flat white

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…

The good ol’ days

I’m not really one for pining for the good ol’ days, when things were splendid and now, they’re not. Apart…

27 Jun 2026

Labour’s messiah seizes the crown

The momentous 18 June Makerfield by-election in Wigan, in northern England’s once-industrial heartland, marks the second time the town has…

27 Jun 2026

Chalmers’ war on capitalists

How many Australian businesses must fail before another generation of politicians learns one of the oldest lessons in economics? State-directed…

Chokepoints seldom last

In 1973, Opec Arab members cut production and imposed an oil embargo to inflict revenge on Western countries for supporting…

27 Jun 2026

An American Monarch

On the Fourth of July, the United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of their separation from the British Crown.…

27 Jun 2026

Comrade Chalmers’ class war budget

Labor’s 2026 budget delivered barely six weeks ago, is a masterclass in deception and incompetence. It attracted widespread, well deserved,…

27 Jun 2026

The world’s worst case of TDS

I write this week from Britain’s first and oldest colony. If you’re thinking, ‘He’s in Bermuda’ that’s a good guess.…

27 Jun 2026

Housing daze

Australia’s love affair with property is older than the nation itself. From the earliest days of settlement, land was the…

27 Jun 2026

The real significance of the Israel-Lebanon agreement

Even before the ink on the agreement between Israel and Lebanon was dry, its opponents began trying to destroy it.…

28 Jun 2026

The social contract is fundamentally broken

As the eyes of the nation flit between the dramas of Westminster, Wigan and the World Cup, there is no…

28 Jun 2026

Andy Burnham’s reality TV show rise

I knew that the endless hours I’d spent watching reality TV would one day stand me in good stead in…

28 Jun 2026

Labour’s latest immigration plan is pure insanity

Last week, almost a thousand more illegal migrants entered the country via small boats. Over 204,000 have arrived since 2018.…

28 Jun 2026

Is Britain doomed?

In the wake of Keir Starmer’s resignation much has been made of the fact that in the past decade we…

28 Jun 2026

Farage and Kemi’s pitch for conservative hearts and minds

At the entrance to the hangar-like Olympia conference centre is a huge, framed drawing, showing a design for an imagined…

28 Jun 2026

Is the US-Israel special relationship over?

Until recently, the Israeli right regarded US President Donald Trump as its greatest ally. He was often described in quasi-religious…

28 Jun 2026

It turns out being a hunter-gatherer wasn’t so great after all

The science writer Jared Diamond once called agriculture ‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race’. Yuval Noah…

28 Jun 2026

Is Trump’s quest for peace doomed?

J.D. Vance jokingly compared himself to Richard Nixon earlier this week. ‘Young senator, vice-president, writes some bestselling books, is hated…

27 Jun 2026

Venezuela’s earthquake is the cruelest blow

Venezuela thought its luck was changing. Then the earthquakes stuck. For a country that’s economy has long been in tatters,…

27 Jun 2026

Is Burnham brave enough to scrap the triple lock?

Loss avoidance is one of the strongest forces in the world. It’s a fundamental of human nature – and therefore…

27 Jun 2026

Six ways the BBC could save money

I’m unlikely to be invited to dinner at BBC director general Matt Brittin’s any time soon but judging by the…

27 Jun 2026

A New Zealand republic in Jacinda Ardern’s lifetime?

New Zealand’s former Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, believes the nation will become a republic within her lifetime. We have heard…

21 Jun 2026

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…

4 Mar 2026

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…

22 Dec 2025

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…

8 Nov 2025

Aussie life

Measuring tobacco consumption is dirty work, but somebody has to do it. The antiseptic image of the government statistician has…

27 Jun 2026

Language

The word of the moment is undoubtedly ‘monocultural’. In her take-no-prisoners speech at the National Press Club Pauline Hanson said…

27 Jun 2026

Why should we call Turkey ‘Türkiye’?

Thank heaven my husband doesn’t even pretend to like football. Indeed he emphasises his indifference by making ironic remarks like:…

27 Jun 2026

Dear Mary: can I accuse a writer of using AI?

Q. I work at a magazine and am occasionally (and perhaps with increasing frequency) sent articles that strike me as…

27 Jun 2026

Dull, duller and Dulles – was Churchill’s jibe about America’s Cold War icon unfair?

In the era of Trumpian foreign policy incoherence, a new intellectual biography of the American Cold War icon John Foster…

27 Jun 2026

Nagging doubts: Twenty Minutes of Silence, by Hélène Bessette, reviewed

One critic memorably described Waiting for Godot as a play in which nothing happens, twice. Twenty Minutes of Silence is…

27 Jun 2026

Chinese puzzle or matryoshka doll – the complexity of Sino-Russia relations

China and Russia are twins. Both are great Asian land empires; both are continental, multi-ethnic powers that expanded by pushing…

27 Jun 2026

Hot and bothered: Trouble Was, by Charlotte Edwardes, reviewed

Child narrators are tricky little beasts. Misjudge their vocabulary and they lose all credibility or are unreadably twee. Even the…

27 Jun 2026

Blame the Enlightenment for species extinction

As if she hadn’t got enough on her plate already, the high-powered Danish journalist and mother of three Lea Korsgaard…

27 Jun 2026

The imaginative genius behind the Great Exhibition

If you want to understand Victorian Britain, look to the Great Exhibition of 1851. At a time of unprecedented technological…

27 Jun 2026

Who needs an Italian beach when we have our own lidos?

With his 2012 book, The A303: Highway to the Sun, the author and psychogeographer Tom Fort pulled on his driving…

27 Jun 2026

The tragedy of Paul Celan – trapped in his own allusive poems

Some time in the late 1950s, Jacques Derrida and other intellectual luminaries at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris were…

27 Jun 2026