The Media Glass House appreciates that those two recent state by-elections were horrendous for the Miles state Labor government but do you BUGers out there feel that calling Opposition Leader David Crisafulli the “premier-in-waiting” is just a tad presumptuous?

Our MGH compilers thought so. But that description of Crisafulli flowed freely off the keyboard of INQueensland politics writer David Fagan the other day.

Fortunately, The Bug’s writers appreciate that, if a week is a long time in politics, six months and nine days to the next state election is an eternity. It’s a crying shame INQueensland appears to have no interest in a writer who might suggest that and maybe even opine that the election could be a very close-fought thing indeed.

The MGH lamented recently that INQueensland hasn’t turned out to be the middle-of-the-road, independent, online news site its belief statement claims it to be. Some of its politics writers are coming across as tag-team Tories hellbent on giving the Miles government a kick up the arse at every opportunity.

Poor Madonna King was so short of inspiration for a column the other day that she had to sink the boot into Miles for sticking his beak (sorry about that) into the pet Magpie saga. We suspect that would have had no interest for her at all were a LNP Premier ensconced in George Street.

The other fascinating thing about this Fagan opinion piece is his amazing road-to-Victoria Park conversion to the apparent need for a brand new sparkling massive stadium as a lasting legacy of the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.

The Bug’s ranter-in-residence had some fun with an earlier Fagan piece that was, in his view, full of holes, beginning with this piece of Fagan nonsense very early on: “Time is still on our side to get this right but the time is not right for this or any government to be telling the community it intends to spend multi-billions on new sporting stadiums when their votes are guided by concerns at insufficient spending on health, crime and housing.”

Our ranter-in-residence made this basic point: What absolute rot. This government does not intend to spend multi-billions on new stadiums. It is not telling the community it is doing that.

You’ll have to excuse our ranter-in-residence. He might be bitter and twisted because he and Fagan have exchanged some unpleasant words over the years, outside the LNP’s Bowen Hills branch and in the journos bar at the Jubilee Hotel.

But maybe he made some solid, undeniable points.

Talk about a short-term view. Somehow in the space of a week or so, Fagan has gone from a fierce opponent of a legacy new stadium to the need for one. An interesting change of heart, considering Opposition Leader David Crisafulli fell so quickly in line with the Premier’s “Voters struggling with cost of living pressures will not cop a big multi-billion dollar spend on a new stadium” pitch.

While Fagin admittedly has framed his new-found support for the Victoria Park legacy stadium on the idea of substantial private investment, he seems to have swung surprisingly easily behind calls for such a stadium, from past Olympic stars to the LNP’s Bowen Hills branch – sorry, The Courier-Mail – at which Fagan was editor for a long time.

It seems that while you can take Fagan out of The Courier-Mail, you never really ever take The Courier-Mail out of Fagan.

We asked our ranter-in-residence what will happen if the LNP wins the October 26 poll and Crisafulli orders another “independent” inquiry into the city’s Olympics stadium requirements.

“The Vic Park stadium will be built,” he told us. “Put some money on now.”

***

To end this edition of our Media Glass House, our research teams though they would share with you a chilling sentence they observed in a story about the Nine Network carried recently by The Australian.

Our researchers apologise in advance to anyone shocked or offended by the sentence in question but they feel it is necessary to ventilate it for the sole purpose of giving our reader a snapshot of the current status and quality of free-to-air television in Australia.

Ready? Here it is……

“Married At First Sight (MAFS) is now the most successful franchise to come out of Nine since the cricket world series.”

We shall leave you to ponder that, as well as the future of our nation.

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