Gair, Adermann, Bjelke-Peterson and Killen rejected. The dead poet has beaten the dead politicians for the honour of being given the name of Queensland’s new House of Representatives electoral division. For a second time a committee charged with drawing up the State’s electoral boundaries has recommended that the distinguished poet, Judith Arundell Wright (1915-2000) be given the nod. Back in 2006 the then-redistribution committee recommended Ms Wright’s name to the Australian Electoral Commission for a new division located in central and western Queensland. In its report out today the committee notes that following public objections, as a result of local issues at the time, the then-augmented Electoral Commission decided to change the name of the proposed new division while indicating that were it not for those local issues, there would have been no reason to change the name.

The Committee says it considered the circumstances surrounding that decision “and observed that the reason for not adopting the name of “Wright” in 2006 does not apply to the geographic area of the new proposed division. A number of individual suggestions and comments offered the name of “Wright” for the new division. Therefore the Committee proposes to name the new division “Wright” in honour and recognition of Judith Wright’s service and contributions to Australia as a social and environmental activist, and poet. The Committee also considers that “Wright” is an appropriate choice of name given Ms Wright’s association with the area in which the new division is located, particularly Mount Tamborine.”

Those beaten for the new electorate title included nominations for Adermann, Bjelke-Peterson, Chalk, Coulter, Fulton, Gair, Killen, Theodore, and Waters. Because the guidlines for naming divisions say that they “should be named after deceased Australians”, on this basis Coulter was not even considered. The singer Ricki-Lee Coulter, a Gold Coast resident, whose work includes the seminal meditation on working-class life in Australia Hell No (“Workin’ hard, two jobs, just to get by / Got a boss that’s makin’ my head fly’) and the lyrical, inspirational Sunshine (“Everything that I’ve been waiting for / is knocking at my door”) will just have to wait.

And in other political news:

Ban the gnome. There’s a new Nazi crime trial heading for Nuremburg and the gnome is to blame. The city’s public prosecutor’s office is conducting an investigation into the legality of German artist Ottmar Hörl displaying a garden gnome in the window of his home. An anonymous letter complained about the golden little fellow giving a Hitleresque salute. Der Spiegel quotes spokesperson Wolfgang Träg as explaining to the German press agency DPA that the display of the symbols of organisations which are banned under Germany’s constitution — such as the Nazi party — is only lawful if the organisation is being overtly criticised. “We are currently deciding whether the case of the garden gnomes is as clear cut as placards with crossed-out swastikas.”

Young doctors. A little reminder this morning that Senator Bob Brown had a life before becoming an environmental activist in Tasmania. The good Greens Leader bobbed up on Radio 2UE in Sydney to give an expert opinion, as it were, on the death of Jimi Hendrix. On that fateful day some 39 years ago, the young medical graduate from Sydney University was working as a locum in the emergency department of St Mary Abbotts Hospital in South Kensington when the body of a well-and-truly dead Hendrix was wheeled in after a drug overdose. The reason for this walk down memory lane is the publication of a new book suggesting that Hendrix was in fact murdered but Dr Brown could cast no light on this allegation. But he did confirm that the story about him disrupting a scene in a Richard Burton movie set at the same hospital was not an urban myth.

Who did he work for? Kevin Rudd and his paid-for travels made the news this morning with details of a connection with a Taiwanese born Chinese sure to raise a few eyebrows and not just in Australia. Those nasty fellows in Beijing are also bound to be wondering even more than before about how helpful it is for them to have a Mandarin speaking Australian Prime Minister. The Rudd-Taiwan connection when he was out of political life briefly in the 1990s is surely what the press will be examining next. Who exactly did he work for as a China consultant?