WA's corona clampdown: all bluff - and blunder
An Indigenous Voice to Parliament: not as simple as some would have you believe
Advocates for an Indigenous Voice to parliament see the proposal for a legislated option merely as a stepping stone to radical constitutional…
Mothers of Sons fights for fair treatment of men and boys
Two years ago, a Canberra woman Sarah Jane Parkinson was sent to prison for making over 30 false rape and violence accusations against…
Daniel Andrews’ conversion laws: swimming against the tide
As the Victorian government stands poised to pass new laws based on LGBTI ideology, our global community is telling us…
Eddie McGuire tried to smoke an exploding cigar. Why is he surprised at what happened?
The Collingwood Football Club is like the man who ordered an exploding cigar and then smoked the exploding cigar only…
WA’s corona clampdown: all bluff – and blunder
If 2020 illustrated anything, it’s that there are far worse places than Western Australia to be trapped in. Sure, WA isn’t as fancy pants as places in the east but our beaches, food and weather are magnificent and you can…
The Greenhouse Effect vs. The Ultimo Effect
One of the most intelligent and insightful humans to have ever walked the face of the earth is American economist…
Whatever happened to the free speech party?
The communication revolution birthed by Big Tech began with the best of intentions – to provide anyone, even the most…
Kevin Andrews deserved better
Kevin Andrews didn’t deserve the vilification he received after losing yesterday’s Menzies preselection, especially from journalists who appear to have…
Putin's poisonous prisoner
Alexei Navalny, the man Putin tried to poison, has been sent to prison for two years and eight months — conveniently…
Kamala Harris’s Orwellian future
Do you suppose that Kamala Harris is a student of Jane Austen? The contingency, as Jeeves was wont to observe,…
Can ‘surge testing’ get new variants under control?
A year on, in one sense we’re pretty well back to where we started — with the government attempting to…
AOC’s body politics
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is no stranger to attention. The second-term congresswoman was the second most talked-about politician in 2019, just…
Dreaming of a White Paper
Honouring Malcom Turnbull by making him a Companion of the Order of Australia gave our 29th Prime Minister an opportunity…
Twiggy’s Green steal?
There was a time when the ABC’s Boyer Lectures made sense. Based on the Reith Lectures sponsored by the BBC,…
Biden’s brave new transgender world
That Joe Biden, on the first day of his presidency, signed an Executive Order advancing the transgender movement sends an…
Stranded
In 2019, America recorded the world’s largest decline in energy-related carbon dioxide. But to credit President Trump, would discredit other…
Humourless moral imbeciles
A century ago one of the best-selling authors in the world was the son of a Scottish Free Church Presbyterian…
Court short
Reserved for ‘eminent achievement and merit of the highest degree in service to Australia’, no more than 35 people in…
Divided We Fall
In the middle of the 15th century, Italian philosopher, bishop, and humanist Francesco Patrizi of Siena wrote a number of…
A great president
The United States has led the free world for the best part of a century, producing a record number of…
On The Beach
The aftermath of Australia Day seems like an appropriate time to watch On the Beach, for a belated first time,…
Elijah Moshinsky
Earlier this month, the opera world sadly absorbed the news of the death of Elijah Moshinsky. Born in Shanghai in…
The Investigation
Slowly, after what seemed like infinite, malingering delays, virus-driven, the world of arts and entertainment is starting to open again…
Masked opera
We were all excited to be there. You would have thought that we hadn’t been to an opera performance. Well,…
Queer Teen Craze
It is remarkable how quickly the cause of transgenderism has moved from being a strange object at the back of…
Lives unlived: Light Perpetual, by Francis Spufford, reviewed
Francis Spufford was already admired as a non-fiction writer when he published his prize-winning first novel, On Golden Hill, in…
A bored business administrator in Leicester puts the intelligence services to shame
In the summer of 2012, a man was walking near Jabal Shashabo, a Syrian rebel enclave, when he spotted a…
Memory – and the stuff of dreams
Can you remember when you heard about 9/11? Chances are you’ll be flooded instantly with memories — not only where…
One of the last men-only jobs left — offshore in the North Sea
As a child, I loved the Ladybird ‘People at Work’ series. I had the ones on the fireman, the policeman,…
A beastly cold country: Britain in 1962
Like this author, I was happily snowbound at a beloved grandparent’s house during the big freeze that began on Boxing…
Holding the Empire responsible for the state of modern Britain is becoming commonplace
It seems to have become a virtual orthodoxy of the academic and publishing worlds that history and fiction now have…
Rescuing Elizabeth Barrett Browning from her wax-doll image
‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?’ asks the speaker in Robert Browning’s poem ‘Memorabilia’ — a line which recognises…