Angus Taylor quits shadow cabinet to challenge Sussan Ley
Angus Taylor presumably has the numbers… He has come out, not long ago, to announce he has tendered his resignation…
To the Moon! (Farewell Mars…)
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced a celestial shift. His company will prioritise constructing a base on the Moon, achievable within…
Nationals taken hostage by the Thin Blue Ribbon
I watched a hostage video on Monday. With four Australian flags hanging in agony as a backdrop, Sussan Ley and…
Labor is wrecking our Defence heritage … for money
Labor’s proposed fire sale of culturally and historically significant Defence properties should be stopped. It is a matter of national…
Is weaponised interdependence today’s ‘nuclear deterrence’?
After the end of the Soviet era, Western nations and multinationals built an interdependent global economy on top of US-centred…
AI, Engels, Friedman – and a peace treaty with history
Every so often, history resolves an argument without consulting the people who were arguing. Positions that once looked irreconcilable are…
The brutal life of baby Samuel
Soon after winning the Queensland State election on 26 October 2024, the new Liberal National Premier, David Crisafulli, unexpectedly moved…
Genocide is not what it used to be
Ongoing claims of genocide perpetrated by Israel have reached the point where it is, in modern terms, normative. That is,…
The Covid fad that just won’t die
Fidget-spinners, Pokémon GO, the skateboard, and Covid testing for major sports events – what is the odd one out? Covid…
Barnaby Joyce passes the pub test
From the Press Gallery: The first regular sitting of the House of Representatives for 2026 commenced last week so I…
The road to Hell, revisited
When Billie Eilish recently declared that ‘no one is illegal on stolen land’, the statement was received as a moral…
Why this crypto winter might be permanent
For years, the true believers have shouted from the rooftops of social media, preaching a bitcoin gospel of decentralisation and…
Mono-fanaticism in a sunburnt country
The most effective political leaders are semi-housetrained polecats, which is also a famous insult. You cannot lay a glove on…
Hate speech and Islamic regulation
Just to recap on how the coalition got into its current pickle. In the wake of the Bondi massacre (December…
Liberals’ wheels fell off with the hate speech laws
The Liberal Party is a sinking ship. Sussan Ley’s team have been up late on WhatsApp to journalists who have…
We are more than a blue square
On Sunday night, during the Super Bowl – one of the largest shared cultural moments on the planet – an…
Falling fertility
Last year, it was revealed that Australia’s fertility rate had sunk to 1.48 children per woman, the lowest figure in…
The backlash against Billie Eilish
Since the great Catherine O’Hara’s premature passing, I have been compulsively watching clips of her playing the faded actress Moira…
Seeking social cohesion
Tadpoles darted through the shady shallows of the Thomson River, as I stooped to fill my bottle with the pristine…
Cometh the moment, cometh the Taylor?
In rough and ready terms there are two theories about what is happening with Australia’s Liberal party. One is the…
Electric cell
The invention of the pneumatic tyre sparked an insatiable demand for rubber, turning the Congo’s rainforest – rich in this…
Ignoring radical Islam won’t make it disappear
Radical Islam, in both its Shia and Sunni forms, has become one of the most persistent drivers of global instability.…
Bangladesh teeters
I have just visited my ancestral birthplace of Bangladesh, where an election is due this month. What is unfolding carries…
Pedagogues for Palestine
‘From Gadigal to Gaza, globalise the intifada,’ howled Australian of the Year 2021 Grace Tame. There is no need for…
Starmer pick slammed by ex-mandarin
When a PM is in crisis, what do they do? Sack the head of the civil service. Having lost both…
Jim Ratcliffe has a point about Britain
Jim Ratcliffe is not a polished media performer, and neither does he have an accurate set of UK demographic statistics…
Is there a silver lining in Britain’s dismal growth figures?
Wes Streeting was bang on when he told Peter Mandelson the government had ‘no growth strategy at all’. The Health…
The question we keep asking after Afghan sex attacks
Why was he here? It’s a question we are forced to ask over and over again in borderless Britain, after…
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’…
Jacinda, Jacinta
I’m not a big fan of self-serving autobiographies, particularly of recently departed political leaders. I had briefly considered dipping into…
The inconvenient truth about polar bears
Dark and stormy
The opening gala of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra this year with the renowned pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet seems in every way congruent…
Camp indulgence
Music has the odd quality of being an abstract art as well as one that generates great gulfs and legions…
What Catherine O’Hara gave to cinema
There are actors who dominate the cinema screen, and actors who deepen it. There are stars who are ‘bankable’ and…
Dazzled and satiated
It’s a tumultuous decade or so since The Night Manager burst onto our television screens and a while longer since…
Searching for the one and only is futile, say the sexologists
In a tiny town tucked into the desert an hour’s drive out of Nevada, a legal brothel operates. Its ‘menu’…
The lost world of the pinball machine
‘Pinball games, with their flashing lights and unforgettable names, are the one thread that runs together my otherwise fragmentary life.’…
The citizens of nowhere adrift in the West
We all know that an Englishman’s home is his castle, or at least it was. Looking back, it is easy…
No good deed goes unpunished: A Better Life, by Lionel Shriver, reviewed
Lionel Shriver is a first-rate storyteller. And yet… A Better Life is a satire on the immigration problem that particularly…
The two faces of modern Japan
Japanophiles, look away now. A country renowned for inspiring fascination, warm feelings and not a little envy in its rapidly…
Why Leonard Cohen felt empowered to pronounce benedictions
If it is true that a serious artist is one with the capacity to go on reinventing who they are…
Growing up with thieves, murderers and heroin addicts
‘You can’t pick your parents, but they get to pick your life,’ Jonathan Tepper points out at the beginning of…
Rupert Murdoch’s warped vision of family
When Rupert Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, in August 2022 he made her sign an agreement that she…