Australian values
Angus Taylor to echo One Nation’s migration policy
One Nation has been at the forefront of migration policy. Many months ago, One Nation posted their policy which states, among…
Western Australia frustrated over fuel stockpiles?
The Albanese government appears to have frustrated one of its state Labor allies. Western Australia Energy Minister, Amber-Jade Sanderson, has expressed…
Every little bit helps. How to waste $20 million on an ad campaign
While the Treasurer plots how to take money out of our pockets in the next Budget, we discover the Albanese…
From Pluto, with love
The debate about whether or not to include Pluto as a planet is part-nostalgia, part-history, part-historical justice, part-science, and part-aww,…
Strait of Hormuz: Where geology, myth, and international law converge
The geography of the Strait of Hormuz is not man-made; it is the result of a long process shaped by…
International Law in dire straits
The United States’ decision to impose a naval blockade is a legally contentious move under International Law. The measure follows…
Angus Taylor’s ‘wrong rein’ on immigration
The immigration horse is definitely the one that has wandered off to the One Nation side of the paddock, but…
Albo government’s perfect storm of weakness
I first set foot in Brunei in 2019. It was, and remains, a jewel of Southeast Asia. Verdant, orderly, and…
How multiculturalism destroys societies, Australia included
The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported in March that net overseas migration rose to 311,000 in September 2025, marking a…
Iran at a crossroads: Australia’s opportunities and pitfalls
Over the last few weeks, the Islamist regime in Tehran has expanded the scope of its hostage-taking operation. Not satisfied…
The Australian apocalypse approaches
An apocalypse is considered to be a number of events that cause widespread destruction on a catastrophic scale. You may question…
Embarrassing: Is Australia missing the next tech age?
While Australia remains fixated on renewables, the rest of the world is accelerating into a new era of energy and…
The jobs Australians won’t do
We are often told that Australia needs foreign workers because there are many ‘jobs that Australians won’t do’. Across a…
Born in April: A toast to Jefferson and Hitchens
Today is April 13th. Thomas Jefferson was born on this date in 1743. Christopher Hitchens was born on this date…
One Nation is protecting cash, not the Treasurer
Those who heard Senator Michaelia Cash’s speech about One Nation’s decision to vote against Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ Competition and Consumer…
What did I miss?
Anthony Albanese sulked, cap in hand, to Singapore. Fossil fuel is better for the environment if someone else drills for…
What if they held an election and nobody came?
The South Australian state election in March saw Labor comfortably home, yet again, but the insurgent One Nation became the…
Let’s ‘turn back time’, Albo
Our Prime Minister, in one of his frequently mundane press conferences, reminded us that ‘we can’t turn back the clock’…
Addressing Australia’s self-inflicted energy crisis
How could Australia be suffering a double energy crisis when the nation exports several times more energy than it consumes…
A five-point plan for Aussie AI
Last week, OpenAI released a white paper titled Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age. It’s unusually candid about the risks…
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…
What do you most despise?
The great and recently deceased playwright Tom Stoppard was once asked what he most despised. This, by the way, is…
Remembering Bert Kelly
I was lucky enough to become friendly with Bert Kelly MP in the last years of his life. Bert had…
The ignorant Aussie
In my view the true nature of the Liberal party became apparent during the vote on the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate…
Australia is fast becoming a failed socialist state
The Hawke government, with Paul Keating as Treasurer, spent the 1980s dragging Australia away from the economic model that was…
Modern slavery
Ruqia was a 21-year-old Afghan woman building a new life in Australia. She and her family fled Afghanistan after the…
Labor’s crazed ideological bent
I know how Father Damo feels. The delinquent young priest in Father Ted arrives on Craggy Island, clocks the situation,…
FoolWatch
Having abandoned the notion of pretending it isn’t facing a fuel crisis, the Albanese government’s bright idea to bring down…
Top Brasso
After my article last week on what is called the ‘civilianisation’ of military justice, I found myself in a series…
Britain’s economy is growing – but not for long
It must be bittersweet being Rachel Reeves. Figures just released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show the economy…
Labour is turning a blind eye to China’s persecution of Uyghurs
Of all Labour’s U-turns, none is perhaps more egregious than their stance on China. In opposition, they were happy to…
The Scottish Greens want everything to be free
The Scottish Green party can usually be relied upon to provide some light relief at election time. But this year,…
Trump is making life increasingly hard for his allies
Here is a fun one: what do Giorgia Meloni, Pope Leo XIV, Ed Miliband and the Cato Institute all have…
Oh the joy of watching Keir Starmer descend into fury!
Handbags at noon! It’s always nice to watch Sir Keir Starmer descend into the sort of incandescent fury that living…
Does Mark Carney believe in democracy?
Mark Carney is swaggering about Canada with his new majority government, acting as if he’d just received a landslide mandate…
Starmer wants to ask, not answer, the questions at PMQs
Keir Starmer gave six responses to questions about Lord Robertson’s defence spending comments today, none of which addressed the criticism…
Rachel Reeves may regret goading President Trump
It is a ‘folly’ with ‘no clear exit plan’. The Chancellor Rachel Reeves certainly made little secret of her views…
The hateful posts of yet another Green party candidate
The extremism of some in the Green party is increasingly being compared to Labour in Jeremy Corbyn’s time. But there…
What’s the point of the Sussexes’ undignified Australia tour?
Not since the First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay in 1788 has a visit to Australia been so eagerly awaited…
Our gay asylum policy makes no sense
This morning, the BBC of all places, is reporting it has unearthed a ‘shadow industry of law firms and advisers’…
The lesson of Orbán: Trump must tackle corruption
The landslide defeat of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán carries lessons across the ocean for Donald Trump and both MAGA…
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’…
Organised crime is targeting artisanal food
Like him or loathe him
It’s cheering to hear very promising reports of Barrie Kosky’s production of Siegfried at Covent Garden suggesting that the Melbourne-born…
Cruelties of popular culture
Ethan Hawke is an extraordinary figure. He has made straightforward Hollywood classics like Training Day but he also comes out…
Deaths in the mind
It’s strange the way certain deaths stay in the mind perhaps because of the fascination and interconnection of the lives…
A daily beauty
It’s fascinating to see that Sharmill are presenting a new Othello from London’s Haymarket from 28 March with David Harewood…
Language
‘Hypocorism’ is another strange and wonderful word (hip-OCK-ah-riz-um.) The Oxford’s definition is: ‘pet name’. But there is a bit more…
Aussie life
St Arnaud is a tiny speck on the map of Australia. The western Victorian town is surrounded by farmland and…
Why do we loiter?
When my husband wants to do something I won’t like, such as getting tickets for Henley, he hangs about, plucking…
Zack Polanski’s plan to abolish the Grand National
Having trained the runner-up in the Grand National twice – and once in the Topham Chase for good measure –…
Why one of Renoir’s most celebrated paintings languished unloved
Shimmering off the cover of The Renoir Girls are sisters Alice (aged four) and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers (six), portrayed in…
Unravelling the infinite mysteries of physics
Can artificial intelligence become godlike? Can such technology unravel the world’s great mysteries? Can everything, from love and intuition to…
Derided as ‘feminists’: the unsung witnesses of the Nuremberg trials
There are several things wrong with James Vanderbilt’s new film Nuremberg, least of all, some might say, the fact that…
A dying fall: The Last Movement, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed
Robert Seethaler is known for celebrating the unsung: commonplace characters – peasants, labourers or shop assistants – who draw us…
The typo that spelled death in the Soviet Union
‘As anyone who has gleefully spotted a typo in a prestigious publication, felt a flicker of schadenfreude at a pompous…
‘A lost generation’: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, by Deborah Levy, reviewed
In a 2013 interview, Deborah Levy said: ‘Modernism is the soft typewriter of the womb that made me.’ But what…
The cormorant – symbol of gluttony and the Devil
Greed, death, hate and clouds of destruction – this is the cormorant season all right. I was hungry to read…
A deadly imitation game: the fate of the British teenager who posed as a Russian oligarch’s son
This story is little more than a brutal anecdote, which Patrick Radden Keefe has chosen to tell at excessive length.…
