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Academic groupthink: is Nick Coatsworth the new Peter Ridd?

Never has it been so important for Australian universities to be places of free intellectual inquiry than it is right now.  But…

13 Oct 2021

Dave Chappelle braves the TERF wars

Dave Chappelle has us arguing again over his last Netflix special “The Closer”.  Chappelle has controversially declared himself “team TERF.”…

12 Oct 2021

Why cry over Covid yet back state-sanctioned killing?

The newly appointed New South Wales Premier, Dominic Perrottet is being criticised for expediting the process of bringing his out of its…

12 Oct 2021

Come fly the gender neutral skies

The gender-neutral brigade are getting a bit much.  Last week I wrote an article for SpecOz about how women are…

12 Oct 2021

The IBAC sensation: ‘ICAC, hold my beer’

State corruption and integrity commissions are well and truly du jour at the moment. Less than a fortnight ago, ICAC felled its…

12 Oct 2021

Look over there! Look over there!

If it wasn’t so serious you’d fall off your chair laughing. A major sleaze scandal is threatening the Andrews Government…

Freedom Day? You have a barcode on your forehead

You wouldn’t let a premier tattoo a barcode on your forehead, so why do we submit to QR check-ins?  “Those…

12 Oct 2021

It’s not Freedom Day until we’re all free

Welcome to Freedom Day! Oh, hang on, this isn’t Freedom Day. If it were, everyone would be free with no…

11 Oct 2021

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The president’s health is a national interest

Delaware used to be Cale Boggs country, almost as much as Massachusetts belonged to the Kennedys. Boggs served as governor,…

12 Oct 2021

As COP26 looms, Glasgow is facing a waste crisis

In early November, Glasgow will be the focus of the world’s attention for COP26, the UN’s Climate Change Conference. For…

12 Oct 2021

Evergrande illusions

At the height of the 2008 financial crisis I was invited to an off-the-record media lunch with a famous investor.…

12 Oct 2021

The mystery of Vladimir Putin’s mistresses

There’s an odd thing about 18-year old Luiza Rozova’s instagram feed. You can see photos of her breakfasts (sliced exotic…

12 Oct 2021

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Kiwi Life

A crisis by design It is increasingly sad, so many New Zealanders saying they would leave – if they could…

2 Oct 2021

Kiwi Language

A tech company claims that anti-vax and anti-lockdown rallies have been ‘astroturfed’. Which means? Well, ‘AstroTurf’ was the world’s first…

2 Oct 2021

No, New Zealand is not Aotearoa

“Create your own pepeha to celebrate te wiki o te reo movement.” Given that estimates range between about 4% and…

26 Sep 2021

Does AUKUS show there’s still life in the Morrison government?

Yesterday’s surprise announcement of AUKUS – the new Australia-United Kingdom-United States security partnership – is huge news. Not only is…

17 Sep 2021

Xi goes ballistic

The AUKUS pact turns a half-century of foreign policy on its head. Fifty years of ‘multilateralist’ fantasies about Australia’s role…

9 Oct 2021

Little to be proud of

There is no doubt that Prime Minister Scott Morrison takes a great deal of pleasure in talking about freedom. A…

9 Oct 2021

The empty moral posturing of attacks on vaccine hesitants

Our so-called leaders are so blinded with the lockdown cult that they would stubbornly refuse to see reality even if…

9 Oct 2021

Blah blah blah meets la-la

Having wasted seven minutes of my life watching Saint Greta address the Youth4Climate – yes, I know what you are…

9 Oct 2021

Handing Beijing the keys

Professor Tim Flannery, who achieved notoriety for his apocalyptic, spectacularly wrong global warming predictions, boasts of bailing up former News…

9 Oct 2021

ScoMo’s to blame, nobody else

Let’s face it. These heavy-handed, despotic lockdowns hit the young much more than the old; they hit the poor without…

9 Oct 2021

To vax or not to vax?

Mandatory vaccination has become a vexed, or a vaxxed, issue wherever it has been enforced. To vax or not to…

9 Oct 2021

Aux bien pensants

Premier, why didn’t you listen? After ICAC’s attempt to destroy that model of integrity, Crown Prosecutor, Margaret Cuneen was scuttled…

9 Oct 2021

Clive Owen

A time of plague makes us brood on the culture we share in the absence of personal preference. One person…

9 Oct 2021

Heath Ledger

It’s weird to hear news of artistic life in the midst of Covid. The Sydney Theatre Company has a new…

2 Oct 2021

Nic Denton and Frances O’Connor

As the northern hemisphere, that ambiguous spectral homeland we’re conscious of, starts to open up, it’s easy to be envious…

25 Sep 2021

Diane Lane

It was doubly sad the other night to see Virginia Gay deliver a speech from her Covid-cancelled Cyrano on the…

18 Sep 2021

Aussie Life

One of the most compelling things about Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, is the way we don’t…

9 Oct 2021

Aussie Language

A new study by researchers at the University of Western Australia shows that the most trusted accent in Australia is…

9 Oct 2021

What exactly is the ‘festive season’?

‘Here you are, darling,’ I said to my husband. ‘These lines might have been written for you: “Drinke, quaffe, be…

9 Oct 2021

I’d pick the Vero Beach retirement home for old ladies over Annabel’s

Around 20 or so years ago I had a point for match point on a perfect grass court at Fort…

9 Oct 2021

Disappointed in the Libs?

How might the centre-right do better? This is the question that the promising young writer Jake Thrupp has posed; and…

9 Oct 2021

Fiction’s most famous Rifleman returns — and it’s miraculous he’s still alive

It has been 15 years since the last Richard Sharpe novel, and it’s a pleasure to report that fiction’s most…

9 Oct 2021

Beavers, not concrete barriers, can save Britain from floods

As the start date of COP26 draws closer, and just when we are assailed by daily proof of climate chaos,…

9 Oct 2021

As feminists fall out, it’s not just the patriarchy that’s under fire

UK grassroots feminism is flourishing at the moment, with the journalist Julie Bindel leading from the front as troublemaker-in-chief. In…

9 Oct 2021

The delicate business of monitoring the monarchy

This very readable account of relations between the British intelligence services and the Crown does more than it says on…

9 Oct 2021

Spitfires of the sea: the secret exploits of the Royal Navy’s 15th Motor Gun Boat Flotilla

Fast boats and fast women have been the ruin of many a poor boy. But they can also prove a…

9 Oct 2021

Pink for boys, blue for girls and a worldwide mania for mauve

It would seem, if recent publications are anything to go by, that we have an insatiable appetite for this subject.…

9 Oct 2021

Only time will tell if there’ll be a Great Pandemic Novel

We had been dreading it like (forgive me) the plague: the inevitable onslaught of corona-lit. Fortunately, the first few titles…

9 Oct 2021