Jimbo’s road to Venezuela
Undemocratic? Why shouldn’t Pauline Hanson shun the ABC…
Somewhere off camera, in the back of Pauline Hanson’s Victorian press conference, a sad little voice belonging to an MSM…
AI is the new Climate Change
As a writer, I need to stop tripping into curiosity black holes while doomscrolling podcasts. Seeing as I’m already face-down…
Tim Wilson: from oblivion to resurrection – wait, what?!
Tim Wilson has always been a sort-of ‘third man’ to the Angus Taylor and Andrew Hastie’s leadership tussle. As the…
The right will rise from Ceuta
Spain’s far-left socialist Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has been preaching to a radicalised electorate about the joys of mass migration…
Where did the resourceful Aussie spirit go?
At our family house, inner-city Perth, in the old garage – it has a smell you would know. Cut timber.…
Chris Bowen is trying to lock Australia into a Net Zero future
On Wednesday, Energy Minister Chris Bowen used a National Press Club address to announce another subsidy scheme for renewable energy.…
The alibi of skill
Spain’s border failed in front of the cameras last week. Australia’s border never fails, which is exactly why our numbers…
Cheaper electricity?
I rode my motorbike to the National Press Club today to hear what Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen…
The hidden risks of low-deposit housing under Labor
The Albanese government’s housing policies have been sold as the great Australian dream made accessible. Five per cent deposit schemes,…
AI psychosis
We all know that the Silicon Valley tech bros are a little detached from reality, but the advent of AI…
The spirit of Cain
Last month the ABC broadcast a young woman inviting the nation to imagine what it would do to Gina Rinehart…
For art’s sake
Between 1801 and 1812, more than 100 tonnes of Pentelic marble were hacked away from the walls of the Parthenon…
There can be no sovereign capability with Net Zero
The Albanese government’s fervour for renewable energy and red tape expansion looms large over the otherwise welcome decision to explore…
Internationalism: where no one is privileged, even in their homeland
Carl von Clausewitz said that war was politics by other means, one method of advancing your interests among many. In…
The education beneath the education
Every civilisation teaches its children what to love, what to fear, what to obey, and what to regard as sacred.…
Vale Rod Liddle
On the sudden and very sad passing of Rod Liddle, who died aged 66 following a short illness: Rod Liddle…
The refusal of rescue
A love for the island A young girl crests a sandstone ridge above a homestead in Tasmania’s bush and finds…
Immigration and national identity
Last week I trekked down to Melbourne to speak at a policy dialogue put together by the Robert Menzies Institute…
Two views on the death of the West
Patrick J. Buchanan is an American author, political commentator, and former senior political advisor. He served in the administrations of…
Single point of obsolescence
Andy Burnham had been Prime Minister for roughly ten days when he discovered one town in England that Whitehall could…
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…
Premier Pete from central casting
Come on girls and boys, admit it – he’s a good looker. Tall, athletic, softly spoken; I’m talking about the…
My prediction? 18C will bite the dust
After more than thirty years of argument about the merits and validity of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act,…
In Canberra, consent not required
Among the most powerful ideas in the history of politics is that governments derive their powers from the consent of…
Is there a field the Libs didn’t abandon?
I attended a really excellent talk last week on the virtues of Western culture. In the audience there were a…
ICAC – an unnecessary disaster
To err is human, but to persist in error – actively undermining the constitutional order – is the hallmark of…
Luck of the Irish
I don’t know about you, but every time I look at my phone there’s another story about ‘passport power’. Usually…
How to succeed as a Covid expert
On 29 July, Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment one hundred and eleven times in three hours before a Senate…
Nobody paid for this article
How can Australians trust the energy debate when the government is helping to pay the journalists reporting on its own…
Fact check: the many claims of Jason Arday
Jason Arday has resigned from his post at the University of Cambridge, but as the story rumbles on and new…
How nukes made the world safer
Three hours after daybreak, a blinding flash ripped through the morning sky. August 6, 1945, began as a tranquil and…
Jason Arday quits Cambridge (finally)
So. Farewell then Jason Arday. The 37-year-old lackademic has tonight resigned his post at Cambridge University – the latest chapter…
A grim turning point has been reached in Russia’s war on Ukraine
An important turning point has been reached in Russia’s war on Ukraine. But unfortunately for Kyiv, it’s not the “tide…
Pedro Sánchez is stubbornly clinging on to power
With Spain still reeling from the extraordinary scenes in Ceuta, the country’s Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has decamped to…
Welcome to Tivat, the ‘Monaco of the Balkans’
“Quiet luxury” is all the rage these days, the social media algorithms tell me. On Instagram and TikTok, Americans inform their…
The NHS is not in a crisis of racism
The Society of Radiographers have said racism is rising in the NHS. They give the example of a patient refusing…
What happened to the Democrats?
Whatever happened to the Democrats? Party of FDR, Kennedy and Clinton. Idealistic, moderate, gave a vague impression of actually liking…
How common is academic plagiarism in Britain?
The story of Cambridge professor Jason Arday’s academic scandal seems to have no end. First there were allegations of plagiarism,…
Treasury fires warning shot at wealthy
We are two weeks into Burnhamania and the Prime Minister has already, er, earned himself a break. Somewhere abroad, our…
Andy Burnham must get used to being unpopular
Andy Burnham is apparently enjoying his first taste of unpopularity as prime minister, in the form of the furore over…
Has Abdul El-Sayed just saved Trump?
Just a few hours before Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan last night, he told me…
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…
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…
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a triumph
An exercise in murder
A friend said recently that the only two people he knew who had read Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers…
A gurgle of merriment
Chekhov is tricky. He’s not someone we think of as uproarious but the playwright himself used sometimes to complain that…
High Antipodean
The death of that fabled cricketer Sir Garfield Sobers – one of the greatest all-rounders who ever lived – is…
A Treasury on YouTube
It’s strange how much we take for granted the world we inherit, which is available to us on YouTube for…
Forty years on, the furore over Paul Simon’s Graceland seems almost quaint
‘The story of Graceland’s origins,’ writes Ashley Kahn in his deep dive into Paul Simon’s multi-million-selling album, ‘is the story…
Finding happiness in simple tactile pleasures
When I confess that this is the first self-help book I’ve read, I’m also confessing to a minor but pointed…
A house of secrets: Where Are the Kings, by Donal Ryan, reviewed
A typical adolescent, Jack Fristensky is consumed by uncertainty about who he is, his place in the world and, of…
Why we must forgive Immanuel Kant his misogyny and racism
If the only story you’ve heard about Immanuel Kant’s life is that it was so regular that the citizens of…
An exhilarating chase: The Runner, by Scarlett Thomas, reviewed
Billed as a literary thriller from one of the masters of the genre, Scarlett Thomas’s The Runner is a far…
What will the successful cities of the future look like?
Can architecture solve urban crises? Or should architects and planners concentrate on mitigating the consequences of wider events (climate change,…
The monumental failure that was Henry VIII
There can be virtually no aspect of Henry VIII’s life and reign, as Steven Veerapen puts it, that has not…
Looking for Katrin: Rory MacLean goes in search of his dead wife
One September, Rory MacLean’s wife, Katrin, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Seven months later she was dead. The couple had…