Australia’s major parties: censorship, thoughtcrime and suppression
Who the 'bloody hell' are the Libs?
The 1987 election was the first I took interest in. Seeing two politicians of conviction, Bob Hawke and John Howard,…
The Musky scent of freedom
Tesla billionaire Elon Musk has put a ring on it. This morning it was announced that social media platform and…
Taking the mickey out of Mickey
There’s a sad trend in Western society of late to erase childhood from the experience of childhood, a sort of…
Australia’s major parties: censorship, thoughtcrime and suppression
By most measures and standards, Australia is a beacon of freedom – a state where any citizen can espouse and…
Stoking the fires of energy policy
Stung from previous election losses, the ALP is at pains to deny that it will introduce a carbon tax. The…
Polling payday for pollies
Politics is big business in Australia. The major parties rake in stupendous amounts of donations every election cycle and have…
Fair go, mate!
The first time I heard the phrase ‘fair go!’ I was a young reporter new to Australia from Britain and…
Restoring Menzies' Australia
I came to Australia from India in December 2000 where I had been a senior civil servant fighting socialist policy…
The relentless march of Europe’s zombie centrists
Journalists rarely had it so easy as when it came to writing up the final result of the French presidential…
The end of the last Arab Spring success story
Visibly, and with very little pretense, Tunisia is sliding into tyranny. In the last two years, its president, Kais Saied,…
Biden lives long enough to become the villain
“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” Harvey Dent says to…
The perverse joys of Elon Musk buying Twitter
The predictable yet somehow still hilarious news that Elon Musk is to acquire Twitter for $44 billion has been greeted…
New Zealand 'trusts' China on extradition
New Zealand’s Foreign Minister, under Ardern’s Labour government, has set another scary precedent in relation to China. ‘I don’t think…
New Zealand’s cultural upheaval
My wife and I recently spent two weeks on a road trip around New Zealand’s South Island. It’s a spectacularly…
Ardern and Clark’s next pandemic will be horrid
Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern have been very mean to the world’s Covid Cinderella, New Zealand. Just when we thought…
Attacking English to undermine our European heritage
It starts with very familiar, underground movements burrowing away, gaining a little ground at a time until eventually a society…
Sweet cents of Musk
Who amongst us can fail to be at least a little bit excited by the woodsy, earthy scent of musk…
What does China know about MH370?
Australia deserves some credit for its role in the search for missing Malaysian airline MH370. It was a flight connected…
Butler re-heats Rudd’s thought bubble
One of the problems of Labor’s strategy of running with a small target is that there isn’t much to talk…
Luvvies guide to defining a woman
Should someone who cannot define a woman be the nation’s top health bureaucrat? ‘Balls’, said the Queen. ‘If I had…
France’s choice between bad and terrible
So often Western democracies offer awful electoral choices. Boris Johnson for example offers a woeful record on border protection (let’s…
A national scandal
For nine years Coalition governments have tolerated the national broadcaster’s defiant indifference to its charter and editorial policies. For nine…
The leper vote
Like the Grim Reaper, the spectre of Covid’s warped vaccines is stalking the major parties in the Australian federal election.…
Is Albo another Biden?
The 2022 election, closely monitored by criminals, domestic and international, could be one of the most important in Australian history.…
A peculiar backwards mutation
It’s not hard to sympathise with Christopher Allen’s recent column in the Review section of the Australian decrying the juxtaposition…
A remarkable film that gleams with mastery
What a relief it was to see Parallel Mothers the new film by Pedro Almodóvar. There was the tediousness and…
Archangel of Italian film
Like yesterday, there’s the memory of William Weaver, the great translator from the Italian of Umberto Eco’s The Name of…
Mighty and majestic
There is nothing like a ghastly war, an inscrutable election and a great rush of entertainment high and low to…
The murky history of Germany’s top family businesses
It was a clear cold morning in January 1936 when Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler arrived at the luxurious Regina Palast Hotel…
The case of the ‘Hay Poisoner’ inspired many a cosy murder mystery
The case of the retired major Herbert Rowse Armstrong, a Hay-on-Wye solicitor hanged in 1922 for killing his wife Katharine…
We must all become Doctor Dolittles and listen to the wisdom of animals
One day the writer and artist James Bridle rented a hatchback, taped a smartphone to the steering wheel and installed…
Michel Houellebecq may be honoured by the French establishment, but he’s no fan of Europe
For many years, Michel Houellebecq was patronised by the French literary establishment as an upstart, what with his background in…
Memory test: The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan, reviewed
On page 231 of The Candy House, a sequel – no, a ‘sibling’ says Jennifer Egan – to the Pulitzer…
A tale of forbidden love: Trespasses, by Louise Kennedy, reviewed
Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-winning recent film Belfast chronicles the travails of a Protestant family amid sectarian conflict in 1969. Louise Kennedy’s…
Nymphomaniac, fearless campaigner, alcoholic – Nancy Cunard was all this and more
The title of Anne de Courcy’s riveting new book might give the impression that Nancy Cunard had no more than…
Accusations of racism have lost all meaning
The War on the West is Douglas Murray’s latest blast against loony left wokery, chiefly in the areas of race…