Christine Holgate: the latest cannon fodder for the left’s misogyny narrative
Inconvenient truths about impoverished women and privileged men
Women, women, women. Aren’t you sick to death of hearing about women? Endless bleating about women’s tough lives, whining about…
Christine Holgate: the latest cannon fodder for the left’s misogyny narrative
In Senate Estimates hearings today Christine Holgate said she was “humiliated” by Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Therefore, apparently, he is confirmed…
Black real estate matters
SpecOz readers would have seen yesterday’s reports about Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors and her real estate binge-buying, which…
Aboriginal imprisonment: don’t confuse a social issue with a justice issue
Those who insist that too many indigenous people are in jail confuse a social issue with a justice issue, and…
Fourth time lucky with Victorian hotel quarantine?
Be afraid. Be very afraid. Last Thursday, the Victorian government restarted its Covid hotel quarantine program. This is the fourth…
Woke@work – and joyless, mistrustful, dispiriting and dreary
Just as I was celebrating the fact that in ditching Turnbull from the ridiculous New South Wales climate job the…
When we are old: dignity in aged care
Over the last year, a huge proportion of the residents in the aged care facilities around our country did not…
Captain America versus… Jordan Peterson?
The progressives’ latest offering of ‘woker-tainment’ shows they are more interested in political posturing than creating beautiful or meaningful art. …
Now even Nick Clegg turns on Brussels
The last four months have not been a happy time for those in power in Brussels. The unedifying squabbles over…
How the West can respond to Putin’s military build-up
In the last few weeks, Russia has been flaunting its military build-up in and around Ukraine, sending 20,000 extra troops,…
The problem with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's war on obesity
With his little round spectacles and earnest expression, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is the Penfold to Jamie Oliver’s Dangermouse. Both men have…
Biden backs extending regulation of fentanyl ‘lookalikes’
As the pandemic accelerated, an epidemic seemed to recede from headlines. But it did not stop. More than 40 states reported an…
Psst… Australian women are doing well
It’s just as well I don’t have a Twitter account. Mind you, I’m told that it’s not a pre-requisite for…
Lockdowns are the opiate of champagne socialists
Lockdowns have violated three core tenets of public health policy: prioritising the long term over the short, focussing on the…
Counter-factual history
Go back a decade and a half and Australia had basically no Commonwealth government debt. We had the democratic world’s…
World Peace or Propaganda Games?
Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, in the documentary Hitler’s Olympics: How One Man Invented Olympic Ritual, tells how the Nazis reconfigured the opening…
Labor embraces Palestinian terror
For the first time in Australian political history a mainstream party has in its policy platform unconditional support for the…
Cave’s cautionary tales
Mr Nick Cave is an Australian rock star, sensationally good at his job in my musical opinion, blessed with the…
Jabbing the PM
Prime Minister Scott Morrison hosted the first meeting of his cabinet women’s taskforce which received zero interest from the Left.…
Dear woke America, you’re dreaming
Western democracy is having a major identity crisis. Common ideals that once provided generations with cohesive cultural values are being…
A Murder of Crows
Sometimes a crime show on TV turns into something higher and better, a transfigured thing. The Victim, from Scotland, falls…
Opera on the Harbour: La Traviata
These days, you’d need to be as game as Ned Kelly to run an opera company. It’s a chancy enough…
La Streep
It’s one of those secrets that we keep even from ourselves that great acting, everything that we know in terms…
Boy Swallows Universe
It is difficult not to be irritated by the preoccupations of the funded state theatre companies. They seem to be…
Bob Dylan — from respected young songwriter to Voice of a Generation
Clinton Heylin is the eminence grise of Bob Dylan scholars: co-founder of Wanted Man (the magazine dedicated to studying Dylan’s…
A written constitution is no defence against authoritarian government
No one can accuse Linda Colley of shying away from big subjects. This one is as big as they come…
What does it really mean to feel English?
Referring to the precarious future of the Union of England and Scotland, the authors of Englishness: The Political Force Transforming…
Sowing seeds of comfort
If you had asked me a year ago how a pandemic-panicked world of stockpiles, curfews and social isolation would influence…
A celebration of friendship: Common Ground, by Naomi Ishiguro, reviewed
Naomi Ishiguro began writing Common Groundin the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The title refers to both Goshawk Common in…
The magnificent fiasco of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House
John Ruskin believed the most beautiful things are also the most useless, citing lilies and peacocks. Had he known about…
Problem parents: My Phantoms, by Gwendoline Riley, reviewed
Gwendoline Riley’s unsentimental fiction hovers on the edge of comedy and bleakness, and has drawn comparisons from Jean Rhys to…
Sleeping with the enemy: the wartime story of ‘La Chatte’
The name ‘Carré’ immediately evokes the shadowy world of espionage. Ironically, however, few people today have heard of the real…