Australian education has become very good at everything except education
Does Victoria have the guts to go blue?
And so it is that another unpopular leader has lost the confidence of their party, was summarily rolled by a…
Taking out the trash
Thank god, that’s over! The risky (and some may argue, unnecessary) spectacle of Reform Leader Nigel Farage competing against a…
AI gives us 16 new viruses
‘For several years now, scientists have been able to synthesise viruses from scratch,’ stated an article in Wired. ‘These are typically…
Pauline Hanson vs anti-capitalist students
There has been nation-wide scorn and fits of eye-rolling over a planned student ‘protest’ against Pauline Hanson. To quote our…
Born alive means a patient deserving equal care
There are few subjects in Australian public life more polarising than abortion. When Llew O’Brien, Federal Member for Wide Bay,…
Iran’s quagmire, and why it is locked
Many see the current situation in the Iran war as merely a failure of clear strategy on the part of…
Labor’s distraction
Now, as the Albanese federal government and the Minns NSW government launch Australia’s largest gun buyback in decades, we are…
Australian education has become very good at everything except education
Australian education has achieved something rather impressive. After two decades of curriculum reform, pedagogical innovation, wellbeing initiatives, inclusion strategies, digital…
Textbooks will be written about how Australia turned into Argentina
Aluminium’s nickname in the ‘trade’ is congealed electricity. This is in large part because its production (bauxite is refined into…
Who are the real ‘free press’?
One Nation were extremely proud to launch their Victorian candidates in front of the Rebel News cameras. Rebel News, many…
Another week, another renewable energy subsidy
Another week, another subsidy for renewable energy and greenhouse gas abatement. Recently, Climate Change and Energy Minister Bowen added an…
Students waste their time and energy protesting Pauline
Last Thursday afternoon, thousands of Australian students walked out of classrooms in eight cities to protest Pauline Hanson. High schoolers,…
The Pauline protests: a day out during Mao’s cultural revolution
A few days ago, I caught the ferry into town in Sydney. It was a beautiful day, the water sparkling…
Ben Carroll’s Union power play
Just months out from the Victorian state election, Labor Premier Ben Carroll has sensationally moved to shut down unions which…
Identity politics is modern communism
Before the pandemic, Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement turned identity politics from a niche American slogan into a…
Latest polling reveals path to victory for conservatives
Pauline Hanson is improving her position and making it less likely that this manifestation of One Nation will splutter out.…
Government to hand more power to eSafety Commissioner
It’s eight months since the under-16 social media ban began, and a single fact is staring the government in the…
Make Australian genealogy affordable
In 2038, Australia will celebrate 250 years since the arrival of the First Fleet. That will be a big deal.…
New Victorian Premier Carroll backs away from unworkable WFH laws
The Allan-led Victorian Labor government introduced its ‘world first’ work from home legislation back in March before the wheels completely…
Melon jokes cannot fix Labor’s man problem
Japanese melons and Kylie-shagging. What has Australia come to when a Prime Minister carries on so? This is a rhetorical…
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…
Can Ben, the Kmart kid, avert the crash?
Around the corner from where we live in suburban Melbourne, there is a sign that reads ‘Fault Identified’. It is…
It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world
Let me pick out just two examples of ours being a mad, mad, mad, mad world – one here in…
The fiftieth time
In April last year a journalist asked the Prime Minister a plain question. Would he rule out any change to…
The Greta Thunberg of Cambridge
The University of Bergen in Norway a few years ago produced a short but witty video for students on the…
ABC cancels suicide note
Edmund Burke notably recalled in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, that it was 16 or 17 years since…
Business/Robbery, etc
Last Tuesday’s Census will confirm just how disastrous the impact of fundamental changes in Australia’s housing have been on the…
Spain ignites a Third World invasion
The apocalyptic images of 70,000 illegal immigrants storming into Ceuta, one of Spain’s two territories in North Africa – accompanied,…
Clancy of the Overlooked
Can mRNA vaccines weaken your immune system, making you vulnerable to certain forms of cancer? An AI-assisted search of the…
Why people cared about Jason Arday
Don’t badmouth the dead, said Chilon of Sparta. Over time, the phrase became a positive injunction to say nothing of…
Jason Arday wasn’t the victim of a ‘racist witch hunt’
For decades, voices on the liberal and progressive left have invariably rolled out the terror-inducing accusation of ‘racism’ in order…
Send the emergency alert to Whitehall
In Great Missenden we were affixing the last details to our Friday Effigy when the alert came. It’s a new…
Britain’s universities have an English language problem
Lectures at Britain’s best universities now come with subtitles. Look around the room and you’ll see rows of students who…
How Russia and China are helping North Korea dodge sanctions
If you were Kim Jong-un, you’d be pretty happy right now. North Korea’s third supreme leader is not only the…
Who was the real Anthony Bourdain?
When did Anthony Bourdain decide on his future career? If you take him at his word in his memoir, Kitchen Confidential,…
Jason Arday’s death is dreadful – and enraging
Behold the human wreckage of the cult of diversity. The tragedy of Jason Arday is that he was both built…
Will Andy Burnham send the Parthenon Marbles to Greece?
In 2023, the Mayor of Greater Manchester posted a comment on Twitter about the Parthenon Marbles held at the British…
What a dead bird taught me about the English class system
The most intimidating moment of my three-and-a-half years as Poland’s ambassador to Britain did not take place in Downing Street,…
The tragedy of Jason Arday
Simon Baron-Cohen, the distinguished Cambridge autism specialist, has been speaking movingly about his friend, Jason Arday, in a BBC radio…
The Iran crisis has exposed Britain’s strategic paralysis
I have often joked that in the unlikely event that Iran launched a direct, full-scale attack on Europe, Foreign Office…
We need more emergency phone alerts
Last night, my phone, which was set to silent, erupted with the sort of siren one associates with immediately life-threatening…
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…
There’s a logic to Donald Trump’s incendiary diplomacy
An aggravated splendour
Rod Liddle, who died on 2 August, was a journalist of genius and you could only feel a bit wonder-struck…
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…
What Israel can learn from its long history of sectarianism
According to conventional wisdom, David was a proper hero. He slew Goliath; he wrote beautiful psalms; he built Jerusalem. His…
A heady cocktail of coquetry and extortion: The Millionaire Waltz, by Anthony Quinn, reviewed
Anthony Quinn’s deliciously dark, theatrical-set murder mystery Curtain Call announced the former film critic as a popular novelist of the…
The tiny island in the wild North Atlantic that ‘feels like the safest place in the world’
Tim Ecott has always been drawn to islands, and the seas that surround them: ‘I once ran away from England…
How a young inventor with no printing experience revolutionised the newspaper world
Here’s a quiz for you. On the third floor of the New York Public Library is a vast mural painted…
A question of identity: Passage, by Colin Thubron, reviewed
Colin Thubron’s compact, elegant and beautifully written new novel opens with a woman undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumour.…
Do we really want to live in a world where we’re perpetually spied on?
Some people think that the United Kingdom ranks as an unusually surveillance-heavy society, what with all the CCTV installations, doorbell…
What’s in a kiss? A millennium of mixed messages
Kissing is a tricky subject. It has a complex, baffling history. The kiss of a baby is one thing; the…
Together and apart: How to Make a Woman, by Marie Darrieussecq, reviewed
Two girls in Basque south-west France in the 1980s have been best friends since early childhood. Rose is the good…