Revealed: the true cost of our stimulus spending
Post-pandemic self-reliance: an answer to globalist nostalgia
Australia is beginning to emerge from the depths of COVID quarantine, but we can’t celebrate just yet! We will shortly…
Pink and blue? That’s far too simple for some
Last time I checked the number of genders available to identify as or with is currently 112. That’s up from…
If we’re on the road back, are interstate travel bans even legal?
There is an old saying about experts and politics: experts are better on tap than on top. In a democracy,…
The left want to keep us lockdowned to serve the grand green agenda
Leftists have turned to alchemy to try to transform the Covid-19 pandemic into their fabled climate emergency. Former ABC journalist…
A question for the(ir) ABC and Scott Morrison
Please take a seat; we need to discuss something incredibly important. It has been reported over recent weeks that calls…
Extinction Rebellion: prepare for “mass civil disobedience”
Extremist, hard-left activists haven’t been wasting their lockdown. Instead, they’ve been celebrating the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs,…
The biggest issue with COVIDSafe: incompetence
The COVID-19 tracing application may look like a targeted and temporary solution, but history shows that privacy incursions are typically…
Revealed: the true cost of our stimulus spending
Relative to GDP Australian government spending to address COVID-19 has been among the highest in the world. The Morrison…
Boris Johnson should be wary of comparisons with Churchill
Despite his carefully-crafted bumbling image, Boris Johnson is anything but daft. When vying to replace the apparently rootless Tory moderniser…
In defence of the British Empire
Is it my imagination, or are the whitened bones of the British Empire being yet again dug up and trampled…
My father is home at last
Today is my father, Robin Hanbury-Tenison’s, 84th birthday and miraculously he was able to wakeup in his own bed and…
Why Boris bashers like Jacinda Ardern
I’m starting to wonder if the people who unfavourably compare Britain’s Covid experience with New Zealand’s are being wilfully stupid.…
Selling Beijing the rope
When are we going to start getting real about China? When are we going to stop pretending that China is…
Churchill in reverse
There is a lovely anecdote in Roy Jenkins’ biography of Winston Churchill where Jenkins (a centre-lefty who came to love…
China’s pantry
Perhaps toilet paper as the first essential on an Australian’s survival list did not fit into the logical part of…
WAs three red monkeys
When a senior Victorian health bureaucrat compared Captain Cook to the coronavirus it had an ugly echo of eugenics, a…
Can Morrison emulate our forgotten conservative hero
When this lockdown is lifted, it’s not impossible the capitalist machine proves its resilience yet again and the economy is…
Maori roadblocks
Expatriate New Zealanders returning home after a long absence are often taken aback by the extent to which the country…
Missing from the National Cabinet – Tony Abbott
If a close relative suffered seriously because an operating surgeon was ignorant of world’s best practice, only surviving because of…
Beijing’s biotech bullies
Kill a chicken to scare the monkeys, the Chinese say. In this case, Australia is the chook, the butchers in…
Queens of print
The Spectator has been celebrating its 10,000th UK issue with justifiable pride; it is an astounding achievement. Australia has long…
Geraldine Brooks and Darleen Bungey
Major award-winning biographies of Arthur Boyd and John Olsen have preceded the third book by Darleen Bungey. It is less…
The Elgin Marbles
He grew up in Eastwood on Sydney’s Northern Line. Geoffrey Robertson’s brilliant career got off to a flying start with…
Geoffrey Blainey
He coined the phrase ‘tyranny of distance’ which not only entered the language but encapsulated the view that many Australians…
Political biographies to enjoy in lockdown
Here are ten political biographies, with a leavening of the classics, for those with time to kill in the present…
Another alien in our midst: Pew, by Catherine Lacey, reviewed
It needs authorial guts to write a novel in which details are shrouded, meaning is concealed and little is certain.…
William Sitwell’s history of eating out reminds us painfully of what we’re missing
In the concluding chapter of this book the Daily Telegraph’s restaurant critic and recovering vegan-baiter William Sitwell muses on the…
We don’t talk of a ‘working father’ — so why do we still refer to a ‘working mother’?
The phrase ‘working mother’ ought to be as redundant sounding as ‘working father’ would be if anyone ever said that:…
The art of negotiation: Peace Talks, by Tim Finch, reviewed
Early on in Tim Finch’s hypnotic novel Peace Talks, the narrator — the diplomat Edvard Behrends, who facilitates international peace…
Without Joseph Banks, Cook’s first voyage might have been a failure
When the wealthy young Joseph Banks announced that he intended joining Captain Cook’s expedition to Tahiti to observe the Transit…
The symbolism of Orion, the hunter of the heavens
What happened in the rites of Eleusis is a mystery. So are all the unwritten parts of human history. Our…
The deserted village green: is this the end of cricket as we know it?
Imagine an archetypal English scene and it’s likely you’re picturing somewhere rural. Despite losing fields and fields each year to…