How I learned to stop worrying and love CO2
Forget about “noisy Australians”. What about self-absorbed, obsessive-complusive Twits?
After the bushfires, the Australia Day bashing brigade kept pretty quiet this year. Other than the lunatic fringe, most of…
The Greens: fingers on the pulse
If you live outside Sydney’s inner-west and don’t follow the internecine warfare between the Watermelons and Deep Greens of the…
Don’t tell us when or what to celebrate. It’s our day, Australia Day, January 26
Change the date on this one and it will be a win for those people who hate Australia and all…
Bushfires and the big truths about big charities
An important thing to remember about large parts of the government bureaucracy and the not-for-profit/community sector is that they are…
The six shades of Australian fire lighters
Australian fire-lighters come in six colours – yellow, black, white, blood red, dark green, and light green. All are relevant…
It’s time to end the madness passing as politics
No one who was in Parliament House on the morning of October 3, 1997, will forget when they heard a…
Gillian Triggs is now at the United Nations – UN for unreliable on human rights?
How would you feel discovering that your local or state government had entered into an agreement with, say, McDonald’s to…
How to keep our values in the face of China’s challenge
Australia and New Zealand face a geopolitical predicament as a consequence of China’s rise. How do we preserve our Western…
Donald Trump, president of peace
This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Groupthink is the last thing a country needs when debating…
Do alarmists know the difference between weather and climate?
Until recently, those expressing scepticism about climate-change catastrophe have been hauled over the coals (or the renewables equivalent) for not…
How to fight back against ‘cancel culture’
‘Cancel culture’ is a horrible term because outside of a dictatorship nobody can actually be ‘canceled’ or otherwise ‘disappeared’. All…
Why aren’t leftists happy Joe Rogan endorsed Bernie?
As a twenty-something man who spends excessive amounts of time on the internet I have of course watched countless hours…
Business/Robbery etc
My merchant banker son tells me I’m wrong. He rejects my criticism of Australian corporate boards that respond to noisy…
How I learned to stop worrying and love CO2
At Davos this week, history lived up to its reputation of repeating itself as farce. In the 1980s, the triumvirate…
Cave diving into the culture wars
If Nick Cave is the answer, what is the question? Almost any you might fancy putting to him, as it…
Fox hunt
It’s now apparent that Stalinism has re-emerged, not in Russia it’s birthplace, but in the Western world. Dissent from the…
An ill wind
They’re like coastal scavengers of the eighteenth century, plundering the cargoes of wrecked ships. Or looters after an earthquake, pillaging…
King Kevin through the back door
Extraordinary plans are afoot in Canberra for Malcolm Turnbull, Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd or someone of their ilk to succeed…
Sacha Baron Cohen’s brilliant new comic device
Sacha Baron Cohen’s recent anti-defamation league speech was quite a performance, even by his standards. In shrill, bordering on hysterical…
Gastrointestinal disease, climate change and a republic
Whenever something adverse happens these days, the event will more likely than not be attributed to, or associated with, the…
Marta Dusseldorp
Known throughout his life as Dick, Gerardus Dusseldorp had just come to Australia and created Civil and Civic (later Lend…
Heritage Cai Guo-Qiang, China b.1957
We talk about it a lot. One of life’s most essential elements it is now being celebrated in an exhibition:…
Lachlan Macquarie
One of the Scots who made extraordinary contributions to Australia was Lachlan Macquarie. Grantley Kieza has published several biographies including…
Natalia Aroyan and friend at Sydney Opera House
It’s summer in Sydney, so there is an Opera Season. Two productions by the distinguished British director David McVicar –…
How David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades
In January 1973, Science (along with Nature, the most influential general science journal in the world) published an article that…
Babies are aware of bilingualism from birth — if not before
Probably most of the world is bilingual, or more than bilingual. It is common in many countries to speak a…
Rembrandt remains an enigma
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–69) is not only the presiding genius of the Dutch golden age of painting, but one…
The Pearl Harbor fiasco need never have happened
It is sometimes said that intelligence failures are often failures of assessment rather than collection. This is especially so when…
We were highly amused: the Queen — and Mrs Thatcher — thought Ken Dodd tattyfilarious
Doddy! Thou shouldst be living at this hour. England hath need of tickling sticks. So also hath the rest of…
Dreaming of the desert: my life in the Sahara, by Sanmao
Travel writing is ‘the red light district of literature’, as Colin Thubron aptly put it, a space where anything goes.…
The wanderings of Ullis: Low, by Jeet Thayil, reviewed
Jeet Thayil’s previous novel, The Book of Chocolate Saints, an account of a fictional Indian artist and poet told in…
Desperate to preserve her sister Jane’s reputation, Cassandra Austen lost her own
Poor Cassy. The Miss Austen of this novel’s title is Cassandra, Jane’s elder sister. She was to have married Thomas…