Digital ID: privacy and liberty are brothers
This is a variation on the speech I gave over the weekend in Sydney at the One Nation rally against Digital ID.…
Aussie cash: redesigned $5 note goes Woke
Well, that was predictable, as predictable as the sun rising the next morning, though not as welcome. With the late…
Government versus X: the pacification project must not be challenged!
Watching the dystopian-named ‘eSafety’ Commissioner in action is like watching the illegitimate lovechild of a deer caught in the headlights…
Crossing
The announcer said that the train – crowded with women and their children – was nearing the last station before…
Should business schools promote ‘social’ research?
One of the curious things of our sophisticated, yet superficial, information age is that the official websites of most business…
Put coal back in the Coalition energy policy
Most protagonists of nuclear power like to say it is clean, meaning no CO2 is released, as though this is…
Are they criminalising hate speech, or valid criticism of gender politics?
On the first of May, Queensland began living under the Criminal Code (Serious Vilification and Hate Crimes) and Other Legislation Amendment…
Mugged by bad law
In the course of human affairs and communications, words have specific meanings, and nowhere is this more important than in…
Scream louder: we will not suffer the e-Stasi Commissar
A healthy democracy has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to censors. As I pledged on Spectator TV last week, One…
The Resolute desk needs a resolute occupant
Like others perhaps, I used to think that the ‘Resolute desk’ in the Oval Office of the White House was…
WA Court of Appeal upholds Police Commissioner’s powers to mandate Covid vaccination
Senior Constable Ben Falconer and Police staff member Les Finlay lost their appeals in the WA Court of Appeal against…
Albanese’s political censorship plan
No wonder the Albanese government is worried about misinformation. This week as news broke about an horrific attack on an Australian couple…
Slipping on a banana Teal
When I heard that two Victorians, Bronwen Bock and Lucy Bradlow intend to nominate as candidates to share the representation…
Making appointments, Coalition-style
Readers, let your minds drift back to pre-Albanese times. And then imagine your typical Coalition government cabinet meeting as the…
Four troubling features of the Higgins judgment
On 15 April, Justice Michael Lee brought down the curtain on Lehrmann’s suit against Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson. His…
Trump versus Biden
I know that there are plenty of Trump admirers among Speccie readers. And there were certainly aspects of his time…
The Spirit Whale has spoken
It is a sign of the times when an $18.7 billion gas project, 180 kilometres north-west of Northwest Cape off…
Business/Robbery, etc
At last! A barely noticed Federal Court order in April means there is now a real prospect that the cloak…
How to be an ‘Approved Jew’
Alas, it is so hard to be an Approved Jew™ these days, meaning, of course, approved by the ‘progressive’ left.…
Tertiary degrees in Intifada
‘University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small,’ quipped Henry Kissinger adding, ‘University politics make me long…
Aukus is becoming a potent alliance
Compare and contrast the frenetic, largely unwanted and unnecessary manoeuvres to create a common EU defence union, with the methodical,…
Why we should defend Nathan Cofnas’s academic freedom
After a controversial blog post he made earlier this year, the professional career of Dr Nathan Cofnas, a Leverhulme early-career research…
We know smartphones are harming girls – so why don’t we act?
This week a report by the Policy Exchange think tank found that children at secondary schools with a full phone ban in…
How North Korea uses cartoons to evade sanctions
Recently, it was reported that North Korean animators may have been working on cartoon projects for western firms, including Amazon…
Why New Zealand is cracking down on immigration
The government of New Zealand this week tightened the country’s working visa rules in order to stem historically high numbers…
Why is New Zealand’s deputy PM rowing with Chumbawamba?
In their musical heyday, the English anarchist punk band Chumbawamba enjoyed a reputation for having an irreverent attitude towards those…
New Zealand’s imperial judiciary
If you cast your eyes across the Tasman right now, you can see the beginnings of an imperial judiciary, the…
Subversion within New Zealand
Recently querying why New Zealand governments make annual January pilgrimages to the Maori Pa at Ratana, to celebrate the birth…
The Xi files: how China spies
Music as pasta
It’s sad to see that Sir Andrew Davis, the former head of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, has died. The man…
Is John Cleese right that the ‘literal minded’ have killed comedy?
John Cleese appeared in the West End this week. ‘I’ve got vertigo,’ he said as he walked on stage at…
Taylor Swift is a rotter
Taylor Swift has released another album spilling the beans on her private life. ‘I’d written so much tortured poetry in…
The barbarity of this man
It’s a spectacle a lot of people would kill to see: Hugo Weaving in a Sydney Theatre Company co-production of…
A GP diagnosed me with ‘acute anxiety’ – only to exacerbate it
In 2008, after his first child was born and before he was due to get married, Tom Lee began to…
Death was everywhere for the Victorians, but it was never commonplace
Death’s great paradox is its inconstant constancy. Its forms and rituals change from generation to generation. In our own era,…
Nietzsche’s thinking seems destined to be mangled and misunderstood
For Mussolini’s 60th birthday, Hitler gave him a de luxe edition of Friedrich Nietzsche’s complete works, bound in blue pigskin.…
A timely morality tale: The Spoiled Heart, by Sunjeev Sahota, reviewed
Who would have thought that the battle between champions of old-school socialism and contemporary identity politics for the post of…
Living in the golden age of navel-gazing
If you are under 40, you probably already know of Joel Golby. He writes stream-of-consciousness personal essays and the satirical…
Are all great civilisations doomed?
To quote Private Frazer in Dad’s Army, ‘We’re doomed, doomed!’ That seems to be the message of Paul Cooper’s eminently…
A surprising number of scientists believe in little green men
In 1928, a young physicist and engineer named Karl Jansky began working at Bell Telephone Laboratories, tasked with investigating any…
The Berkeley scandal of 1681 transfixed London society – and Aphra Behn soon capitalised on it
If you want to understand in detail what people in the past were capable of doing, thinking and saying, there…