The Trump administration attempts to correct the record on Covid
Pope Francis has died aged 88
Pope Francis, head of the Catholic Church, has died aged 88. The Pope had been seriously ill in hospital for…
Stuart Bonds: the demise of Australian coal is a terrible experiment
Anthony Albanese’s bizarre verbal fumble about whales getting tangled in offshore wind farms was discussed on Sky News Australia’s Outsiders…
Labor and the Greens: thick as thieves
Labor and the Greens are thick as thieves – and thieving is exactly what they intend to do with the…
Matt Canavan: the perfect conservative
Listen… Senator Matt Canavan might not be as traditionally dishy as Alex Antic, but he made himself an incredibly attractive…
Third debate attitude reflects leadership: we ain’t got either
Greetings from Bhutan: The first time I was teaching leadership in Bhutan, for our end-of-course celebration (held two nights before…
A nation of delayed common sense
We are a nation of delayed common sense. We often take too long to get there. Both sides of politics…
One Nation is freeing Australian families
‘Families’ are being exploited in the Federal Election race. Having been shoved to the back of the queue behind ‘climate…
Stopping the colonisation of women’s rights
A landmark UK court judgment has confirmed that equity legislation should define women as a biological sex for the purpose…
The ABC’s climate change humiliation ritual
There is now a religious ritual that the ABC performs, a set of words that an individual must utter to…
Our ‘Beliefs’
We live in a representative democracy. That is, we elect people to represent us in Parliament House and act on…
The Forgotten People: have they been forgotten again?
In 1942, during the height of the horrors of the second world war, the RT Hon. Robert Gordon Menzies made…
‘Green Death’ tax from a Labor-Greens minority government?
The Greens don’t want you to succeed. They want to take your money so they can turn Australia into a…
Is it time for a Pope Donald?
Does the Roman Catholic Church need a Donald Trump? As with the Washington political establishment when Trump set out to…
Pope Francis, the 266th pope, has died
Pope Francis died this morning, Easter Monday, at 7:35 am Rome time, at the age of 88. His last public…
Why the establishment is targeting Elon Musk
If there’s one idea that the rise of social media has proven it’s that a large proportion of the population…
Bracket creep and soft economists
The Albanese government reduced the Stage 3 tax cuts that were designed to address some the burden of bracket creep.…
Bowen sinks to new lows
You might think I’m obsessed with Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen – B1 to me and Speccie readers. …
Poilievre still in the game to win
Canada’s looming election will take place on Monday, 28 April, five days before Australia’s. It seems to me that a…
ABC of Aboriginal history
Recent evidence from Washington shows how profoundly President Trump’s domestic decisions can affect the rest of the world. Australia’s woke…
The Federal Reserve can’t rescue stocks
On Monday, 19 October 1987, the US share market dropped on opening by about 10 per cent, double the slump…
Meloni’s war on the red robes
My Spectator Australia colleagues Ramesh Thakur and James Allan have written in these pages about the perils of an unelected…
A referendum on Albo’s government
Australia’s ‘sliding doors’ federal election is really two polls: one playing out in the suburbs and regions, where the hip-pocket…
The art of the fail
President Donald Trump’s trade policies, launched under the slogan ‘Making America Great Again’ have instead sparked economic disruption, geopolitical instability,…
The man who bought the world
According to a superfluity of economic experts and no fewer foreign policy wonks, on 2 April Donald Trump became the…
Could Trump cost Australia’s Liberals victory?
Since Australia’s general election was called by Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese at the end of March, the contest for…
Starmer’s words about ‘trans women’ are too little, too late
When will Keir Starmer finally show some leadership over the most fundamental distinction in human society: the difference between men…
Why London’s Russia-Ukraine ceasefire talks will fail
There’s one key thing that one should know about Ukraine peace talks scheduled to begin in London today, and that…
Ireland is still in denial about trans rights
The reaction in Ireland to the UK Supreme Court’s decision on the meaning of ‘woman’ in the Equality Act has…
307,000 Voices
Growing concerns at the impact of unregulated free speech around the world, and especially in the English-speaking West, are understandable.…
New Zealand’s cringeworthy new tourism slogan
‘Everyone must go!’ New Zealand’s new tourism declares, but so far almost everyone seems to be cringing. The prime minister…
The sacred sites fandango
The second-highest mountain in New Zealand has been granted ‘personhood’ by the NZ parliament because it is regarded as the…
Operation Resolution: cleaning up after HMNZS Manawanui
HMNZS Manawanui, formally a chirpy red and yellow MV Edda Fonn, sank on October 6 much to the shock of…
Will Trump join the strongman club?
The way the imagination works
Easter was almost on us when the suggestion came. There was talk of a new Narnia film underway and of…
The zenith of art
Last week your columnist cut a paragraph stating that the original Melbourne Higgins in My Fair Lady, Robin Bailey, and…
Unsurpassable
It’s a weird connection but they say Donald Trump is devoted to his presidential predecessor Andrew Jackson who was popular…
What really scares people about Adolescence
Two books I read in my teens made me want to be a writer. One, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, appeared when…
Is there ever a good time to discuss the care of the elderly?
Not far into The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman, Didier Eribon quotes from this balladesque 1980…
Only Hitler could have brought the disparate Allies together
‘Allies,’ declared Stalin on 8 February 1945, the fifth day of the Yalta Conference, ‘should not deceive one another.’ In…
Dangerous games of cat and mouse: a choice of crime fiction
Psychosis and thriller writing are never friends. Even when told from the psychotic’s point of view, madness is always hard…
The boy who would be king: The Pretender, by Jo Harkin, reviewed
Cock’s bones! This is a most wonderly historical novel, the very reverse of a wind-egg. It tells the story of…
The mystical masterpiece from Stalag VIII-A
Olivier Messiaen was a French composer steeped in the solitude and ecstasy of Catholic mysticism: everything he wrote was dedicated…
Why we never tire of tales of pointless polar hardship
I’m not altogether a fan of what the writer Sara Wheeler has called the Big Willie school of expeditions. ‘To…
The making of Van Gogh as an artist came at a terrible cost
Six months before Vincent van Gogh’s death, the critic Albert Aurier, waxing poetical, wrote an article entitled Les Isolés on…
Christianity in England is dying – and our national identity with it
‘Christianity,’ writes Bijan Omrani in his opening sentence, ‘is dying in England.’ Does it matter? His next sentence makes it…