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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…

18 Apr 2026

Remembering Bert Kelly

I was lucky enough to become friendly with Bert Kelly MP in the last years of his life. Bert had…

18 Apr 2026

The ignorant Aussie

In my view the true nature of the Liberal party became apparent during the vote on the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate…

18 Apr 2026

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…

18 Apr 2026

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,…

18 Apr 2026

FoolWatch

Having abandoned the notion of pretending it isn’t facing a fuel crisis, the Albanese government’s bright idea to bring down…

18 Apr 2026

Top Brasso

After my article last week on what is called the ‘civilianisation’ of military justice, I found myself in a series…

18 Apr 2026

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…

16 Apr 2026

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…

16 Apr 2026

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,…

16 Apr 2026

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…

16 Apr 2026

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…

16 Apr 2026

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…

16 Apr 2026

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…

15 Apr 2026

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…

15 Apr 2026

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…

15 Apr 2026

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…

15 Apr 2026

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’…

15 Apr 2026

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…

15 Apr 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

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…

22 Dec 2025

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…

8 Nov 2025

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’…

3 Nov 2025

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…

18 Apr 2026

Aussie life

St Arnaud is a tiny speck on the map of Australia. The western Victorian town is surrounded by farmland and…

18 Apr 2026

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…

18 Apr 2026

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 –…

18 Apr 2026

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…

18 Apr 2026

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…

18 Apr 2026

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…

18 Apr 2026

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…

18 Apr 2026

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…

18 Apr 2026

‘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…

18 Apr 2026

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…

18 Apr 2026

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.…

18 Apr 2026