flat white

OH NO, NOT BLUEY! – Labor has started a war against speech and satire | S3 Ep 26

In this episode: Is BLUEY ground zero for the war against satire? Victoria – the reddest state – is about…

TURN THE POLITICAL TEMPERATURE DOWN… WHO TURNED IT UP?! – Labor’s outrageous hypocrisy | S3 Ep 25

In this episode: Macron’s ‘soft touch’ on far-left riot agitators. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni vows swift justice against looters. Labor’s inter-generational…

CHAMPAGNE SOCIALISM BURNS FRENCH CULTURE – and Australia’s descent into censorship | S3 Ep 24

In this episode: Far-left riots bring France to its knees while President Macron attends #CelineDion concert. Australia’s Royal Commission into…

Hot air con

It would appear that the federal Labor government has been taking lessons from its favourite bureaucrats and serving up questionable…

Jimbo is toast

Jimbo is toast: it’s the scientific consensus. His term as Treasurer of this country must end as soon as possible.…

31 Oct 2026

What went on tour should have been sorted on tour

You know something has gone awry when Labor’s Captain Sensible, former defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon, calls for an intervention against…

31 Oct 2026

The housing crisis is a hoax

Australia’s Housing Accord is a five-year plan, and it is performing exactly as five-year plans do. It promised 1.2 million…

31 Oct 2026

WA under Labor is rotten to the core

A small town in the north of Western Australia by the name of South Hedland has been the focus of…

31 Oct 2026

France’s riots are a gift to Le Pen

Few in the mainstream media spotted the irony of the BBC’s Paris correspondent describing the recent anarchy across France as…

31 Oct 2026

Australian notes

That the Bureau of Meteorology could fake and corrupt weather temperature data, as so egregiously revealed recently in a forensic…

31 Oct 2026

Potholes, political mates and Toto

Somewhere in regional Australia, a council worker is staring into a pothole large enough to qualify for its own post…

31 Oct 2026

The sewage hits the fan

A whiff of wastewater that wafted over the Cooks River has finally enveloped the Prime Minister. For weeks, Albanese insisted…

31 Oct 2026

Political trends firming against Labor

There are two leading trends in Australian politics which are firming against Labor , and which, I suspect, will hold…

31 Oct 2026

Left-wing violence

In a recent speech, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned about the deadly danger of left-wing activism, claiming that…

The left’s fraudulent language

Many years ago, I was on an appointments committee to select between two candidates for a lecturing position in the…

24 Oct 2026

How was Q Manivannan able to be elected on a student visa?

Members of the Scottish Parliament seemed genuinely surprised when this year’s Holyrood elections returned a new MSP who, it turned…

4 Nov 2026

Will Labour cave to Europe on AI?

The ramifications of the American midterms will be digested in the days that lie ahead. One likely consequence will be…

4 Nov 2026

Could Democrats bring an end to the Iran war?

Midterm elections in the United States typically centre around the bread-and-butter issues that Americans deal with on a daily basis.…

4 Nov 2026

The Democrats’ Texas victory was inevitable

No one who paid even five minutes of attention to Texas politics this autumn should be surprised by the Democrats…

4 Nov 2026

Is the John Lewis Christmas advert racist?

A white grandmother, Gloria, opens the door to her daughter’s family. From the outset, it is clear that Freddie and…

4 Nov 2026

How corruption decided the midterms

The exit polls in the midterm elections revealed that corruption in government was almost as much an issue as the…

4 Nov 2026

Trump has united America – against him

President Trump has long sought to create a political realignment in America. He succeeded on Tuesday night. In declaring that…

4 Nov 2026

In defense of Haley Stevens

The digital left has a new hate figure: Haley Stevens. She’s the Democrat who has put a bomb under the…

4 Nov 2026

Pollsters have got the US midterms wrong

I’ll be weighing in again on the midterms early Wednesday. But since this is the season of prediction, prophecy, punditry…

4 Nov 2026

Has Poland become a banana republic?

On Friday evening, policemen descended upon 12A Johann Christian Schuch Alley in Warsaw – the inconspicuous address of the constitutional…

4 Nov 2026

The Tories are still being tripped up by their own legacy

The Conservatives should be landing some pretty painful hits on Labour at the moment, given the Budget has gone down…

4 Nov 2026

The stupidity of demanding an apology for slavery

In his big Commonwealth speech in Antigua today, King Charles III is now expected to speak with “unflinching honesty” and “sincere…

4 Nov 2026

Labour MPs declare war over sex

Oh dear. It is a day ending in ‘y’ – so of course another Labour backbencher is going to the…

4 Nov 2026

Why migration is ‘a massive class issue’

Shabana Mahmood was supposed to be the one who got it. Of all of Labour’s top team, the Birmingham woman…

3 Nov 2026

Rachel Reeves’s attempt to save her reputation is futile

She may have been one of the most unpopular chancellors of modern times, widely mocked during her tenure in the…

3 Nov 2026

How looting came to Germany this Halloween

On Halloween it is traditional in Germany to greet trick or treaters with the cry of ‘sweet or sour?’. This…

3 Nov 2026

New Zealand election musings

By the time you read this, the New Zealand election will be about a week away. Now I’d like to…

27 Oct 2026

Why you shouldn’t shrug at New Zealand’s greyhound racing ban

Greyhound racing ended in New Zealand on August 1. Those who neither own a greyhound nor care for the sport…

9 Aug 2026

A New Zealand republic in Jacinda Ardern’s lifetime?

New Zealand’s former Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, believes the nation will become a republic within her lifetime. We have heard…

21 Jun 2026

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…

4 Mar 2026

Aussie life

Small boys have always had big parts in fables – putting fingers in dykes, crying wolf, climbing beanstalks and so…

31 Oct 2026

Language

There it was in the newspaper – the use of ‘hone in on’ when the only correct usage is ‘home…

31 Oct 2026

Can racing survive Labour’s gambling tax rises?

By the age of 13, Alex Wood was a virtuoso violinist, though he was later sentenced to seven years in…

31 Oct 2026

Is it too much to expect my useless cat to catch rats?

Roux the cat stared at the rat, decided it was a bad do and retreated. The rat was screaming so…

31 Oct 2026

In praise of Piedmontese wines

Authors hate it when reviewers refer to their book as a ‘weighty tome’ as it implies that the contents are…

31 Oct 2026

One for the Prefab Sprout diehards

‘One for the heads’ is the phrase that traditionally covers the more outré elements of a band’s career: the outtakes,…

31 Oct 2026

Singsong vapidity: The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse, by Heather Morris, reviewed

The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse is from Heather Morris, whose 2012 novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz began the vogue for…

31 Oct 2026

How can we fool ourselves that chatbots feel anything for us?

Imagine that a good friend of yours has fallen for a psychopath, a man or woman who seems superficially charming…

31 Oct 2026

Why a frothy Jane Austen adaptation is always imminent

There has never been a good screen adaptation of a Jane Austen novel. There have been plenty of films with…

31 Oct 2026

The felled tree that devastated Britain

It was just a tree, a beautiful tree, in a strikingly beautiful place. Yet when the two friends Daniel Graham…

31 Oct 2026

Return of the war-weary: Gjak, by Dimosthenis Papamarkos, reviewed

The Second Greco-Turkish War (1919-22) ended catastrophically for Greece and led to a massive population exchange: аt least 1.2 million…

31 Oct 2026

‘An inspiration to all under his command’: the cheerful courage of Brian Franks

They say there are old soldiers and bold soldiers but very few old, bold soldiers. Well, Tim Spicer is pretty…

31 Oct 2026