Chalmers’ rate-and-switch
Cory Bernardi will give the Liberals a real scare in South Australia
Cory Bernardi is a conservative. This is controversial. He is also the latest candidate announcement from One Nation after it…
Jacinta Allan’s unbelievable Pride comments
It’s not often I scoff out-loud scrolling X in the morning, but that’s what happened when I made the mistake…
Reunification imminent for the Coalition
What are you trying to fix? This is a question the Coalition, and in particular the Liberals, should be asking…
What happened to the Gen Z revolution?
Western nations are experiencing a rising interest in revolution. Not the over-the-top French-style guillotine variety or a Maoist starvation leap…
Australia’s bigger, better idea
William Wentworth said: ‘Every man that is honest and industrious can sit under his own vine and his own fig-tree.’…
Scott Morrison almost got it right
If you want to know why the Australian Liberal Party is where it is read Scott Morrison’s piece on fundamentalist…
Chalmers’ rate-and-switch
Today, in a stark contrast to ‘expert’ predictions six months ago, the Reserve Bank of Australia has raised the cash…
RBA interest rate hike: our plight under Opposition light
From the Press Gallery: Below my seat in the press gallery, the Liberal Party sits in Parliament as a shadow…
Debt, debt, debt, debt, debt
There are a lot of people who comfort themselves by thinking that the Commonwealth government’s $1 trillion of debt is…
The death of debate: how media pluralism collapsed
For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, an extraordinary variety of publications served as arenas of managed disagreement…
Mob justice
Most readers will be familiar with the now disused practices of stocks, pillories, public flogging, tarring and feathering, and other…
Liberals’ last hurrah?
Outside of mortgage repayments, motor vehicle rego charges, and council rates, politics is like an annoying blowfly that interrupts the…
The Minneapolis paradox: when Liberal democracy turns against itself
In the frozen streets of Minneapolis, two deaths have crystallised a distinctly American paradox. Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse,…
Australia’s renewable energy or monorail policy?
I hate to infringe on the sacred writing territory of Labor Dry, but desperate times call for shameless imitation. There…
Why the merry-go-round can’t save the circus
There’s a special kind of panic that sets in when people confuse motion with progress. Things start spinning. Jobs change…
Banning of political parties and reasonable debate
Although the strongest hate speech laws ever passed by the Australian Parliament are now securely ensconced in our statute books,…
Bring back Tony Abbott
With a likely Liberal party room ballot looming, the Coalition’s predicament has become impossible to ignore. The parties are haemorrhaging…
The perils of commenting
There was a point when I began to wonder whether my columns on immigration might violate the government’s proposed new…
Refusing to rule America
The United States Supreme Court has just heard oral argument in two closely watched cases – West Virginia v. B.P.J.…
Business/Robbery, etc
In Donald Trump’s January Venezuelan adventure that added military substance to last November’s new US national security strategy warning about…
Delulu Lib bed-wetters
There is a certain conceit or image or depiction that the left side of the Liberal party likes to wrap…
The hate that dare not speak its name
The barbarians are not at the gates. They are already inside the walls and the institutions, hollowing them out. The…
Maga: perish the thought
How frustrating it must be for democracy’s enemies to have the unpredictable, unconventional, brash outsider, Donald J. Trump, in the…
Visa versa
Sami Yahood (Sami the Jew in Arabic) is a British Israeli Jew and a staunch critic of the political ideology…
A radio licence won’t save the BBC
According to the Times, the BBC – strapped for cash as millions more stop paying the TV licence, and struggling to…
Cricket has banned naughty jokes
English cricket, in its joyless pursuit of moral purity, has banned naughty jokes. There can be no other explanation for…
Colombia can’t give Trump the cocaine crackdown he wants
When US president Donald Trump hurled abuse at Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro last month, branding him a ‘sick man who…
Watch: Starmer’s legal record called out
It’s been a pretty terrible start to the week for the government. Amid mounting revelations from the Epstein files, the…
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’…
Jacinda, Jacinta
I’m not a big fan of self-serving autobiographies, particularly of recently departed political leaders. I had briefly considered dipping into…
Nigel Farage is not infallible
What Catherine O’Hara gave to cinema
There are actors who dominate the cinema screen, and actors who deepen it. There are stars who are ‘bankable’ and…
Dazzled and satiated
It’s a tumultuous decade or so since The Night Manager burst onto our television screens and a while longer since…
Celluloid nostalgia for lost worlds
There’s a poignancy in turning back the clock to the Fifties and early-Sixties. Everyone remembers Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Happy Birthday,…
Call me Ishmael, or Viola
When To Kill a Mockingbird was published, Flannery O’Connor, the author of those unholy and tragic fables born of intense…
Made in China
Most things that seemed like a good idea at the time eventually land somewhere between disaster and calamity. In Apple…
Leonardo Sciascia and the reshaping of the detective novel
Northern Italians sometimes speak of Sicily as the place where Europe finally ends. The island was conquered in the 9th…
Dark days in Kolkata: A Guardian and a Thief, by Megha Majumdar, reviewed
In the Kolkata of Megha Majumdar’s gripping second novel, set over seven days in an unspecified ‘ruined year’, restaurants deliver…
Horror in Victorian Hampstead: Mrs Pearcey, by Lottie Moggach, reviewed
Our appetite for true crime is nothing new. The Victorians devoured it and, as Lottie Moggach’s fourth novel shows, they…
The turbulent life of the Marquis de Morès – the 19th-century aristocrat turned populist thug
The Marquis de Morès (1858-96) was a man of many abilities, but balancing a chequebook was not one of them.…
Sabotage in occupied France: The Shock of the Light, by Lori Inglis Hill, reviewed
The courage of women dropped into Nazi-occupied Europe in order to work for Special Operations Executive (SOE), was immense. Trained…
Mark Haddon attempts to exorcise the memory of a loveless childhood
Growing up in the 1960s at 288a Main Road on the outskirts of Northampton, Mark Haddon spent hours alone in…
A poignant study of female attachment: Chosen Family, by Madeleine Gray, reviewed
Madeleine Gray’s first novel, Green Dot (2023), was a witty account of a messy office affair, whose fans included Nigella…