Victorious Lord Mayor Graham Quirk should start his fresh four-year council term with a promise to Brisbane voters to never again publish LNP political material that mimics official Brisbane City Council designs.
Those copycat images blighted much of his team’s electioneering material over recent years – they were all pervasive during the recent municipal election – and this paper suspects the imagery was designed to mislead and trick voters.
It’s a suspicion The Independent is entitled to hold since we started asking questions last year after seeing the distinctive pattern of blue and yellow blocks on all sorts of LNP election material that to our eyes looked identical to the distinctive pattern of blue and yellow blocks used on official BCC material.
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The LNP has called on Labor to cease promoting itself through the use of taxpayer funded government advertising. Deputy Opposition Leader Tim Nicholls said Labor was ignoring the caretaker provisions of government which came into effect on Sunday with the start of official election campaign.
“For the past year the Bligh government has been on an unprecedented advertising spending spree that is tipped to top $100 million,” Mr Nicholls said. “The last election proved that the Bligh Labor government will say and do anything, and break every promise and every rule to hold onto power in Queensland.
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Talk about a captive audience. Local federal MP Teresa Gambaro was there at Bupa New Farm on Monday to congratulate the centre for providing young nurses with exciting career development opportunities. She did that – but no pollie worth her salt wastes a chance to do a little politicking.
Sure, she praised two young nurses – Sushma Gautam and Mamata Khatry, both originally from Nepal – who began graduate training program at Bupa New Farm this week. But listening to her speech you could be excused for thinking a federal poll was imminent, not state and local ones.
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Lord Mayor Graham Quirk has put the owners of rundown Valley buildings on notice, with new laws giving council the power to force them to be cleaned up expected to be passed as this issue of The Independent went to press.
Cr Quirk (pictured) said the draft Health Safety and Amenity Local Law 2012 aimed to lift standards in the Valley by placing a legal responsibility on local building owners to ensure their properties were kept clean, painted and safe.
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Question: what becomes more expensive the less you have of it? Sure, precious metals is a good answer? You up the back? Oil. That’s a good one. Anyone else? Another answer is, of course, newspaper advertising rates that go always go up when circulations decline.
For as long as this paper has been publishing, it has taken our city’s mainstream mastheads to task for often very selective reporting on their circulation figures that gauge their success and an important stat for potential advertisers to ponder before forking out the outrageous sums The Courier-Mail and the Sunday Mail demand as monopolies for their display advertising space. Sadly the company that runs these papers has a pretty sorry record of cherrypicking these quarterly figures to show them in the best possible light. Maybe cherry picking is the wrong word. When really bad results fall from the Audit Bureau of Circulations tree, they are left to rot well out of the public eye.
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Ann Brunswick
Mungo MacCallum
Tim Milfull
David Bray
Ivor Thurston
Don Gordon Brown
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