Are the wheels falling off the Royal Commission?
Revenge of the preppers
During the era of Covid, sneering at panic buyers became a national sport for bored nanny state enthusiasts. The worst…
The Farrer crucible for conservative politics
The Farrer by-election is more interesting than we first thought. Triggered by the resignation of former Liberal Leader, Sussan Ley,…
The Canavan conundrum
Senator Matt Canavan has been chosen as Leader of the Nationals. Imagine predicting that last year when conservatism was deep in the…
Matt Canavan elected leader of the Nationals
Popular conservative Senator, Matt Canavan, has been elected as leader of the Nationals. He replaces David Littleproud who, yesterday, said…
Caught in the crossfire: 115,000 reasons to worry
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran. As the war enters its…
Are the wheels falling off the Royal Commission?
The resignation of Dennis Richardson from the Bondi Beach Royal Commission should, in my opinion, ring alarm bells across the…
Should you stock up for the war?
Like millions of others throughout the world, I have been quietly stocking up on essential day-to-day items for years, perfecting…
The regime in Iran and the delusion of moderates
Almost three decades ago, the regime in Iran launched a new campaign. Its goal was to fabricate legitimacy and break…
The ‘Kharg Option’
For decades, the ‘smartest people in the room’ at the State Department and in the legacy media looked down on…
What did I miss?
Jim Chalmers’ kinder economy has turned a corner and crashed straight into a tree. Inflation expectations are spiking to 5.2…
Chaharshanbe Suri in the Iranian Soul
Chaharshanbe Suri is one of the ancient Iranian festivals, celebrated on the eve of the last Wednesday of the year,…
The Liberal Party should trial community primaries
Australia’s political parties are confronting a long-standing issue that has been gradually worsening over many years: the decline in party…
NSW hate-hunting police force
Premier Chris Minns’ latest move to create a permanent hate-hunting police unit suggests, in my view, that when he claims…
Silence the doctors, harm the children? When ethics becomes dissent
Medicine was never meant to follow ideology. It was meant to follow evidence, ethics, and the simple promise embedded in…
Biological truth must prevail in schools
In court, you must swear to tell the truth. Failing to do so is considered a serious offence and harmful…
E Pluribus Unum: The architecture of unity
‘As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, the Gods of the Copybook Headings with…
Middle East conflict exposes government on economy
Inflation is not an abstract statistic. It is the weekly grocery bill that keeps creeping higher. It is rent and…
The global climate confidence game
Every successful confidence game follows roughly the same structure. First comes a compelling narrative – a story persuasive enough to…
How to make family tax fair
This week has seen two politicians putting family tax back on the agenda, but in very different ways. Matt Canavan…
Don’t attack Pauline, Senator Matt Canavan
It is no disadvantage at all for Matt Canavan being in the Senate, as The Australian claims. Except for determining…
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…
Pauline? Not our sort of person
Somewhere in Australia tonight, a senior Liberal is having dinner at a good restaurant. The food is excellent, the conversation…
Divisive diversity divas
‘Diversity is our strength.’ One hears this, or myriad variants of the same idea, unrelentingly. Certainly, I work in an…
The Great Rort
To paraphrase Charlie Munger: ‘show us the oversized government program and we will show you the scams and the rorts.’…
The terrifying case of Dr Amos
Last week, Dr Andrew Amos, a leading Queensland psychiatrist and academic, was silenced by the national regulator. The Australian Health…
Nice work if you can get it
In May 2020, in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, two rock shelters, Juukan 1 and Juukan 2, were destroyed by mining…
Middle-class revolutionaries
When the Iranian regime was struck and the death of the Supreme Leader confirmed, one might have expected a straightforward…
Lionesses in the land of Oz
Last Sunday was International Women’s Day, a socialist jamboree, adopted by the United Nations. But it said little about the…
Pauline warns of jihad
The firestorm surrounding Senator Pauline Hanson’s comments regarding ‘good Muslims’ continues to swirl, fuelled by the obviously false claim that…
Richard Tice’s tax trickery shows he is a true patriot
Reform’s Richard Tice has been the subject of what I fear is intended as a hit-piece in the Sunday Times. “The Deputy Leader…
Britain can learn from Trump’s moral clarity over Iran
Two weeks into the war in Iran, Donald Trump’s critics have intensified their attacks not only on his conduct of…
Stop crying wolf about World War Three
You sometimes wonder if people who put together newspapers these days have ever heard the story about the boy who…
Roald Dahl’s antisemitism feels painfully familiar
Me on Broadway. Not a phrase that immediately comes to mind, and certainly not one that occurred to me in…
Sunday shows round-up: Miliband says drones may be sent to open the Strait of Hormuz
Ed Miliband: Government may send drones to get Strait of Hormuz open The backlog of oil tankers unable to pass…
Hungarian independence day makes me think about Britain
One of the most important and dramatic dates in Hungarian and European history is 15 March 1848. The dashing poet Sandor Petofi recited the stirring ‘Nemzeti dal’ (‘National song’).…
Iran doubles down on the Strait of Hormuz blockade
President Trump said on Saturday that the United States is seeking an international naval coalition to reopen the Strait of…
Trump’s quest for a ‘Greater North America’ is in full swing
With world attention focused on the US-Israel assault on Iran, US Secretary of War Peter Hegseth delivered a speech last…
What Britain can learn from Israel’s female fighters
It is impossible to imagine the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) functioning without its female soldiers. In the last week alone,…
Good riddance Rene Redzepi
This week, Rene Redzepi – often credited as having created the world’s greatest restaurant – stepped down amid explosive allegations…
Why are men in the gym so annoying?
Being of menopausal age, I obey instructions and regularly lift weights (menopausal women are meant to lift heavy stuff and…
Is measles really on the rise?
A new narrative began at the start of the year, pushed by senior government figures including the Prime Minister, linking…
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…
What will Jacinda Ardern do next?
When I first met Jacinda Ardern in the early 2010s, the notion that the young MP with the toothy smile…
The de-Wokification of New Zealand’s education system
The conservative coalition government of New Zealand came to office promising to wind back an enormous, government-run system of ‘Woke’…
Am I an extremist?
Uncanny mutations
Isn’t it odd the way we can start watching a streamer in absolute disgusted disbelief only to discover that we’re…
That glimpse of grandeur
The death of Robert Duvall the other week was a reminder of how long ago some of our cultural landmarks…
A hoard of lost treasure
Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is the most celebrated of all Australian plays; and this story of the…
Strange and familiar
One of the excitements of seeing Ngaire Dawn Fair in the full trilogy of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll…
Fractured loyalties: The Tribe, by Michael Arditti, reviewed
Michael Arditti’s impressive and immersive family saga begins in Salonica (now Thessaloniki) in 1911 and follows the fortunes of the…
Blockchain fantasies: My Bags Are Big, by Tibor Fischer, reviewed
If you long for that far-off time when novels were prepared to be hilariously funny, vulgar, caustic, wildly politically incorrect…
Nintendo and the plumber who conquered the world
It’s not more than a parlour game, perhaps, to speculate about history’s most crucial inventions. One invention often makes the…
Lloyd Blankfein – guiding light of Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs inspires awe and envy in equal measure. Those who survive the Wall Street investment bank’s annual cull earn…
The world destroyed by madness: Howl, by Howard Jacobson, reviewed
Rarely has such a short title worked harder than Howl, which Howard Jacobson takes from Allen Ginsberg’s incantatory 1955 poem.…
Frederic Prokosch – the man who seemed to know everyone
One day Frederic Prokosch wrote a novel. He was 27 years old, living with his parents in New Haven, Connecticut,…
Caught between Hitler and Bomber Command – the Berliners’ cruel predicament
Can you be a true, thoroughgoing patriot and still want your country to lose in a war? It’s a dilemma…
Chasing happiness: The Daffodil Days, by Helen Bain, reviewed
Is there anything more to be said about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath? I didn’t think so, but Helen Bain’s…