‘Growing Up in Queensland and Queensland Growing Up’ was the theme of the first Public Address of an annual series organised by the Queensland Studies Centre to mark the anniversary of Separation Day (10 December 1859). Hosted by Griffith University on 8th December 1993, the inaugural Public Address also served to launch the Centre's first major conference, which was organised around the related theme of ‘Defining Queensland: Histories and Futures’.

The statement that ‘Queensland is different’ is entrenched within the folklore of Australian political and social commentary. The case is not persuasive, certainly no more so than the case that Tasmania or South Australia or any other state is ‘different’. Those who have pursued the argument have focused selectively on the modicum of differences reasonably to be expected among the peoples, institutions and socio-political processes and preoccupations of six ‘sovereign’ states.

The other day an economist friend told me that in Brisbane and commercial centres to the south, when discussion turned to financial and business considerations in the North, the key question asked was how to grow North Queensland? This market driven and profit seeking way in which southern entrepreneurs regard the beautiful and fragile environment in the north of this State, and its exploitation, was cause for concern but did not come as a surprise. After all, economic growth and international competitiveness is publicly endorsed by leading politicians and the captains of industry alike as the key to both material well being and social justice. Indeed it is central to today's conventional wisdom. Yet this belief must be challenged if there is to be creative discussion about social policy today.

In Queensland today, a class action is being considered against the state government to recover and return to Aboriginal control, cash and assets which were acquired from Aboriginal earnings by the Aboriginal affairs department over a period of 60 odd years. In the process of three years' research into the workings of Queensland's Aboriginal department I have accumulated a range of information relevant to this matter. This summary provides a historical context within the constraints of incidental material which was available to me. I will canvass two separate, but interlocking, issues: the department's control of wages and savings accounts; and the government's handling of the trust funds built up from the accumulated, and compulsorily acquired, earnings of thousands of Aboriginal men and women.

A great deal has been made of the boom in audiovisual production based in southern Queensland (and to some extent in northern Queensland) in the 1990s. This follows a pattern throughout the so-called ‘revival’ period (since the early 1970s) in Australia which has seen successive moments of regional upsurge. In the 1970s, it was South Australia, under the energetic leadership of the South Australian Film Corporation, that saw many of the best feature films and several of the early historical mini-series of the early revival period made in that state (see, for example, Moran). During the early to mid-1980s, Western Australia, with the location of bold production houses such as Barron Films and strong independent documentary traditions, offered robust regional opportunities, culminating in such memorable films as Shame and Fran.

According to one newspaper report, Paradise Beach was initially marketed in the US as a ‘very hip, very cool’ Australian serial about three good-looking suburban kids finding romance and adventure in an endless summer. Here, in Australia, Channel 9 did something rather similar:

Australian foreign policy reached a watershed in late 1941/early 1942. As the Japanese continued their rapid advance through Southeast Asia and into New Guinea, apprehensive Australians believed their country could be next. The government also knew their traditional ally Britain would not come to their aid should the Japanese invade Australia, and as most of their own forces were already out of the country, the remainder would have provided a totally inadequate defence. For Prime Minister Curtin and his advisers it was America that had to provide protection for Australia; both for its own sake, and as the base from which the Japanese advance through the Eastern Pacific rim from North to South could be halted.

The terms of reference for the SEQ 2001 Project were to come up with policies and processes for managing the region. The author's assignment as Director of the SEQ 2001 Project was completed in July 1993 with the release for comment of a set of policy reports including a report on institutional arrangements.

The lid of Pandora's Box has been lifted. Queensland, which takes pride in being different, is considering adopting a relatively conventional planning system — and in the process is raising issues which might never be adequately resolved. Until now, development in Queensland has been largely buffered against intervention by State planners, contributions towards social facilities and consultation with the public but all this could be about to change. In December 1990, a meeting at Parliament House convened by the then Minister for Housing and Local Government, Hon Tom Burns, set in train a process to investigate South East Queensland's needs for the coming decades — SEQ 2001. A Regional Planning Advisory Group (RPAG) was established which utilised a number of task forces and public consultation to canvass a wide range of topics while RPAG itself produced a ‘preferred pattern of urban development’ (PROP) and a complementary set of proposals for institutional change. The task force findings and the draft regional outline plan were presented to the public in July 1993 in a set of 19 reports with a request for comments by October 1993.

Australia is often described as having the fastest human population growth in the western world at 1.4 per cent per annum (ABS 1993). Queensland's growth rate in comparison is 2.52 per cent while the Gold Coast is currently experiencing 6.1 per cent which is equivalent to a population doubling time of 11 years. While such rapid growth is lauded in the media and discussed in glowing terms by economists, engineers and entrepreneurs, there are many others who in recent years have queried the wisdom of such rapidly increasing growth. In 1992 a group calling themselves The Union of Concerned Scientists, ‘comprising 1575 scientists from 69 countries, including a majority of Nobel laureates’ (Caswell 1) issued a ‘Warning to Humanity’ regarding the accelerating damage threatening humanity's global support systems. According to this group, ‘no more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished’. They refer specifically to over-consumption, poverty and spiralling populations: all of which we have in south-east Queensland.