Please explain… the polls
To the Moon! (Farewell Mars…)
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced a celestial shift. His company will prioritise constructing a base on the Moon, achievable within…
Nationals taken hostage by the Thin Blue Ribbon
I watched a hostage video on Monday. With four Australian flags hanging in agony as a backdrop, Sussan Ley and…
Labor is wrecking our Defence heritage … for money
Labor’s proposed fire sale of culturally and historically significant Defence properties should be stopped. It is a matter of national…
Angus Taylor: the last king?
It was presumed, from the eternal silence of the party room, that someone talked Angus Taylor off his horse while…
Hate speech and Islamic regulation
Just to recap on how the coalition got into its current pickle. In the wake of the Bondi massacre (December…
Liberals’ wheels fell off with the hate speech laws
The Liberal Party is a sinking ship. Sussan Ley’s team have been up late on WhatsApp to journalists who have…
We are more than a blue square
On Sunday night, during the Super Bowl – one of the largest shared cultural moments on the planet – an…
Please explain… the polls
Recent polling has come as a great shock to those who have not been paying attention, and who are out…
One Nation rises as the broad church collapses
I’m the President of One Nation South Australia, and I was genuinely pleased when Cory Bernardi agreed to join our…
Did we learn anything from the first global warming debate?
One of the enduring and acrimonious controversies in Australian politics concerns the disagreements between those who believe obstinately in the…
The submarine delusion
The submarine industry has an almost supernatural ability to humiliate clever people. It is the only field where trillion-dollar states…
Taming the two-wheeled Wild West
A recent report from Sky News Australia has laid bare the mounting human cost of our unregulated streets: over the…
Hate laws or political tools?
Outside a small lecture hall, protesters waved placards and shouted – blocking an Israeli speaker from entering. Inside, security struggled;…
I’ve had enough. Have you?
At what point do people of British or European, or part-British or part-European ancestry, who were born in Australia –…
Neither the leaders we deserve nor the ones we need
This past weekend I was watching The Dark Knight (2008). Not my favourite franchise, but critically acclaimed. One thing that stood…
Tony Abbott’s most hated budget was his greatest act of love
Politics punishes truth-tellers who arrive before the pain is obvious. In 2014, Tony Abbott and his Treasurer Joe Hockey delivered…
Move over B1, B2’s in the spotlight now
I’m not apologising for my obsession with B1, our Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen. Under his watch, he…
When flags are burning…
Recent Australia Day polling revealed something significant about the national mood. Support for keeping Australia Day on 26 January has…
How did the Nats end up more liberal than the Libs?
In the aftermath of the horrific Bondi massacre and the subsequent nearly-as-horrific political responses to it, every Australian who believes…
Five days pay, four days work
What a wonderful thing it must be to spend other people’s money? And the sound you can hear? They’re the…
Meet Dr Jim, the Bracket Creep
Inflation is the most insidious tax of all. It is the tax you pay for bad government. Worse still, it…
When independence became conditional
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is now under criminal investigation. Allegedly over overruns. Allegedly over testimony. No one seriously believes…
US-UK relationship nosedives
Many Donald Trump observers have developed two lists. The first is the spectacular successes: stopping illegal immigration; opposing the climate…
Conservative rage against the party machine
Tony Abbott’s 2013 landslide victory marked the high-water mark of Liberal electoral power. The Coalition secured 45.5 per cent of…
The problem with ‘diversifying’ English literature
Lit in Colour, a campaign launched by Penguin and the Runnymede Trust to diversify English literature, has recently released its…
The eternal danger of an actor without a script
Actors have been saying unscripted things again. Riz Ahmed is the star of a brand-new film version of Hamlet directed…
The restoration of parliament has become a shambles
For most of us the term R&R means the promise of rest and relaxation but for anyone associated with the…
Celebrity Justices compromise the Supreme Court
The real problem with US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson attending the Grammys wasn’t that it revealed her true…
What they don’t tell you about Christmas in New Zealand
‘I still think New Zealand the most beautiful country I have ever seen,’ Agatha Christie marvelled in 1922. Evidently she’s…
What will Jacinda Ardern do next?
When I first met Jacinda Ardern in the early 2010s, the notion that the young MP with the toothy smile…
The de-Wokification of New Zealand’s education system
The conservative coalition government of New Zealand came to office promising to wind back an enormous, government-run system of ‘Woke’…
Jacinda, Jacinta
I’m not a big fan of self-serving autobiographies, particularly of recently departed political leaders. I had briefly considered dipping into…
The inconvenient truth about polar bears
Camp indulgence
Music has the odd quality of being an abstract art as well as one that generates great gulfs and legions…
What Catherine O’Hara gave to cinema
There are actors who dominate the cinema screen, and actors who deepen it. There are stars who are ‘bankable’ and…
Dazzled and satiated
It’s a tumultuous decade or so since The Night Manager burst onto our television screens and a while longer since…
Celluloid nostalgia for lost worlds
There’s a poignancy in turning back the clock to the Fifties and early-Sixties. Everyone remembers Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Happy Birthday,…
Forgetting was the best defence for the Kindertransport refugees
Michael Moritz, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capitalists, really has got it in for Donald Trump. America is…
Goddesses and courtesans: six centuries of the female body in art
This is a book that many of us might like to have on our coffee tables – beautifully produced, not…
Lust for gold: White River Crossing, by Ian McGuire, reviewed
Ian McGuire’s previous historical novels, The North Water (2010) and The Abstainer (2020), tightly plotted literary thrillers with Shakespearean bodycounts,…
Musical bumps: Discord, by Jeremy Cooper, reviewed
From skylarks and bumblebees to the changing seasons and the sea, composers have long drawn inspiration from the natural world.…
What hope is there for the Church of England today?
A familiar defence of Anglicanism holds that flowers of principle bloomed in the mucky soil of compromise. Yes, this idea…
Are western governments actively facilitating money laundering?
On the outskirts of Fort Worth, Texas, there is a two-storey factory churning out a vast number of dollar bills…
The tale of John Tom, the Cornish rebel with the Messiah complex
When was the last battle fought on English soil? The traditional answer, still sanctioned by Wikipedia, is Sedgemoor, in 1685,…
Made in China
Most things that seemed like a good idea at the time eventually land somewhere between disaster and calamity. In Apple…