Potholes, political mates and Toto
Lord of the sock puppets
Anthony Albanese has joined the Unplug24 campaign, announcing on X: The movement is in honour of Mac Holdsworth who, to…
Penny Wong vs Ralph Babet
United Australia Party Senator Ralph Babet has a knack for getting under Labor’s skin and this week, he succeeded in…
The conservatives are coming
There have been some seriously deranged things written about CPAC by left-wing publications. Conservative leaders spoke on stage in front…
AI is a psychopath
Did anyone else catch that fleeting headline in the Daily Mail, claiming: Chinese AI tool told researchers how to make biological weapons…
Feminism and the disastrous decade of dating
Young women have never had more freedom, more education or more money. So why are so many of them so…
The winged figure of Cyrus the Great at Sydney Olympic Park
Today, I would like to write about the winged figure at Sydney Olympic Park, Australia, which is associated with Cyrus…
You were only supposed to blow the doors off!
Every good heist film needs a villain who is not the crew. In Bank Job, published this week to coincide…
Australia’s shameful era of progressive antisemitism
Hallelujah! I opened my newspaper on Friday to read, in black and white, the two words I never thought I…
Anthropic’s laundry list of risks
Halloween has come early on Wall Street. This week, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, lodged its prospectus to list on…
Minns vs the Barossa
In November 2014, a man who had run the Barossa for 18 years handed over the keys. Nobody stood against…
Dreamers not Dregs
It’s not hard to see how America’s elites and its snide class of wannabe professional politicians threw away their hegemony…
Chris Bowen’s long, slow climate controversy
For years I have clung to the academic excuse that climate change is ‘not my field’. But politics is my…
Designated devils v. designated survivors
The new reality show on the world stage is, a bit like the Truman Show, not a reality show at…
The disaster of institutionalised childcare and why choice matters
One does not have to conduct multitudinous studies and surveys to recognise that mothers innately understand and appreciate it is…
Digital Duty of Care (censorship) laws pass the Lower House
Last month we warned you about the government’s latest attempt to censor the internet, via the Digital Duty of Care…
Albo not walking on water but thin ice
Jesus turned water into wine, but Albo went one better. He turned a ‘dirt sheet’ on Helen Haines into a…
The fair go was never a government program
Andrew Long has done something rather unusual in modern political commentary. He heard a speech, considered its arguments, and responded…
The right must unite, or Labor wins again
At CPAC Brisbane, conservatives, Liberals, Nationals, and One Nation supporters discovered that their minor differences matter less than the Western…
Erasing the West
Last week in Parliament, when I spoke on the Public and Bank Holidays Amendment Bill 2025, I knew that between…
New Zealand election musings
By the time you read this, the New Zealand election will be about a week away. Now I’d like to…
OH NO, NOT BLUEY! – Labor has started a war against speech and satire | S3 Ep 26
In this episode: Is BLUEY ground zero for the war against satire? Victoria – the reddest state – is about…
TURN THE POLITICAL TEMPERATURE DOWN… WHO TURNED IT UP?! – Labor’s outrageous hypocrisy | S3 Ep 25
In this episode: Macron’s ‘soft touch’ on far-left riot agitators. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni vows swift justice against looters. Labor’s inter-generational…
CHAMPAGNE SOCIALISM BURNS FRENCH CULTURE – and Australia’s descent into censorship | S3 Ep 24
In this episode: Far-left riots bring France to its knees while President Macron attends #CelineDion concert. Australia’s Royal Commission into…
Hot air con
It would appear that the federal Labor government has been taking lessons from its favourite bureaucrats and serving up questionable…
Jimbo is toast
Jimbo is toast: it’s the scientific consensus. His term as Treasurer of this country must end as soon as possible.…
What went on tour should have been sorted on tour
You know something has gone awry when Labor’s Captain Sensible, former defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon, calls for an intervention against…
The housing crisis is a hoax
Australia’s Housing Accord is a five-year plan, and it is performing exactly as five-year plans do. It promised 1.2 million…
WA under Labor is rotten to the core
A small town in the north of Western Australia by the name of South Hedland has been the focus of…
France’s riots are a gift to Le Pen
Few in the mainstream media spotted the irony of the BBC’s Paris correspondent describing the recent anarchy across France as…
Australian notes
That the Bureau of Meteorology could fake and corrupt weather temperature data, as so egregiously revealed recently in a forensic…
Potholes, political mates and Toto
Somewhere in regional Australia, a council worker is staring into a pothole large enough to qualify for its own post…
The sewage hits the fan
A whiff of wastewater that wafted over the Cooks River has finally enveloped the Prime Minister. For weeks, Albanese insisted…
Political trends firming against Labor
There are two leading trends in Australian politics which are firming against Labor , and which, I suspect, will hold…
Left-wing violence
In a recent speech, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned about the deadly danger of left-wing activism, claiming that…
The left’s fraudulent language
Many years ago, I was on an appointments committee to select between two candidates for a lecturing position in the…
Is now the time to bring back national service?
Wes Streeting has told us last week that we have 1,000 days to get war-ready amid the intensifying threats and…
The Church has forgotten the true meaning of martyrdom
All Saints’ Day is upon us. Today, Christians throughout the world will reflect on the lives of saints who have…
Nietzsche was the first self-help guru
Since the 1990s it has been acknowledged that our culture has become unduly concerned with risk and obsessed with the…
The true lesson of the Suez crisis
‘No Americans Served Here’ read a sign outside a car showroom in Hertfordshire in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis.…
Am I the most hated man in liberal America?
I’ve had hexes put on me by a university professor, had online vigilantes send packages of dogshit to my childhood…
A Court of Thorns and Roses gives reading a bad name
There’s a general consensus that reading is a good thing, and reading from actual physical books an even better thing.…
Poland’s constitutional squabble is the end result of ‘lawfare’
Karol Nawrocki was en route to Senegal when he instructed his flight crew to return to Poland. When he got…
Are the dirty tricks of Russia’s FSB getting even dirtier?
If your toilet is full of excrement that you don’t remember depositing there yourself, you may be the victim of…
Don’t expect calm after the US midterms
US technology shares were sliding again yesterday. The drop, as the Financial Times puts it, marks ‘a continuation of a…
A ‘woke’ TV news channel will never work
Quizzed by MPs last week on Ofcom’s alleged failure to rein in bias at the broadcaster GB News, the quango’s chairman Sir Ian…
Scottish nationalists may finally have an answer to their currency conundrum
It seems like a lifetime ago now. A few weeks before Scotland’s seismic 2014 vote on whether to exit or…
What are we really celebrating at Halloween?
Three years into my medical career, I worked with a doctor called Darren. Darren was excellent. Calm, sensible, highly intelligent…
New Zealand election musings
By the time you read this, the New Zealand election will be about a week away. Now I’d like to…
Why you shouldn’t shrug at New Zealand’s greyhound racing ban
Greyhound racing ended in New Zealand on August 1. Those who neither own a greyhound nor care for the sport…
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…
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…
Revolting France: The riots are driving the country’s politics to its extremes
An urge to take over the play
It’s astonishing what awaits the culture vulture. A lot of people know the riches on offer when they see the…
The beauty of the ruthless truth
There are times when the screen, big or small, looks like a gift of the gods. In the last week…
Conflicting colours and tones of tragedy
Any fan of Gerald Murnane would love to see him win the Nobel Prize for Literature. And if it’s never…
That sinister sense of comic patter
Harold Pinter is one of the great dramatists of the last hundred years, perhaps the only one who can hold…
In praise of Piedmontese wines
Authors hate it when reviewers refer to their book as a ‘weighty tome’ as it implies that the contents are…
One for the Prefab Sprout diehards
‘One for the heads’ is the phrase that traditionally covers the more outré elements of a band’s career: the outtakes,…
Singsong vapidity: The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse, by Heather Morris, reviewed
The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse is from Heather Morris, whose 2012 novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz began the vogue for…
How can we fool ourselves that chatbots feel anything for us?
Imagine that a good friend of yours has fallen for a psychopath, a man or woman who seems superficially charming…
Why a frothy Jane Austen adaptation is always imminent
There has never been a good screen adaptation of a Jane Austen novel. There have been plenty of films with…
The felled tree that devastated Britain
It was just a tree, a beautiful tree, in a strikingly beautiful place. Yet when the two friends Daniel Graham…
Return of the war-weary: Gjak, by Dimosthenis Papamarkos, reviewed
The Second Greco-Turkish War (1919-22) ended catastrophically for Greece and led to a massive population exchange: аt least 1.2 million…
‘An inspiration to all under his command’: the cheerful courage of Brian Franks
They say there are old soldiers and bold soldiers but very few old, bold soldiers. Well, Tim Spicer is pretty…