Flight 1073 and what we can learn from modern-day Spartans
The price of coffee could lose Albo the election
The price of coffee is set to become an election-defining issue after the Prime Minister was ridiculed and community-noted across…
Defiling Asimov’s Laws
Laymen concerned by the encroachment of AI assume CEOs and world governments are designing the digital age loosely around the…
Silence of the Lambie
Remember when Jacqui Lambie fantasised about throwing Elon Musk in jail? I had forgotten until Damian Coory pointed it out…
Kevin Rudd might be … right(?!)
Carrying on the great political tradition of ‘never buggering off’, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is back – sort of…
Flight 1073 and what we can learn from modern-day Spartans
While we celebrate the heroism that saved many lives on board Flydubai flight 1073, we should take the opportunity to…
Multiculturalism and the great Australian levelling
With One Nation now polling at or above Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition a distant third, Australia appears to be…
Iran needs another Cyrus the Great
At a time when Iran’s name has once again become a focus of international attention, the recent remarks by Benjamin…
Bill 691 and the French crisis of trust
France is once again on the streets. Across the country, students are protesting over overcrowded classrooms and deteriorating educational conditions.…
Albo was the only person who thought coffee would get cheaper
In a classic case of not having a clue, Anthony Albanese has made himself out to be the goose we…
Never stop campaigning
Donald Trump is a perpetual campaigner, whether in or out of office. We only have to look to the recent…
Who should we blame for high inflation?
It would make my life easier if Australia’s inflation problem had a simple cause done by a single villain. Alas,…
Listen to the Alborithm
One of the defining features of our age is the tendency for ostensibly democratic governments to introduce legislation that curtails…
Can beleaguered Victoria rise from Labor’s ashes?
With the ‘attention-sapping’ AFL football season over, many critical questions are starting to weigh on the minds of Victorian voters.…
Pauline Hanson: The problem woman (for the left)
This week, David Shoebridge defeated Mehreen Faruqi and Sarah Hanson-Young to become the new leader of the radical Greens party.…
You are NOT watching Rowan Dean
Notification 1A: Digital Duty of Care and Net Zero Misinformation You’re not watching Rowan Dean on TV, on social media,…
AI’s show-me-the-money moment is approaching
For years, tech bros, politicians, and Wall Street have been spruiking artificial intelligence as the holy grail of productivity growth.…
Marx and Engels made a deal, Mephistopheles giggled
If Marx were rolled out of Highgate cemetery and landed in Marrickville today, the surprise wouldn’t be that he had…
Penny Wong’s Iran excuse expired in 2019
Penny Wong has said a regime that must murder its own people to keep power has no legitimacy. Yet when…
Free speech: America is warning, Labor isn’t listening
You would think that going against the United States – the most powerful country, with President Trump acting as the…
The tunnels NAZA refuses to enter
The Venice Film Festival has bestowed its Special Jury Prize upon NAZA, an 80-minute documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel…
ALBO, THE COFFEE WHISPERER – Labor might be the worst economic managers of all time | S3 Ep 22
In this episode… Albo’s ‘not-so-cheap’ coffee. ☕️ Is Jim Chalmers a good Treasurer? Is the 5% house deposit scheme causing…
GLOBALIST IN CHIEF – Albanese accepts his award & Trump cancels ‘Fake News’ Media | S3 Ep 21
This week… Javier Milei ‘rips the United Nations to shreds’. Albanese’s good little globalist award. Digital Duty of Censorship… I…
SILENCE OF THE ROYALS – Spencer’s memoir and the death of the last Royal carriage maker | S3 Ep 20
This week with Professor David Flint. Does the ghost of Princess Diana still pose a threat to King Charles’ legacy?…
Return of the King
King Coal is back! This week the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission gave permission for two coalminers in the…
Brown study
I don’t know if Anthony Albanese actually learned anything from his recent sojourn at the United Nations, but I doubt…
You will live in a dog box and be happy!
I think someone needs to tell the hapless Housing Minister, Clare O’Neil, that the government’s housing target of an additional…
Time to fix our universities
This week I’m going to really depress readers, and especially those over the age of about thirty-five. You see, when…
Teal deal is dead
Remember what the teals were going to do? In 2022, they were going to change Australian politics. The Morrison government…
Australia – the failing state
Australians are getting poorer, and they know it. Real wages are going backwards as prices outpace pay packets. Productivity, the…
Trump’s honest bribe
Donald Trump has written the finest political satire of the decade. He did it in one sentence in Dallas this…
Shaggy God story
Every seven years or so there is a breathtaking announcement by an American fundamentalist Protestant group claiming they have found…
Albo’s left hook
Larissa Waters’ sudden resignation prompted a closer look at the political menagerie otherwise known as the Greens as they went…
How the far left plans to take over AI
Where else would our far-left Prime Minister Anthony Albanese go, other than the United Nations, to sound the alarm and…
Not OKKK
‘Is it heartening for you to see someone like anti-immigration Pauline doing well in Australia?’ asked the Channel Nine journalist.…
Bad laws outlive their victims
England once taxed daylight. It did so for 155 years. That is the number to keep in mind as we…
Get ready to flee socialist America
Peter Thiel, as is his wont, caused a stir last week when he expressed doubts that a Republican could win…
The delights of not running a newspaper
Writing this diary and the amiable correspondence I have had recently with my old friend Mathias Döpfner as he assumes…
Ed Davey is living on borrowed time as Lib Dem leader
per leader donning a wetsuit and making his way through a bog, but a political mess that he does not…
Britain is playing catch-up in the fight against antisemitism
This coming week brings another round of anti-Israel protests to our campuses and to our city centres, cynically timed to…
There is no place for Chinese espionage in British universities
As another academic year begins, the hallowed walls of universities are filled with anticipation, whether for the bright-eyed fresher or…
Russian history has become Chinese kitsch
I had to go back and snatch a photo, just to confirm the evidence of my own eyes – to…
The Tory party has a big opportunity to speak up for the Church of England
There is a big opportunity for one of the parties to show that it understands and values Britain’s Christian tradition.…
The truth about Gazan ‘journalists’
For two years we were told that Israel was waging a war on journalists. The statistics were recited at the…
Is Badenoch cutting through?
We are on the home stretch of the party conference season. It’s the turn of the Greens this weekend and…
Proportional voting will usher in a sectarian Britain
Andy Burnham’s pledge to change our voting system – and his vow at last year’s Labour conference that ‘Proportional Representation’s…
Fines don’t stop parents taking their kids on term-time holidays
The assumption is an obvious one: if you fine people for bad behaviour, they should stop. But human psychology is…
The Cornell Seven and the problem with consent
It’s October and a new academic year is underway. In Britain, students are taking diversity classes; in France, they are…
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…
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…
Andy Burnham begins the long march left
From another world
It’s striking what we can experience if we look back at the images of the recent past, aided by YouTube.…
An elegance that is hair-raising
Sometimes cultural news is just bad news. Everyone was delighted at the thought that Joanna Murray-Smith’s Switzerland was being turned…
A gorgeous evocation of the natural world
The world of artistic expression runs in a thousand ways. The Melbourne Symphony’s Spring Gala – paralleling the Opera’s Wagner…
A man of great suavity
They were both films that stay in the mind from a lifetime ago. Peter Pan is J.M. Barrie’s contribution to…
Did the Bayeux Tapestry succeed as a tool of Norman propaganda?
It makes for a good pub quiz question: what has 632 people, 202 horses, 55 dogs, 41 ships and only…
A passion for music: Partita, by Barbara Kingsolver, reviewed
Barbara Kingsolver’s bestselling novels tackle political and social issues and win prizes, among them the Pulitzer and Women’s Prize for…
The triumph of virtue over fear and malice: The Bridge, by Colm Tóibín, reviewed
A small, beautiful book about betrayal, the cost of isolation and the persistence of human decency, Colm Tóibín’s The Bridge…
Abstract ideas made concrete
The Iron Curtain, or at least its most visible symbol, was not metal. Berlin’s Antifaschistischer Schutzwall (Anti-Fascist Protection Wall) was…
‘I shall always want to say thank you to this country’: the gratitude of a former kindertransport refugee
For all that it is an anachronism, the House of Lords contains some remarkable specimens, not least Alf Dubs. The…
Terrorism nearly always fails – so where does that leave the ‘freedom fighter’?
This book begins with rueful comments on the absence of philosophy from terrorism literature. The phenomenon is frequently analysed through…
Battling the elements – Claude Monet’s litany of anguish
For a painter we acknowledge as a master of atmospheric effects and ever-changing light, whose early work ‘Impression, Sunrise’ sparked…
Warnings, omens and the end of days: the surreal times of the Emperor Charlemagne
I don’t know if it is still the case, but there was a time in London when the ring of…