AI is a psychopath
Did anyone else catch that fleeting headline in the Daily Mail, claiming: Chinese AI tool told researchers how to make biological weapons…
Wake up, Bowen. Nap time is over!
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen doesn’t seem to be enjoying is multi-million-dollar pre-COP soirée. Aside from criticism that…
Shoebridge’s obsession with turtle politics
You have to admire the commitment to delusion. Newly appointed Greens Leader, David Shoebridge, fronted the cameras and declared his…
The price of coffee could lose Albo the election
The price of coffee is set to become an election-defining issue after the Prime Minister was ridiculed and community-noted across…
Fizzer in Fiji takes the wind out of Bowen’s turbines
Four years of promises, modelling, and National Press Club performances have run into higher electricity bills, angry people who live…
One day on the road to Moora
Have you read Xavier Herbert’s masterpiece, Poor Fellow my Country? You should, it’s about life in the Northern Territory between…
Every radical has an origin story
Tucker Carlson recently made the mistake of debating Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg on war and history. It didn’t go well. Rees-Mogg…
Where is Australia’s Gettysburg address?
Once upon a time, there was Camelot, when the world was ruled by US President John F. Kennedy and his…
Albanese is a global citizen, but whose world is it?
Perhaps Latika Bourke asked the question many Australians will be thinking… While Anthony Albanese was preparing to receive the Atlantic…
Ted Lasso was wrong about kindness
Think of the last meeting where somebody floated a dud idea and the whole room knew it. Did anyone say…
Boys are no longer educated, they are emasculated
Boys are struggling in literacy, completion, and behaviour. It is no secret. In March 2026 Education Minister Jason Clare opened…
Never forget the evil of October 7
It seems like only yesterday, but it was in fact three years ago when David Adler rang me on that…
From Reith to Rishworth and beyond
In 1993, Peter Reith wrote in his diaries and republished in his memoir, The Reith Papers, that even though the…
Rumble in the shallows
Coogee has always known how to draw a crowd. On Anzac Day 1935, a tiger shark on display at the…
Louise Clegg is right about the Teals. Now, the hard part…
I should declare a bias. I have always been a little wary of Louise Clegg’s view of the world, partly…
Chris Bowen doesn’t need a Khemlani, he’s got you and me
Whitlam’s infamous Minister for Minerals and Energy, Rex Connor, set in motion the wheels that led to The Dismissal on…
Flight 1073 and what we can learn from modern-day Spartans
While we celebrate the heroism that saved many lives on board Flydubai flight 1073, we should take the opportunity to…
Multiculturalism and the great Australian levelling
With One Nation now polling at or above Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition a distant third, Australia appears to be…
Iran needs another Cyrus the Great
At a time when Iran’s name has once again become a focus of international attention, the recent remarks by Benjamin…
Bill 691 and the French crisis of trust
France is once again on the streets. Across the country, students are protesting over overcrowded classrooms and deteriorating educational conditions.…
ALBO, THE COFFEE WHISPERER – Labor might be the worst economic managers of all time | S3 Ep 22
In this episode… Albo’s ‘not-so-cheap’ coffee. ☕️ Is Jim Chalmers a good Treasurer? Is the 5% house deposit scheme causing…
GLOBALIST IN CHIEF – Albanese accepts his award & Trump cancels ‘Fake News’ Media | S3 Ep 21
This week… Javier Milei ‘rips the United Nations to shreds’. Albanese’s good little globalist award. Digital Duty of Censorship… I…
SILENCE OF THE ROYALS – Spencer’s memoir and the death of the last Royal carriage maker | S3 Ep 20
This week with Professor David Flint. Does the ghost of Princess Diana still pose a threat to King Charles’ legacy?…
Third anniversary, October 7
The release of the Coalition’s immigration policy coincided with the third anniversary this week of the horrific 7 October massacre,…
Albo’s out of control spending
Almost fifty years ago, in his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan said, ‘We don’t have inflation because the…
Cowardly corporate crony capitalists rule
Last week, I attended the annual conference of the H.R. Nicholls Society. The society is ‘dedicated to advocating for sensible…
Giggle v. Tickle v. Macbeth
Talking recently with an old acquaintance, now a barrister, I spoke of how disappointing it was that the High Court…
Go directly to jail!
Having addressed the position of the ever-shrivelling teals last week, I was well into drafting a piece turning to focus…
Business/Robbery, etc
There’s now a coal boom in Asia that the ideology-driven, anti-coal Albanese Labor government doesn’t want to know about –…
En garde! China and AI
Early in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Butch finds himself facing the intimidating Harvey Logan, who has decided that…
Painted clay
‘The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation: that away, men are but gilded loam or painted clay.’ That’s…
Hamas: Triumph of the intellectuals
On 7 October 2023, the world experienced in a real-time livestream what the absence of a secure Jewish state meant…
Australia on a road to ruin
Australians’ pessimism about the future of the country is now probably at its highest level. Polling suggests an extraordinary two…
Return of the King
King Coal is back! This week the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission gave permission for two coalminers in the…
Brown study
I don’t know if Anthony Albanese actually learned anything from his recent sojourn at the United Nations, but I doubt…
The decade of Trump has been a necessary corrective
The past two centuries have been the era of mass production, of people as well as things. To a degree…
Britannia Shield won’t keep the UK safe from Russia, but Israel might
When Donald Trump announced with great bombast his plan for an American ‘Golden Dome’, he promised an all-encompassing shield that…
My best friend Jeffrey Archer
Jeffrey Archer was my closest and dearest friend for 40 years. I first met him in 1986 when we were…
Burnham’s Berlin visit won’t give Merz the boost he’s hoping for
Andy Burnham makes his first visit as Prime Minister to Germany today in an attempt to further strengthen the country’s…
France’s student protests always go the same way
The world is watching alarming scenes in the burnished boulevards of Paris where riot police are using batons and tear…
The Tories love Kemi – but who loves them?
I swear that every year the introductions to leaders’ speeches at party conferences become more and more of a circus.…
Fourteen things we learned from Kemi Badenoch’s Tory conference speech
Kemi Badenoch delivered her Conservative party conference speech in Birmingham this afternoon. Here are fourteen things we learned from her…
Inside the October 7 Palestine march
The anti-Israel mob has a new mission: to erase the truth about October 7, 2023. The sadistic violence unleashed by…
It’s no surprise Burnham wants to delay boosting defence spending
There was a grim inevitability about this. ‘Whitehall sources’, which is almost always code for the government rolling the pitch…
Why Kemi Badenoch should end devolution
A Spectator reader and Kemi Badenoch enthusiast gets in touch occasionally to remind me of my brief flirtation with Robert…
Could a steak chain heiress bring down Germany’s former spy chief?
Has a custody dispute involving the multi-millionaire heiress of a steak chain brought down the former head of Germany’s foreign…
Cristiano Ronaldo is acting like a big baby
Cristiano Ronaldo, football’s biggest cry baby, simply has no idea when to stop. He threw his toys out of the…
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…
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…
The anti-Semitic alliance between Restore and the Greens
That sinister sense of comic patter
Harold Pinter is one of the great dramatists of the last hundred years, perhaps the only one who can hold…
From another world
It’s striking what we can experience if we look back at the images of the recent past, aided by YouTube.…
An elegance that is hair-raising
Sometimes cultural news is just bad news. Everyone was delighted at the thought that Joanna Murray-Smith’s Switzerland was being turned…
A gorgeous evocation of the natural world
The world of artistic expression runs in a thousand ways. The Melbourne Symphony’s Spring Gala – paralleling the Opera’s Wagner…
A literary romp: Our Noble Selves, by Kate Atkinson, reviewed
It is hard to imagine a setting better suited to bureaucratic absurdity than the lead-up to the 1951 Festival of…
All the big hitters are here: scenes from the golden age of boxing
In 1891, in Thomas Edison’s makeshift film studio – a shack in West Orange, New Jersey – two men put…
Winning hearts and minds: propaganda of the Spanish Civil War
History, as the aphorism frequently attributed to Winston Churchill would have it, is written by the victors. This certainly holds…
A bullying monster: the infamous Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s early mentor
For several decades, Roy Cohn (1927-86) was the man you needed to know if you wanted to get to know…
Famous for being famous – the scandalous life of the Countess of Castiglione
‘The whore of the Risorgimento’ or ‘the divine Countess’ – Virginia Oldoini Verasis di Castiglione was among the most extravagantly…
Adventures of the Time Traveler’s daughter: Life Out of Order, by Audrey Niffenegger, reviewed
There is only one problem with this beautiful, elegiac novel, a glorious hodgepodge mash-up of time travelling and apocalyptic eco-fiction:…
They don’t make men like Erroll Prior-Palmer any more
Erroll Prior-Palmer had one decision to make on D-Day. It wasn’t as momentous as Eisenhower’s to launch the invasion, having…
The mystery of Easter Island’s still undeciphered script
When British and Ottoman forces defeated the remnants of Napoleon’s army in Egypt, General Menou, the Frenchman in charge of…