Now that doctors have fixed one of the two things wrong with Wayne Goss's brain - the tumour's gone but it's still a solicitor's - we can finally comment with a sense of decency and timing on the ex-Premier's desire to peddle his politics on the national stage.

Bug readers certainly won't need all of their brain to work out there's something terribly suss about politics being the only business in town where you can run down a state branch over a few short years to the point where no one wants to buy your products anymore, and still be lauded as someone worthy of being lured to the company's national office with talk of perhaps one day being the CEO of the whole shebang.

For that's exactly what has happened to our beloved former leader with the former stratosphere personal approval rating.

Goss won an election in 1989 that, to paraphrase a former party man and current bitter and twisted ex G.G. Bill Hayden, the dairy cat could have won. He triumphed again in late 1992 when those members of the Coalition who hadn't been sent to jail were still bickering and divided.

He limped back into power in 1995 after Bob Borbidge and Joan Sheldon saw the error of their ways and toured the state like star-struck lovers. He lost power a few months later after Bob flew Joan up to left-voting Mundingburra, put the tongue in as deep as he could, then toured the electorate with Joan in tow like two dogs stuck together after a rutting session gone terribly wrong. The good people of the far north seat who had voted Labor for ever and a day embraced dwarfism and said to Wayne: on your bike, son! It hasn't been fun.

Now of course, we know deep down why ALP power brokers want Wayne down south. In his short but sweet reign of six years plus a bit after what seemed like a millennium of the corrupt Nationals, Goss showed he had the goods: only a Labour government really knows how to screw workers good and proper.

I was up at a function at the Paddo Workers Club the afternoon Goss finally claimed victory after the cliff-hanger 1995 election, and the ALP crowd up there reacted as if they'd just been told Gough and Margaret Whitlam had died in a car accident. It was, admittedly, a left function but all seventeen members of the 12 main left factions were in attendance, and their indifference to Wayne's win was eye-opening - and yet understandable.

The trouble with Wayne and advisers such as Wayne Swann, Kevin Rudd and Clive Emerson was that they had spent the previous six years trying desperately to get things so Right that they lost sight of their core constituents. Voters eventually came to the conclusion that if the government was going to be an uncaring, right-wing one, they may as well return the dinky-di item.

For mine, the standout fuckups of Goss's time were not the big-ticket items like screwing the teachers and other public servants, closing railway lines or even that stupid plan to cut and fill one of the nation's big remaining koala colonies: they were daylight saving and prositution laws.

They were symbols of Goss's weakness in kow-towing to the forces of the right.

Why daylight saving? As someone who had lived under National Party despots and desperados for virtually the first 40 years of his life, I saw the election of the Goss Government as a changing of the guard - for the first time in living memory, the country tail would not be wagging my city dog.

What did Goss do? Played the good cop, bad cop routine with Tom Burns and pulled that shonky referendum five years ago. Tom toured the bush opposing daylight saving and the referendum was lost. Those in the bush won the day and their curtains were saved.

Goss and his cronies just never seemed to be able to grasp the idea that rural Queenslanders might actually give some brownie points to a tough-minded Labor Premier who led from the front and said: "We need daylight saving for business in the south-east corner and the tourist spots at the very least: the rest of you can jump on board if you like."

Is anybody in Brisbane against daylight saving? Yet we city slickers were rolled, deliberately, so as not to offend those in the regional seats Labor had picked up in 1989 or had in its sights for the next time round. A case of backroom boys pouring over polls instead of showing some spine and political guts.

Then there was Goss's muddled, wishy-washy prostitution laws, designed not to offend the purple-rinse set and the churches. The laws certainly weren't designed to protect the safety of those women forced to operate alone, or what you'd expect from a left-wing government determined not to see a return to the rampant police corruption and protection rackets of the past. The world's oldest profession will always need brothels, legal or otherwise, and Goss's laws were a recipe for a return to the bad old ways.

You'd be wrong if you think these criticisms of the Goss years have been forged in the warm glow of blessed hindsight. It didn't take long after the euphoria of 1989 had died away than ALP rank and filers, ex-party members such as myself and those who had hoped a left-leaning government would have tackled some of the big social issues were shaking their collective heads at the direction and motives of Goss and his minders.

To give some of the idea of the gulf that was developing, I remember fondly a number of altercations at the Jubilee Hotel with Goss's media chief of staff, Dennis Atkins, now dispensing political wisdom at The Courier-Mail.

Our short and sweet conversations would go something like this:

Me: Goss and his government stink!

Dennis: The opinion polls say otherwise.

Now Dennis is a big bastard with brooding dark eyes. After our short exchange, he would shuffle a little closer and give me a paternal look not dissimilar, I would imagine, to how a wedge-tailed eagle might reassure a field mouse he's just dropped into his nest.

Dennis's eyes said that everything's going along fine, sonny, so don't worry about things that are way over your head.

We always moved apart after this to keep our blows solely verbal, so I can now confess that I didn't really have much of an answer to his standard "opinion poll" line at the time. Just that old gut feeling.

Haven't seen Dennis much since those times, and I imagine if we ever talked about Goss's demise, he'd have plenty of fine-sounding excuses to run by me. It was Keating who did us in. That prick Davies stuffed it up for us. We knew that new coast road wasn't a winner but we didn't have a choice. This is a very conservative state; we were lucky to win twice.

These sorts of excuses must be behind the reinvention of Goss as a political asset, shoring up the mythology that Goss would make an excellent Beazley minister and the likes of Swann, Rudd and Emerson are also indispensible to Labor's fortunes federally.

Personally, I'm sticking with that old gut feeling.

The Labor Party rank and file should send Goss and his cronies packing - but not for Canberra.