The rise and rise of Australia’s Nigel Farage
Pauline refuses to pander to the press
It is a shame Pauline Hanson did not walk up to the podium at the National Press Club and announce:…
GetUp! did One Nation a favour (again)
Activist group GetUp! are laughably hopeless at their stated purpose … combatting One Nation. Previously, the group boasted about putting…
A loss of faith
Upon hearing the news that Senator Duniam would be stepping away from politics before the federal election, I immediately wondered…
Gina Rinehart invests in Elon Musk’s space race
Let’s face it. If we left the space race to Energy and Environment Minister Chris Bowen, Australia would be attempting…
Pauline Hanson came, saw, and conquered Canberra
The National Press Club this week attempted to show its liberal democratic credentials by giving the One Nation leader a…
Roll over Banjo, they’re culling your brumbies
I’m sure Banjo Paterson would be rolling in his grave if he learns that the beautiful wild brumbies that featured…
Stop the scare – save the science
The past two decades have seen an explosion in climate anxiety among children, defined as the chronic fear of environmental…
The X-Files of tax reform
I recently visited the website of the Federal Senate Standing Committees on Economics. If that doesn’t sound like the most…
Why One Nation is striking a deeper chord
One Nation’s critics have a lazy explanation for its rise. They say Pauline Hanson’s party is merely riding a Populist…
The era of tokenmaxxing is over
We all know those people in the workplace who brag about using AI for every aspect of their job –…
Pauline Hanson and the party of one
When you have been swimming in a sewer long enough, you lose the ability to smell your own filth. I…
Labor’s capital gains tax blunder
Tax reform doesn’t need to be this difficult. Australia is overtaxed, and we desperately need another round of income tax…
Roman precedent suggests Hanson might turn out great
Giorgia Meloni and Pauline Hanson began in almost the same place. One is three months from making history. The question…
Fire the Liar: The politics of broken promises
‘Never ask a liar why they lied. To explain it, they would have to lie again.’ Online, the quote is…
Let the United Nations collapse!
The United Nations is in a state of ‘imminent financial collapse’. Apparently. Their decline is moving at a glacial pace.…
Labor’s housing market wrecking ball
Australia’s housing market is sending a warning the Albanese Labor government cannot afford to ignore. Across the capital cities, more…
David and Goliath
The most consequential allies in the US war on the Iranian Republic (now passing the 100-day mark) are not influential,…
One Nation may have found the Holy Grail of Populism
Like most political commentators, we have been transfixed by the meteoric rise of One Nation as a credible political force…
Inclusive art where we no longer belong
I recently left an art display at the Art Gallery of Western Australia called Attachment Styles: Modes of Belonging in…
Labor failed their political IQ test
This week, Labor failed a political IQ test. The best way to fight your political opponent is to Labor what…
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…
Jim Chalmers is one of the most useless treasurers ever
Jim Chalmers will go down as one of the worst treasurers that Australia has ever had, up there with Jim…
Canberra’s obscene compassion machine
The alleged abduction and murder of five-year-old Kumanjayi Little Baby from an Alice Springs town camp should have shattered one…
The madness of Mabo
In the mining industry (and probably every other sector), Aboriginal heritage is no longer about the protection of Aboriginal heritage.…
Please explain, Pauline
One of the small pleasures of Australian politics over recent years has been Pauline Hanson’s Please Explain videos. Usually they…
Business/Robbery, etc
Deliberate, deceptive and disastrous. And although it is among the most damaging of all the appalling injuries the Albanese Labor…
Water versus massive waste
There’s one man in Australia who can say with overwhelming scientific authority that Donald Trump is right – the theory…
MAFS arms and legs race
I hadn’t planned to write about this, but life has a strange way of forcing your hand. After a particularly…
One Big Government Nation
In her address to the National Press Club this week, Senator Pauline Hanson took aim at the financial disaster that…
Economic gloom is Keir Starmer’s real legacy
This week has been described by some as Keir Starmer’s ‘legacy week’. The ban on social media and the G7…
Was Brexit a mistake?
Next week, we will celebrate a decade since the Brexit vote. The decade that followed was one of political turmoil:…
Do politicians really care about the evidence?
Is policy-making in the UK based on evidence? That is the question I address in my new book, Inside the Sausage…
What I learned in the pubs of Makerfield
Last Wednesday I went up to Makerfield to do a bit of on-the-ground research into what voters there really make…
Keir Starmer’s delusion is becoming tragic
Keir Starmer has entered what might be described as the peak delusion period of what remains of his time in…
The strange divide at Labour’s Makerfield HQ
On the eve of a by-election that could sound the death knell for his political career, Sir Keir Starmer has…
Civil service grifting hits new heights
Violence, shooting and driving fast cars are not usually the first things that spring to mind when Whitehall talks about…
The perfect two words to describe this zombie parliament
With Sir Keir in Evian busy taking what must surely be his last opportunity to stuff Lady Victoria’s hand luggage…
The trouble with the Ministry of Defence
In a telling exchange on Radio 4 last week, during the furore following John Healey’s resignation, Debbie Abrahams, the Labour…
David Lammy’s heart wasn’t in DPMQs
Claire Coutinho emerged as the Tory frontbencher taking deputy prime minister’s questions today, with the shadow energy secretary focusing on…
The strange reluctance to discuss Islamist terror
Ten years ago this week, the British MP Jo Cox was murdered. In his post on social media platform X marking…
Watch: Lowe aide silences Restore’s by-election candidate
“We’re not doing any interviews” “You’ll have to speak to the management sorry” “Alistair can Rebecca do one interview or…
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’…
The Pope’s merciless war against the Old Rite
Striped caps and striking shoes
June 11 saw the death of the Yorkshire-born English painter David Hockney who was arguably the most celebrated painter of…
A man of music
The other day saw the opening of the Peter Corrigan Collection at RMIT which comprises his personal collection of architectural…
Such stuff as dreams are made on
When Ken Branagh took the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford for the first time in thirty years…
Elegance and intrigue
Anyone who knows the Sixties can easily be reminded of the beauty and the authority of Sidney Poitier. The MTC…
The clear and present danger of exploring the Gulag
On 21 February 2022, 35-year-old Charlie Walker flew into Yakutsk in the Russian Far East, ready to ski hundreds of…
A trove of avian lore and history
I finished reading The Book of Birds by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, and leaned out of my attic window…
A grandmother’s twisted mind: The Passage of Roses, by Tie Ning, reviewed
At first glance, Tie Ning’s The Passage of Roses appears to be yet another Chinese novel set during the Cultural…
There will be blood – the vital work of field transfusion units
Most conventional second world war military histories focus on weapons, materiel and even the manpower needed for a decisive victory…
No fairytale: The Children, by Melissa Albert, reviewed
Who would be a child made famous by a book? A.A. Milne’s son, immortalised as the teddy-trailing Christopher Robin in…
Alien fever shows no signs of abating
These two books are about aliens – intelligent beings who may or may not have visited our planet. Jonathan Caplan…
Vigilante justice: Pure Men, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, reviewed
Like the Booker, the Prix Goncourt’s laureates now tend to veer between diamonds and duds. One of the strongest recent…
French letters – Albert Camus’s great epistolary love affair
The extraordinary correspondence between Albert Camus and the love of his life Maria Casarès must rank among the most passionate…