Queensland's new governor Dr Jeannette Young (Image: AAP/Dan Peled)

Young at heart After the ascension of Dr Jeannette Young to the role of Queensland governor, you’d expect there’d be some gushing from Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, who has spent a lot of time working with her. Young has been, until now, Queensland’s chief health officer during the entirety of Palaszczuk’s tenure as premier.

You may remember Young as the anti-vaxxer crowd’s favourite CHO after she told 18-year-olds in her state to not get the AstraZeneca vaccine on account of a vanishingly rare risk of fatal blood clotting — something she stood by even after it became clear Delta could put children in hospital. But regardless of how you feel about her ascension, Palaszczuk response is… odd. “I know you will always stand beside Queensland because you are not just Your Excellency. As far as the people of Queensland are concerned, you are Our Excellency.” What it lacks in dignity, it makes up in incoherence.

Mask mandate from heaven Fox Corporation’s annual shareholders meeting will require attendees to provide a vaccine passport and wear a mask. That might not seem unusual — most people encounter something similar when they get on a train or go somewhere for lunch. But of course most people aren’t pumping out propaganda against those measures.

As Media Matters for America points out, Fox News broadcast material undermined US President Joe Biden’s vaccination campaign nearly every day for six months, and venerated vaccine resisters as heroes. Of course, this is the common MO for News Corp — for example, the company has been preparing for the realities of climate change risks for 15 years, all the time producing commentary railing against “alarmists”, “loons” and “warming hysteria”. Why should its approach to one planet-shaking disaster be any different from another?

Tims and murmurs lives on! For now we will not have to bid farewell to the “Young Liberal who got magically aged into an adult’s body like Tom Hanks in Big“. Tim Smith is determined to cling to the “embattled” portion of his descent before he plummets forever into “disgraced”. He’s concluded that Matthew Guy deciding “you’re a bit on the nose” isn’t enough of a denigration, defying his leader’s edict that he quit before the next election.

According to The Age, Smith believes he can “weather the storm”, telling colleagues he still has the support of “senior federal Liberals”. Normally, we’d think this was a desperate bluff coming from someone who had crashed into a parked car and then into a residential fence while more than two-and-a-half times over the legal alcohol limit. But of course among senior federal Liberals are figures Angus Taylor, Stuart Robert, Alan Tudge and Christian Porter. So he may be telling the truth. 

Revolving doors Never let it be said that the Coalition is the only side of politics that has a revolving-door relationship with business. State Labor governments also benefit from very close links with Australia’s largest corporations. After all, that’s how power works in Australia — if it plays its cards right, the governing class can spend its time shuttling between parliamentary and staffing positions and government relations and PR jobs in the private sector, statutory board positions appointed by governments and lucrative corporate board appointments.

WA Labor is particularly well integrated with WA business — albeit not quite as much as back in the glory days of Alan Bond, Laurie Connell and Brian Burke.

Former WA Labor treasurer Ben Wyatt is on the board of one of Australia’s biggest fossil-fuel culprits, Woodside. Now Premier Mark McGowan’s former chief of staff Guy Houston, who left the staffing life to go and work for Kerry Stokes, has been appointed by the McGowan government to the board of WA’s stadiums manager, VenuesWest (we wonder how much consultants and marketers were paid to devise that name). Houston thus enjoys a rare trifecta — staffer, corporate executive and statutory board appointee — and all in the space of a few months.