The Josh Frydenberg media tour
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…
Wake up, Bowen. Nap time is over!
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen doesn’t seem to be enjoying is multi-million-dollar pre-COP soirée. Aside from criticism that…
Chalmers’ Budget five months on
The Chalmers Budget is regularly described in the media and by political commentators as having produced ‘unintended consequences’. These ‘unintended’…
Push back against your piano robot
Robots at the piano have recently debuted with the World Robot Conference in Beijing, specialised cultural-tech expos like the Gulangyu…
The Josh Frydenberg media tour
Am I alone among conservatives in thinking that the media hoopla surrounding Josh Frydenberg has become just a tad excessive?…
Climate attribution the ultimate abuse of science
The High Court decision against Mach Energy’s Mt Pleasant coal mine, on the basis of its supposed climate impact, is…
Forget ‘killer robots’: the bigger AI threat is to the meaning of life
It’s finally happened. The Terminator is here. Well, sort of. Last month in San Francisco, a YouTuber stepped into a…
The only product the public had to prove unsafe
In every other corner of the law, the person who sells a product carries the burden of showing it is…
Australia was never a nation of embarrassed millionaires
One of the most famous things John Steinbeck never quite said is that socialism failed in America because the poor…
Can Australia reverse the policies hurtling us toward genteel poverty?
One Nation’s Leader in New South Wales, Mike Newman, has challenged Labor to reveal the full cost of its Net…
Introducing the new Queensland Premier … me!
In 1976 I had the growing desire to start my own company, to walk into a room where everyone paid…
Can Pauline Hanson save us from the United Nations?
The High Court’s ruling on a major coal mine expansion in NSW, on the basis of Scope 3 emissions, is…
When imitation becomes enough
What is beauty and what is objective truth? Modern society has neglected to ask this fundamental question, trading beauty and…
Is the Digital Duty of Care a censorship regime?
The Labor government has proposed a Digital Duty of Care, spruiking it as a way to keep children safe and…
Critical Theory in academia: neither critical nor theory
In the hallways of modern universities, certain ideas have achieved near-hegemonic status. Among them, Critical Theory stands as perhaps the…
It’s time to take the UK out of Aukus
Back in January, Spartacus argued that Australia should work with the US to drop the UK from Aukus and bring…
Angus Taylor: CPAC speech
As published on Liberal.org.au Good morning CPAC. It’s great to be with you. When the Liberal Party was last in…
Labor’s credit card surcharge fiasco hits mums and dads
The surcharge ban was sold as ‘money back every time you tap’. A month in, it has been reported that…
THE GREEN GROCERS OF THE APOCALYPSE – communism is back in fashion | S3 Ep 23
In this episode: The ‘Green’ Grocers of the apocalypse bringing communism via your weekly shop. Victoria collapsing underfoot – but…
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…
Conservative leadership
Sorry, Josh, you had your go. And you blew it. Politics is both a brutal and an unforgiving game. As…
If socialists understood economics they wouldn’t be socialists
Nobel Prize-winning economist, Friederich Hayek, argued the price system and market competition are the only effective ways to organise a…
Business/Robbery, etc
Back in the bad old days of a New South Wales state government that was ‘blessed’ with environmental warrior (and…
Pre-Cop flop
I have learnt from bitter experience to avoid the danger of the Hawaiian shirt. You know the sort of thing:…
From each according to the Greens
One of the many adverse consequences of the relentless growth of government in Australia is the ever-diminishing pool of people…
The wretched men of safety and the demise of the West
In 401 BC, the Greek general Xenophon addressed his men amid the peril of the Ten Thousand’s retreat: ‘In soldiering,…
Epicentre of jihad
Much of the world’s attention remains fixed on the Middle East as the traditional heartland of violent Islamist extremism, or…
Josh goes Jobseeking
Loyal Liberals winced at the weekend when Pauline Hanson branded Angus Taylor ‘a smarmy management consultant’, but they shouldn’t. The…
Uber and out
My Uber driver last week was an electrical engineer. He drives part-time, between contracts. He was good company, knew his…
Trillion-dollar suicide note
Not one of the many theories concerning the impact of man-made carbon dioxide emissions on the climate has been proven.…
Third anniversary, October 7
The release of the Coalition’s immigration policy coincided with the third anniversary this week of the horrific 7 October massacre,…
Albo’s out of control spending
Almost fifty years ago, in his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan said, ‘We don’t have inflation because the…
The responses to the tiger attack have been gross and misanthropic
As I was writing the latest chapter of my book, The Children Of Wolves, while sitting in my family’s home outside…
Greta Thunberg is a protest addict
Greta Thunberg is in Paris. Yes, as if the French haven’t got enough on their assiettes with ‘youths’ and ‘students’…
The BBC is not censoring Strictly Come Dancing
I have never watched Strictly Come Dancing. The thought of celebrities I’ve never heard of taking part in jolly japes…
How regenerative farming could save rural Britain
Environmentalists once worried that Prince William was interested only in ‘posh nature’ – rhinos, elephants and pangolins being arguably more…
The true cost of Trump’s diesel deal with Putin
Donald Trump’s telephone call with Vladimir Putin last Friday was supposed to be about a suspected outbreak of plague in…
Zia Yusuf’s plan to tackle the small boats crisis doesn’t hold water
Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s Home Affairs spokesman, is making quite a name for himself as someone who provokes rage across…
Why Tom Cruise’s Digger flopped at the box office
Has climate hysteria finally run its course? I ask because the latest Hollywood blockbuster on the subject seems to have…
The SNP minister who wants her own Artist In Residence
Shetland MSP Hannah Mary Goodlad has been in the spotlight since her election this May. As the first SNP representative…
A very Lib Dem coup
Desperate Sir Ed Davey will plead with his party not to launch a coup against him at a showdown meeting…
Trump’s unconvincing imitators
The recent US adventures in Venezuela and Iran have not, on the American side, wrought the same losses of life and…
The prisoner early release scheme is making life impossible for police
On 1 October, Michael Bogle was released from prison, one of 700 prisoners set free that day under Andy Burnham’s…
What Russia – and Putin – really thinks about Brexit
The revival of the “Putindunnit” Brexit narrative demonstrates how politicians continue to misunderstand and misrepresent the scale, impact but above…
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…
The anti-Semitic alliance between Restore and the Greens
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…
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…
Priceless
The Bee Gees were a popular trio of singers in the 1960s and 1970s, so named because their lives were…
A literary romp: Our Noble Selves, by Kate Atkinson, reviewed
It is hard to imagine a setting better suited to bureaucratic absurdity than the lead-up to the 1951 Festival of…
All the big hitters are here: scenes from the golden age of boxing
In 1891, in Thomas Edison’s makeshift film studio – a shack in West Orange, New Jersey – two men put…
Winning hearts and minds: propaganda of the Spanish Civil War
History, as the aphorism frequently attributed to Winston Churchill would have it, is written by the victors. This certainly holds…
A bullying monster: the infamous Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s early mentor
For several decades, Roy Cohn (1927-86) was the man you needed to know if you wanted to get to know…
Famous for being famous – the scandalous life of the Countess of Castiglione
‘The whore of the Risorgimento’ or ‘the divine Countess’ – Virginia Oldoini Verasis di Castiglione was among the most extravagantly…
Adventures of the Time Traveler’s daughter: Life Out of Order, by Audrey Niffenegger, reviewed
There is only one problem with this beautiful, elegiac novel, a glorious hodgepodge mash-up of time travelling and apocalyptic eco-fiction:…
They don’t make men like Erroll Prior-Palmer any more
Erroll Prior-Palmer had one decision to make on D-Day. It wasn’t as momentous as Eisenhower’s to launch the invasion, having…