The hidden costs of incompatible immigration
This is the end of the Teals
Hold on a moment… Conservatives are given plenty of stick for not being able to define what they stand for,…
No, One Nation isn’t giving land to Musk or Israel
In a podcast livestreamed this afternoon, Senator Malcolm Roberts clarified One Nation’s position in regard to Gina Rinehart’s comments about…
Nuclear will save us from renewables
It has been convenient for renewable energy enthusiasts to blame nuclear energy policy for Peter Dutton’s demise. Of course, this…
No, Tony Abbott is not a Populist
There is an article in The Saturday Paper floating the idea that Tony Abbott is a Populist (according to an…
One Nation supporters are the underdogs
None of them get it – not journalists, academics, big business, policymakers, or the major parties. One Nation supporters are…
Blair, Starmer, and the destruction of greatness
‘I met Murder on the way – he had a mask like Castlereagh.’ – Percy Bysshe Shelley With Keir Starmer…
Australian schools must teach Anne Frank
The decision by any school to refuse to teach The Diary of Anne Frank should concern every Australian who values…
Sage advice for One Nation
They say the worst vice is advice. However, if I were advising Pauline Hanson or One Nation, my first piece…
The hidden costs of incompatible immigration
If Australians are serious about social cohesion and the safety of women and children, we must have difficult conversations about…
Albanese puts the brake on Australia’s next resources boom
Australia’s resource sector has long underpinned our national prosperity. From iron ore and gold to lithium, rare earths and critical…
Which party has the best energy policy?
One Nation’s climate and energy policy is central to the savings they expect to make if they win the next…
Who ends the churn?
On the night of June 18, in a sliver of north-west England few outside Wigan could place on a map,…
One Nation’s Gen Z problem
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is currently one of the most popular parties in Australia, with polling suggesting that a growing…
Mr President, take a leaf out of the Desert Storm playbook
Israel and the US have waged a stop-start war against the Islamic Republic Guard Corps (IRGC) since February 28, 2026.…
Karl Stefanovic’s departure from Nine points to bigger themes
The circumstances surrounding the departure from Nine of its biggest personalities, Karl Stefanovic, points to the future of mainstream or…
Where did our privacy go?
Personal privacy is a fundamental human right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 12 and is an imperative…
Regime change in Iran happens when Pahlavi is in Tehran
President Trump claimed several times, particularly during the course of the Iran war in March, that regime change had already…
Welcome to monocultural Australia
This debate about culture – multiculturalism versus monoculturalism – was sparked by Pauline Hanson’s comments at the National Press Club…
Vale, Teena McQueen
It is with deep sadness and shock that I learned of the passing away of Teena McQueen, former Vice President…
Who gets to program our reality?
Recently, Palantir chief executive Alex Karp predicted that artificial intelligence companies could be nationalised within the next few years. Perhaps…
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…
The good ol’ days
I’m not really one for pining for the good ol’ days, when things were splendid and now, they’re not. Apart…
Labour’s messiah seizes the crown
The momentous 18 June Makerfield by-election in Wigan, in northern England’s once-industrial heartland, marks the second time the town has…
Chalmers’ war on capitalists
How many Australian businesses must fail before another generation of politicians learns one of the oldest lessons in economics? State-directed…
Chokepoints seldom last
In 1973, Opec Arab members cut production and imposed an oil embargo to inflict revenge on Western countries for supporting…
An American Monarch
On the Fourth of July, the United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of their separation from the British Crown.…
Comrade Chalmers’ class war budget
Labor’s 2026 budget delivered barely six weeks ago, is a masterclass in deception and incompetence. It attracted widespread, well deserved,…
The world’s worst case of TDS
I write this week from Britain’s first and oldest colony. If you’re thinking, ‘He’s in Bermuda’ that’s a good guess.…
Housing daze
Australia’s love affair with property is older than the nation itself. From the earliest days of settlement, land was the…
The real significance of the Israel-Lebanon agreement
Even before the ink on the agreement between Israel and Lebanon was dry, its opponents began trying to destroy it.…
The social contract is fundamentally broken
As the eyes of the nation flit between the dramas of Westminster, Wigan and the World Cup, there is no…
Andy Burnham’s reality TV show rise
I knew that the endless hours I’d spent watching reality TV would one day stand me in good stead in…
Labour’s latest immigration plan is pure insanity
Last week, almost a thousand more illegal migrants entered the country via small boats. Over 204,000 have arrived since 2018.…
Is Britain doomed?
In the wake of Keir Starmer’s resignation much has been made of the fact that in the past decade we…
Farage and Kemi’s pitch for conservative hearts and minds
At the entrance to the hangar-like Olympia conference centre is a huge, framed drawing, showing a design for an imagined…
Is the US-Israel special relationship over?
Until recently, the Israeli right regarded US President Donald Trump as its greatest ally. He was often described in quasi-religious…
It turns out being a hunter-gatherer wasn’t so great after all
The science writer Jared Diamond once called agriculture ‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race’. Yuval Noah…
Is Trump’s quest for peace doomed?
J.D. Vance jokingly compared himself to Richard Nixon earlier this week. ‘Young senator, vice-president, writes some bestselling books, is hated…
Venezuela’s earthquake is the cruelest blow
Venezuela thought its luck was changing. Then the earthquakes stuck. For a country that’s economy has long been in tatters,…
Is Burnham brave enough to scrap the triple lock?
Loss avoidance is one of the strongest forces in the world. It’s a fundamental of human nature – and therefore…
Six ways the BBC could save money
I’m unlikely to be invited to dinner at BBC director general Matt Brittin’s any time soon but judging by the…
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…
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…
Will the Iran deal destroy J.D. Vance?
Beauty, blarney and banshees
It’s a bit odd in its way that a fair fraction of the more or less British theatre we watch…
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…
Aussie life
Measuring tobacco consumption is dirty work, but somebody has to do it. The antiseptic image of the government statistician has…
Language
The word of the moment is undoubtedly ‘monocultural’. In her take-no-prisoners speech at the National Press Club Pauline Hanson said…
Why should we call Turkey ‘Türkiye’?
Thank heaven my husband doesn’t even pretend to like football. Indeed he emphasises his indifference by making ironic remarks like:…
Dear Mary: can I accuse a writer of using AI?
Q. I work at a magazine and am occasionally (and perhaps with increasing frequency) sent articles that strike me as…
Dull, duller and Dulles – was Churchill’s jibe about America’s Cold War icon unfair?
In the era of Trumpian foreign policy incoherence, a new intellectual biography of the American Cold War icon John Foster…
Nagging doubts: Twenty Minutes of Silence, by Hélène Bessette, reviewed
One critic memorably described Waiting for Godot as a play in which nothing happens, twice. Twenty Minutes of Silence is…
Chinese puzzle or matryoshka doll – the complexity of Sino-Russia relations
China and Russia are twins. Both are great Asian land empires; both are continental, multi-ethnic powers that expanded by pushing…
Hot and bothered: Trouble Was, by Charlotte Edwardes, reviewed
Child narrators are tricky little beasts. Misjudge their vocabulary and they lose all credibility or are unreadably twee. Even the…
Blame the Enlightenment for species extinction
As if she hadn’t got enough on her plate already, the high-powered Danish journalist and mother of three Lea Korsgaard…
The imaginative genius behind the Great Exhibition
If you want to understand Victorian Britain, look to the Great Exhibition of 1851. At a time of unprecedented technological…
Who needs an Italian beach when we have our own lidos?
With his 2012 book, The A303: Highway to the Sun, the author and psychogeographer Tom Fort pulled on his driving…
The tragedy of Paul Celan – trapped in his own allusive poems
Some time in the late 1950s, Jacques Derrida and other intellectual luminaries at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris were…
