Check your tyres!
From Pluto, with love
The debate about whether or not to include Pluto as a planet is part-nostalgia, part-history, part-historical justice, part-science, and part-aww,…
France takes its 129 tonnes of gold out of New York
France has sold its 129 tonnes of gold being held in the New York Federal Reserve and purchased an equivalent…
No fuel rationing for April, as Albanese heads to Singapore
There are species of sloth that move faster than the Prime Minister. This much is evident as we discover today…
Can the Liberals win back Victoria?
The Herald Sun posted a non-April Fools’ piece on April 1 suggesting that the findings of an investigation ‘could deliver a devastating…
‘How to Save Our Churches’ – A Catholic Perspective
Kemi Badenoch is right to draw attention to the crisis facing Britain’s historic churches. When nearly a thousand places of…
After October 7, deterrence is no longer enough
The October 7 Hamas terrorist attack did more than expose a catastrophic intelligence failure. It exposed the limits of deterrence…
The foundations of Iran
In this writing, I want to introduce the world to the true foundations of Iran. The ‘infrastructure of Iran’ is…
Government set to make extreme police powers permanent
The ‘frog in boiling water’ is a common anecdote. According to the story, if you put a frog in boiling…
The media v. Trump
Let me start with some rather startling numbers from the US. One survey they’ve been running in America since 1972…
Is One Nation more Liberal than the Liberals?
If you are a Liberal Party supporter, this will hurt to read. But truth hurts. The rise of One Nation…
Iran and the death of the decarbonisation empire
Online publications with a habit of operating like mouthpieces for the renewables industry, have been scathing at the suggestion Australian…
Ben Roberts-Smith case brings out the armchair experts
But for the Ben Roberts-Smith arrest this week, you would never know there were so many experts in criminal martial…
ASIO and the eternal police state
In Mid 2025, the Australian government began debating amendments to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2025…
Have police lost public trust?
Looking back over the last few years, it seems Australian police are increasingly being attacked – even murdered – as…
One Nation, the Liberal collapse, and Australia’s populist reckoning
When I wrote about One Nation’s rise earlier this year, the polling was startling. The question was whether it would…
Strike out academic nonsense
In the geological past, I sat on the engineering and earth science and major equipment committees of the Australian Research…
The Isfahan discrepancy
When an American F-15E Strike Eagle was brought down over Iran on April 3 by a shoulder-fired missile, the Pentagon…
The last serious man in Washington
John Bolton was born in the Year of the Rat. The Chinese, who have been thinking about human character rather…
In praise of Pauline
Full disclosure, I have been a huge Pauline Hanson fan for decades, and yes, even fuller disclosure, a Donald Trump…
Beg, vote, and pray
‘See that guy. If he runs, we run.’ These were the words of our driver the first time a Saudi…
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner loses again – A victory for free speech | Celine Baumgarten S3 Ep 18
Celine Baumgarten (Celine Against the Machine) has celebrated her SECOND victory against the eSafety Commissioner. This wasn’t only a personal…
Did Donald Trump conquer the world with witty insults? | Joel Gilbert S3 Ep 17
Did Donald Trump conquer the world with witty insults? I’m joined by Joel Gilbert to discuss the genius of humour…
Digital tyranny or ‘child safety’? 😵 & the bitcoin revolution | Efrat Fenigson S3 Ep 16
When Australia’s Under 16 social media ban started locking adult political writers out of #Substack – it was just the…
My fellow Libs, we need to pick a side
The Islamic terrorist attack at Bondi Beach brought us to a crossroad. The tearing apart of the national fabric has,…
Unstoppable wind and sun
The Albanese government thought it had scored a political win from the leaking of the Coalition’s talking points in the…
The land we forgot to remember
The Prime Minister recently characterised One Nation as ‘…some politicians, some of which have risen up recently in the polling,…
Blind Freddy goes fracking
We are now paying the price after decades of demonising fossil fuels. The mythical fraudulent human-induced climate change ideology and…
When the Law of War comes home to roost
Ben Roberts-Smith VC was arrested this week after a long-running investigation into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan. He was not…
Ben Roberts-Smith and the confused battlefield
So Ben Roberts-Smith has been arrested, and his life will never be the same again. Over the next few years…
Labor is busy fuelling the fuel crisis
When a product becomes scarce, prices rise to ration demand. That is not a moral judgement. It is a mechanism,…
Labor’s fossil fools
It’s hard not to experience cognitive dissonance watching Labor’s hapless ministers respond to the global energy crisis. For five weeks,…
Can the Royal Navy really deter Vladimir Putin?
The Royal Navy has not had a good few weeks in reputational terms. It was nothing short of humiliating that…
Zack Polanski’s Green party bubble won’t last forever
It was bound to happen sooner or later, but coming at the beginning of a local election campaign in which…
The shameful lies about Israel’s attack on Hezbollah
Imagine there was a virulently Francophobic militia on the doorstep of the French Republic. Imagine it had fired nearly a…
France’s migration hypocrisy
Four migrants drowned in the Channel yesterday when they were swept away by strong currents. The two men and two…
The US hasn’t threatened to bomb the Vatican
The first American pope does not like the President of the United States. One of the few things we knew…
The ONS should not work from home
Our invertebrate government has struck again. Given the chance to show a bit of backbone in the face of demands…
The Pentagon’s holy war with Rome
America is having its Golden Age, Iran is about to get blasted into the Stone Age… and Elbridge Colby wants…
What Trump gets wrong about NATO
The idea that the United States has been swindled by its NATO allies is not new. Robert Gates, in his…
A&E is buckling under the mental health crisis
Mental health provision is totally inadequate in this country: we already know that. But you can only really understand quite…
Why are the Greens using the local elections to attack Israel?
In putting an attack on Israel front and centre of his party’s local election launch, you would think Zack Polanski…
Who is lying about the Iran ceasefire?
Somebody is lying about the ceasefire. Iran has insisted that the agreement includes Israel stopping its military action in Lebanon.…
Putin has called Starmer’s shadow fleet bluff
Theodore Roosevelt, the blur of energy who occupied the White House for the first years of the 20th century, famously…
The row over English becoming an official language of New Zealand
Parliamentarians in New Zealand have been limbering up for an oddly unedifying debate over what ought to be the most…
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’…
Organised crime is targeting artisanal food
Cruelties of popular culture
Ethan Hawke is an extraordinary figure. He has made straightforward Hollywood classics like Training Day but he also comes out…
Deaths in the mind
It’s strange the way certain deaths stay in the mind perhaps because of the fascination and interconnection of the lives…
A daily beauty
It’s fascinating to see that Sharmill are presenting a new Othello from London’s Haymarket from 28 March with David Harewood…
A versatile and virtuouso figure
Well, the Oscars have come and gone and we tend only to remember the anomalies. Julie Andrews winning the Oscar…
Motherless friends: Kin, by Tayari Jones, reviewed
Set in the American South during the Jim Crow era, Tayari Jones’s Kin follows the parallel lives of Annie and…
Singing of arms and the man: Son of Nobody, by Yann Martel, reviewed
Yann Martel, the author of Beatrice and Virgil and Life of Pi, typically explores competing storylines, narrative reliability and the…
Landscapes of longing in illuminated Books of Hours
Christopher de Hamel is an outstanding salesman. At Sotheby’s, back in the 1990s, he brokered the sale of the 15th-century…
Defiantly creative to the end: the transgressive Dorothea Tanning
I received this book for review on the same day that Dorothea Tanning was making headlines in the auction world,…
How the paralysed Franz Rosenzweig continued to translate the Bible
In the early years of the 20th century, a young philosopher named Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) set himself the task of…
Self-betterment through contemplation of the Seven Deadly Sins
What mistake did Narcissus make when he looked into the water? To fall in love with his own ravishing self,…
Rebarbative relatives abound: The Palm House, by Gwendoline Riley, reviewed
Like its predecessor My Phantoms (2021), Gwendoline Riley’s new novel is stuffed to the gills with the sort of people…
The harm of dwelling on a traumatic past
Back in the 1970s, people in Britain were mystified by the enthusiasm of Americans – especially New Yorkers – for…