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…
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…
Stop making martyrs
Cancelling people does not defeat their ideas. If anything, it amplifies their message and makes martyrs of the people spreading…
Wealth for toil, guilt for success
There is a world of difference between treating everybody equally and making everybody equal. The first limits the power of…
They’re not Menzies’ forgotten people, they’re One Nation’s fed-up people
Watching re-runs of Landline the other night, I saw a business backed by Gina Rinehart get to air without the…
Care-share or build-spend?
If you are 20, you will turn 65 in 2071. You have just started paying tax, or soon will. A…
Australia’s soft launch of authoritarianism
‘The freedom of speech may be taken away – and, dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to…
Inside the ‘Elysian’ world of the ABC
Over at Ultimo – the ABC’s ‘global’ headquarters – excitement is reaching fever pitch. The cause of the hullabaloo is…
Dressed to kill
Amorality of fashion has reached its height in the recent Met meltdown around John Galliano’s antisemitic antics and cancelled show.…
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?…
PLEASE EXPLAIN! Why politicians are getting salty over satirical cartoons… | S3 Ep 19
This week… Jacqui Lambie’s rant over One Nation’s Andrew Hastie ‘traitor’ cartoon. Who dragged Albanese’s mother into the political conversation…
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…
Flydubai and the heroism of ordinary Jews
Today it seems we witnessed both the toxic power of Jew hate and the searing heroism of ordinary Jews. On…
Why the Right will struggle to beat Andy Burnham – for now
Should you be in the market for scorn towards Andy Burnham’s conference speech, there is plenty of it out there,…
Burnham has no idea what kind of EU relationship he wants
Labour conference is done and dusted, and Andy Burnham will be a happy man. His speech yesterday went down well…
Trump relives high school with the tech nerds
Yesterday President Trump and a gaggle of tech barons appeared before the press pack on the White House lawn, fresh…
The heroes who saved the flydubai flight from disaster
This morning a flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv appears to have been hijacked by its own co-pilot. It…
Inside the Green party’s Orwellian language guide
The Green party has produced an Orwellian glossary of ‘unacceptable’ language ahead of its conference this weekend. Its new ‘Inclusive…
Ceuta is a tinderbox
It’s now nearly nine weeks since tens of thousands of migrants poured across the Moroccan frontier into Ceuta. Most quickly…
Bernie Moreno’s plan to remake South America
“The American Dream is the dream of the Americas,” declared Bernie Moreno to the assembled at Trump Doral – a…
Burnham will regret dredging up the Brexit debate
Andy Burnham tells us that he left the House of Commons in 2017 because he was disillusioned with the place.…
Why does the EU want its own NATO treaty?
An armed drone conveniently located near a Ukrainian cargo aircraft at Leipzig airport in Germany. Russian drones breaching the airspace of Romania…
Burnham’s EU rejoining U-turn
The Makerfield test was meant to be at the heart of Andy Burnham’s government. When Burnham was elected as an…
The National Trust should stick to the day job, not lecture us on climate change
The National Trust – once an admirable institution dedicated to saving historic buildings and landscapes – appears to have let…
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 autistocracy: the men on the spectrum who rule our world
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…