It's easy for a bloke to be pleasant at the factory … but pretty hard when he is pulling old Strawberry out of a bog or chasing the pigs out of the sweet potato patch. And calves! Have you ever heard the raucous, nerve-splitting, bellowing of an army of desperate little demons, who begin to scream at daylight and keep it up all through the hot day?

I'm afraid I've been a bit depressed because you see we mortgaged the place to feed our dairy herd and the little drop of rain last month killed most of those left.

One might wonder what floods, drought and hungry calves have to do with books and reading in the Queensland outback. The connection becomes apparent through an examination of the records of the Queensland Bush Book Club, a Brisbane-based philanthropic organisation that operated a book- and magazine-lending service for families living in the Queensland bush in the early twentieth century. Mrs Ford served as the group's corresponding secretary for many years, and letters detailing the hardships of life in the remote countryside ended up on her desk.

After 32 years of conservative rule, it was more than the Queensland government that changed on 7 December 1989 — it was the whole state of Queensland. Driving the reform process across a wide cross-section of government policy (and seeing Queenslanders respond) left a legacy of which we who formed part of that government are proud.

In our first week in office, we purchased additional tertiary places for Queensland. This underlined our commitment to education and sent the signal that our government believed the future was ‘up the food chain’, and that we would therefore invest in education. We abolished the Special Branch of Queensland Police — a symbol of the misuse of the police service by the previous government. We also abolished imperial honours because we believed that Australia should have its own system of recognising our citizens.

Brisbane in the 1920s certainly had its tense moments, but what struck me most forcibly in browsing the local newspapers from the period was how successfully political and social conflicts were absorbed into the peaceful, civil and law-abiding fabric of Brisbane life. World-altering events like the Russian Revolution, the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles, the Irish Troubles and the rise of Mussolini were reported and discussed in the press and elsewhere, but matters seldom went further than that despite the real potential — given the presence of significant Russian, German, Irish and Italian minorities in the city's population — for ‘imported’ tensions. Even the momentous political developments that occurred in Brisbane in the early 1920s, when the state government's efforts to secure foreign loans were sabotaged by an opposition-funded delegation to London, and the Premier, EG (‘Red Ted’) Theodore, forced the parliamentary upper house to terminate its own existence, failed to polarise or fracture the community to any significant degree.

In 1989, corruption inquiry commissioner Tony Fitzgerald, QC gave a qualified tick to the use of government media units and press secretaries in his landmark report, which ushered Queensland into an age of accountability.

After an inquiry that included 238 public sitting days and 339 witnesses, his view was that it was both ‘legitimate and necessary’ for ministers, departments and public instrumentalities to employ staff to help keep the public informed. He warned, however, against control and manipulation of information and counselled there was no legitimate justification for politically motivated propaganda funded by taxpayers:

The establishment of higher education institutions in Australia is normally an initiative of government. However, in the case of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, the journey towards establishment was delayed continually by a government that was either unable or unwilling to accede to the increasingly vociferous demands of its musically minded constituents. The long and tortuous journey towards its opening in 1957 was characterised by the dogged persistence of numerous individuals, who today might be termed lobbyists. Without their collective efforts, the institution's arrival might have been delayed even longer than the half-century that elapsed between the first suggestion of Queensland having a premier music school and that concept being realised. Themes of cultural deprivation amounting to a ‘state's rights’ catch-cry figure strongly in the Conservatorium's story. It also became a socio-political issue as families sent their musically talented children to study at conservatoria in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney or overseas. The stream of agitators for a Queensland conservatorium provides an interesting snapshot of the state's musical community during the early twentieth century. This article discusses the ‘power of persistence’ by a several musical advocates — some of them were well-known community leaders, while the contributions of others have faded from public memory, but were no less significant.

Australia's entrenched liberal democratic traditions of a free media, fair and frequent elections and robust public debate might encourage outside observers to assume Australia is subject to frequent changes in government. The reality is very different: Australian politics have instead been ‘largely unchanged’ since the beginning of our bipolar party system in 1910 (Aitkin 1977, p. 1), with Australians re-electing incumbents on numerous occasions for decades on end. The obvious federal example is the 23-year dominance of the Liberal-Country Party Coalition, first elected in 1949 and re-endorsed at the following eight House of Representatives elections. Even more protracted electoral hegemonies have been found at state level, including Labor's control of Tasmania (1934–82, except for 1969–72) and New South Wales (1941–65), and the Liberals' hold on Victoria (1952–82) and South Australia (1938–65, most unusually under one Premier, Thomas Playford). It is therefore not a question of whether parties can enjoy excessively long hegemonies in Australia; it is instead one of how they achieve it.

The articulation of a ‘Smart State’ strategy by the Beattie and Bligh governments since 1998 represents, in large part, the continuation of a long Queensland tradition, in which governments have secured legitimacy by fostering economic growth and employment. For Queensland Labor, however, ‘Smart State’ programs also represented a key survival strategy as Labor's historic base among workers employed in agriculture, mining and manufacturing shrank into political insignificance. By 2009–10, these three sectors together employed only one worker in seven (Queensland Treasury 2010, p. 16). For this reason, in coming to office in September 2007, Anna Bligh sought both to continue and transcend the ‘Smart State’ strategy of her predecessor. In a series of policy documents launched with considerable fanfare in 2008–09 — ‘Towards Q2’, the ‘Smart Industry Policy and Decision Making Framework’ and the ‘Queensland Renewable Energy Plan’ — Bligh outlined her own vision for Queensland. Central to this vision was the embracing of a ‘green’ agenda — one that tapped into concerns shared by many of Queensland's growing cohort of middle-class professionals. In her first two years in office, Bligh pledged to continue the $9 billion Water Grid in the state's south-east corner, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one-third, spend $300 million on ‘clean coal’ power generation and provide rebates for households installing solar hot water systems. All of this added considerably to the budget commitments made under Beattie. In highlighting its program for Queensland in 2008, the Bligh government proudly declared that it was ‘set to invest $17 billion’ in the ensuing year (Department of Premier and Cabinet 2008, p. 10).

In the centre of the old city of South Brisbane, at the intersection of its two main streets, Stanley and Vulture, one finds a small, triangular park. Its most obvious feature is the grand set of stairs leading up from Stanley Street, near the Ship Inn Hotel. These stairs have a commanding presence, inviting the walker to ascend to an imposing edifice, but at the top they simply end. Part-way up, a couple of metres above street level, a pedestal, 2 metres high and 2.5 metres across, draws the eye upwards; it should be supporting an iconic statue, perhaps 3 or 4 metres high, but there is nothing. I've lived in the South Brisbane area for most of the past 40 years, and the mystery of the grand stairs and empty pedestal of South Brisbane Memorial Park has long puzzled me. What is this park memorialising? If a war, then which war, and why is it not known as South Brisbane War Memorial Park? These are some of the questions my research sought to uncover.

A generation ago, Queensland's economy relied heavily — as did the standing of the state government — upon a booming resources sector, a bountiful agricultural sector and a still-growing tourist market. ‘Rocks and crops’ (to use a favourite phrase of Peter Beattie's) were mainstays of the state's economic activity, and had long underpinned the government's investment, development and budgetary planning. While to a large extent the same might be said today, critical changes have taken place in the local economy in the intervening period, cultivated by successive state administrations with the express aim of diversifying an economy that was overwhelmingly geared towards primary production. Now it can be argued that Queensland's economy has metamorphosed into a modern, knowledge-based economy that demands greater emphasis on technology, expertise and innovation — what Premier Peter Beattie liked to promote with his catch-all phrase ‘Smart State’. But how effective was this push for diversification in renewing the state's economic foundations? Since the advent of the Goss Labor government in late 1989, has Queensland really moved from a ‘farm and quarry’ to a ‘smart’ economy?

Whether it is treated as an issue for consternation or celebration, a propensity for drunkenness has long been represented as an essential trait of the Australian character. The image of the Australian drinker has remained distinctly masculine, with drinking canonised as a male pastime by Russel Ward's The Australian Legend (Ward 1958: 2). While Australian histories of inebriation have recognised the gendered nature of alcohol use, they have assumed implicitly that because drinking typically has been considered a masculine prerogative, the primary significance of liquor consumption to gender studies lies in the role it played in the construction of masculine identity. The assumption has been that because women's drinking was not conducted on the same scale as men's, the excessive drinking indulged in by a minority of females is unimportant to larger understandings of femininity. This has inhibited investigation of female drunkenness, the responses it provoked and the critical expression of power relations constituted by these reactions.

Tourism has been a major driver of economic and social development in Queensland since the end of World War II. In 2011, tourism's direct contribution to the economy was estimated to be $7.8 billion, and it generated direct employment of an estimated 118,000 full-time equivalent jobs (Queensland Tourism 2011). The multiplier effects of tourism account for another $9.2 billion, making it the most important component of the state's service sector. These figures suggest that the approach adopted by the Labor government over the last two decades to manage and develop Queensland tourism has generally been positive. However, a closer examination of recent trends and criticisms reveals that visitor demand has flat-lined: the industry is struggling under the weight of global and local pressures, investment has slowed, and there are issues of stagnating demand, competitiveness, service quality, industry capacity and innovation. Moreover, Queensland is losing international market share compared with New South Wales and Victoria (Tourism Research Australia 2011). Given that governments have a key role to play in creating and maintaining policy conditions that contribute to both a healthy economy and social well-being, what have been the Queensland Labor government's contributions to tourism, and what are the key challenges into the future?

Soon after Johannes Bjelke-Petersen became Premier of Queensland in 1968, companies in which he held shares were given six-year leases to explore for oil on the Great Barrier Reef. The following year, ministers in his government accepted parcels of Comalco shares. So did senior bureaucrats and the Premier's wife. Criticism at the time was muted because Labor politicians and some journalists had also taken shares (Whitton 1989, p. 19). Bjelke-Petersen was adamant that he had done nothing wrong — a feeling that presumably was shared by other beneficiaries of Comalco's largesse (Wear 2002, p. 93). Because it is inconceivable that a saga of such blatant conflict of interest would be played out in today's Queensland, there is a temptation to tell a simple ‘before and after Fitzgerald’ story of public accountability and administrative reform. Considered analysis suggests, however, that the reality is much more complex. There was progress, but there was also backsliding. Some reforms — such as those to the electoral system — were significant and enduring. Others — such as whistleblower and FOI legislation — were fairly quickly watered down. There was a lack of long-term interest in public administration, parliament retained its usual place on the margins of Queensland's political institutions and executive power remained relatively unconstrained. Cases of corruption continued to emerge.

An account of cultural policy-making in Queensland since the election of the Goss Labor government in 1989 requires revisiting the rise and fall of what Stevenson (2000) has called the ‘cultural policy moment’ in Australia.

This period, from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, was characterised by political and scholarly interest in the civic and symbolic utility of culture, and in the outcomes achieved through its management. The cultural policy moment was produced simultaneously within government, the cultural sector and the academy. Within government, it was characterised by a new and highly visible interest in managing culture and (through it) the citizenry (O'Regan 2002). Within the academy, the cultural policy project was raised by Tim Rowse in Arguing the Arts (1985) and developed by the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies at Griffith University through the work of Ian Hunter, Tony Bennett, Toby Miller, Colin Mercer, Jenny Craik, Tom O'Regan and Gay Hawkins in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Stuart Cunningham's Framing Culture (1992) focused existing debate within Australian cultural studies over the place of policy-based approaches within the discipline.

Since the Australian Labor Party came to power in Queensland in 1989, social attitudes towards the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) community have undergone significant change. In 1989, the decriminalisation of male-to-male homosexuality was the subject of intense debate, even within the ALP, which ultimately put forward the legislation. Today, policies have evolved considerably, with the Queensland ALP endorsing gay marriage and Anna Bligh, the current Queensland Labor Premier, releasing a YouTube video for the ‘It Gets Better’ campaign to give hope to LGBT youth experiencing harassment and perhaps contemplating suicide. During Labor's time in power, apart from the decriminalisation of male-to-male sexual activity, same-sex relationship laws have been reformed, altruistic surrogacy has been introduced and the presumption of lesbian parenthood has been extended. Some areas of LGBTIQ policy are still being contested, however, with debates surrounding civil unions, an equal age of consent and the existence of the ‘gay panic’ defence continuing. This article considers the progression and limits of these policies and areas of LGBTIQ reform that are still being disputed.