The IBAC sensation: 'ICAC, hold my beer'
Academic groupthink: is Nick Coatsworth the new Peter Ridd?
Never has it been so important for Australian universities to be places of free intellectual inquiry than it is right now. But…
Dave Chappelle braves the TERF wars
Dave Chappelle has us arguing again over his last Netflix special “The Closer”. Chappelle has controversially declared himself “team TERF.”…
Why cry over Covid yet back state-sanctioned killing?
The newly appointed New South Wales Premier, Dominic Perrottet is being criticised for expediting the process of bringing his out of its…
Come fly the gender neutral skies
The gender-neutral brigade are getting a bit much. Last week I wrote an article for SpecOz about how women are…
The IBAC sensation: ‘ICAC, hold my beer’
State corruption and integrity commissions are well and truly du jour at the moment. Less than a fortnight ago, ICAC felled its…
Look over there! Look over there!
If it wasn’t so serious you’d fall off your chair laughing. A major sleaze scandal is threatening the Andrews Government…
Freedom Day? You have a barcode on your forehead
You wouldn’t let a premier tattoo a barcode on your forehead, so why do we submit to QR check-ins? “Those…
It’s not Freedom Day until we’re all free
Welcome to Freedom Day! Oh, hang on, this isn’t Freedom Day. If it were, everyone would be free with no…
The president’s health is a national interest
Delaware used to be Cale Boggs country, almost as much as Massachusetts belonged to the Kennedys. Boggs served as governor,…
As COP26 looms, Glasgow is facing a waste crisis
In early November, Glasgow will be the focus of the world’s attention for COP26, the UN’s Climate Change Conference. For…
Evergrande illusions
At the height of the 2008 financial crisis I was invited to an off-the-record media lunch with a famous investor.…
The mystery of Vladimir Putin’s mistresses
There’s an odd thing about 18-year old Luiza Rozova’s instagram feed. You can see photos of her breakfasts (sliced exotic…
Kiwi Life
A crisis by design It is increasingly sad, so many New Zealanders saying they would leave – if they could…
Kiwi Language
A tech company claims that anti-vax and anti-lockdown rallies have been ‘astroturfed’. Which means? Well, ‘AstroTurf’ was the world’s first…
No, New Zealand is not Aotearoa
“Create your own pepeha to celebrate te wiki o te reo movement.” Given that estimates range between about 4% and…
Does AUKUS show there’s still life in the Morrison government?
Yesterday’s surprise announcement of AUKUS – the new Australia-United Kingdom-United States security partnership – is huge news. Not only is…
Xi goes ballistic
The AUKUS pact turns a half-century of foreign policy on its head. Fifty years of ‘multilateralist’ fantasies about Australia’s role…
Little to be proud of
There is no doubt that Prime Minister Scott Morrison takes a great deal of pleasure in talking about freedom. A…
The empty moral posturing of attacks on vaccine hesitants
Our so-called leaders are so blinded with the lockdown cult that they would stubbornly refuse to see reality even if…
Blah blah blah meets la-la
Having wasted seven minutes of my life watching Saint Greta address the Youth4Climate – yes, I know what you are…
Handing Beijing the keys
Professor Tim Flannery, who achieved notoriety for his apocalyptic, spectacularly wrong global warming predictions, boasts of bailing up former News…
ScoMo’s to blame, nobody else
Let’s face it. These heavy-handed, despotic lockdowns hit the young much more than the old; they hit the poor without…
To vax or not to vax?
Mandatory vaccination has become a vexed, or a vaxxed, issue wherever it has been enforced. To vax or not to…
Aux bien pensants
Premier, why didn’t you listen? After ICAC’s attempt to destroy that model of integrity, Crown Prosecutor, Margaret Cuneen was scuttled…
Clive Owen
A time of plague makes us brood on the culture we share in the absence of personal preference. One person…
Heath Ledger
It’s weird to hear news of artistic life in the midst of Covid. The Sydney Theatre Company has a new…
Nic Denton and Frances O’Connor
As the northern hemisphere, that ambiguous spectral homeland we’re conscious of, starts to open up, it’s easy to be envious…
Diane Lane
It was doubly sad the other night to see Virginia Gay deliver a speech from her Covid-cancelled Cyrano on the…
Disappointed in the Libs?
How might the centre-right do better? This is the question that the promising young writer Jake Thrupp has posed; and…
Fiction’s most famous Rifleman returns — and it’s miraculous he’s still alive
It has been 15 years since the last Richard Sharpe novel, and it’s a pleasure to report that fiction’s most…
Beavers, not concrete barriers, can save Britain from floods
As the start date of COP26 draws closer, and just when we are assailed by daily proof of climate chaos,…
As feminists fall out, it’s not just the patriarchy that’s under fire
UK grassroots feminism is flourishing at the moment, with the journalist Julie Bindel leading from the front as troublemaker-in-chief. In…
The delicate business of monitoring the monarchy
This very readable account of relations between the British intelligence services and the Crown does more than it says on…
Spitfires of the sea: the secret exploits of the Royal Navy’s 15th Motor Gun Boat Flotilla
Fast boats and fast women have been the ruin of many a poor boy. But they can also prove a…
Pink for boys, blue for girls and a worldwide mania for mauve
It would seem, if recent publications are anything to go by, that we have an insatiable appetite for this subject.…
Only time will tell if there’ll be a Great Pandemic Novel
We had been dreading it like (forgive me) the plague: the inevitable onslaught of corona-lit. Fortunately, the first few titles…
