Albo’s boob job
AI gives us 16 new viruses
‘For several years now, scientists have been able to synthesise viruses from scratch,’ stated an article in Wired. ‘These are typically…
Pauline Hanson vs anti-capitalist students
There has been nation-wide scorn and fits of eye-rolling over a planned student ‘protest’ against Pauline Hanson. To quote our…
Victoria’s emergency reset
I’m not Daniel Andrews. I’m not Jacinta Allan. It’s surprising these declarations weren’t followed up with, I’m not Labor! For…
Has One Nation forced Tony Burke to get serious about migration?
One Nation is driving the conversation about mass migration. Now, they appear to have forced Labor’s hand. Okay, nudged their…
Japanese melons and the malaise of modern politics
The debasement of Australian politics could scarcely get much lower thanks to our witless Prime Minister and more than a…
A modern-day Odyssey
The release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has brought back vivid childhood memories. My childhood was a little unusual: instead…
The curious case of the wrong feelings
‘The world is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel.’ I came across that…
WA Parliament should keep the Lord’s Prayer
Lachlan Hunter MLA recently made a spirited defence of reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the WA Parliament. I agree with…
The One Nation of our discontent
Another Australian flag is going up in my street in regional NSW. Unlike the regional Australia Chris Bowen spoke of…
Strategy of the pro-Australia parties to the next election
With Australia’s first hard-left Prime Minister – who presents himself as a centrist, gaining the leadership of the Labor Party…
Iran containment has failed; Europe must enable the transition
The images of thousands of Moroccans pouring across the border into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta should be understood as…
International Law and the immigration game
The ‘Views of Hosts’ were a list of regulations made by a statute of 1439 which required that money made…
A mostly cynical, mushroom-cloud-shaped message to Moscow
Tom Lewis has written a challenging article in these pages arguing that, as the headline accurately sums up his position,…
Patriotism: the last default
The great membership institutions of Australian life – the churches, the unions, the parties, the married family – are dying…
Census: a question of religion
There is a particular kind of Australian argument that goes on for years without anyone thinking to check the equipment.…
The de-Christianisation of the nation
In Australia, people are confronted by the rapid, almost irreversible, de-Christianisation of their country. The National Church Life Survey estimates…
Should Australia care where migrants spend their money?
Australian immigration is a story as old as time. It’s as sure as sunshine in Queensland, dirt in the desert,…
Identity politics is the root cause of Albo’s success
A cartoon that appeared in The Industrial Worker in 1911 outlined the Pyramid of the Capitalist System. The pyramid consists…
Australia’s doctors need their Kory moment
On August 5, a United States federal court did something no Australian court has ever done for a medical practitioner:…
Why did it take the ABC 25 days to say ‘sorry’ for torture fantasy?
Imagine a major television network airing a segment in which a contestant fantasises, in graphic detail, about sexually torturing a…
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…
Can Ben, the Kmart kid, avert the crash?
Around the corner from where we live in suburban Melbourne, there is a sign that reads ‘Fault Identified’. It is…
It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world
Let me pick out just two examples of ours being a mad, mad, mad, mad world – one here in…
The fiftieth time
In April last year a journalist asked the Prime Minister a plain question. Would he rule out any change to…
The Greta Thunberg of Cambridge
The University of Bergen in Norway a few years ago produced a short but witty video for students on the…
ABC cancels suicide note
Edmund Burke notably recalled in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, that it was 16 or 17 years since…
Business/Robbery, etc
Last Tuesday’s Census will confirm just how disastrous the impact of fundamental changes in Australia’s housing have been on the…
Spain ignites a Third World invasion
The apocalyptic images of 70,000 illegal immigrants storming into Ceuta, one of Spain’s two territories in North Africa – accompanied,…
Clancy of the Overlooked
Can mRNA vaccines weaken your immune system, making you vulnerable to certain forms of cancer? An AI-assisted search of the…
Britain’s economy is growing – but not enough
Prime Minister Andy Burnham and his Chancellor John Healey are not having a bad start. Sure, there’s trouble ahead: the…
Where do asylum seekers live in Britain?
Andy Burnham says ‘we cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country’ that house refugees…
Let cyclists pee in public
Demi Vollering, Juliette Berthet and Célia Gery are phenomenal athletes. They are all in the FDJ United-SUEZ cycling team and…
Mike Lindell’s sleepless night
Mike Lindell is not ready to rest his weary head. The MyPillow magnate stepped aside from his bedding business to…
Bribing Scots to stay in the UK won’t work forever
A country is not a fiscal transfer. It can be many things – a loose federation of diverging cultures, a…
Unite members sit out leadership vote
A meagre 10 per cent of Unite members bothered to vote in the union’s election for general secretary. Arch-lefty Sharon…
Andy Burnham is already in a migration muddle
In the run-up to his coup against Sir Keir Starmer, Andy Burnham was sold to wavering Labour MPs as the…
Francesca Hong’s defeat won’t stop the Democratic Socialists
So, at time of writing, it looks as if voters don’t want to cancel Thanksgiving – on balance, at least.…
Do we really all have to ‘play our part’ housing asylum seekers?
Andy Burnham wants ‘all parts of the country…to play their part’. Not because we’re at war, or another pandemic is…
The myth of Britain’s functioning probation service
The crisis in the criminal justice system will be the defining domestic policy issue of Andy Burnham’s government. The warning…
Is this the best Labour can do?
Will Andy Burnham call an autumn general election and take advantage of his prime ministerial honeymoon, or will he go…
In defence of betting shops
Unlike a few others, I was prepared to give Andy Burnham the benefit of the doubt – and hold back on…
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…
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a triumph
An aggravated splendour
Rod Liddle, who died on 2 August, was a journalist of genius and you could only feel a bit wonder-struck…
An exercise in murder
A friend said recently that the only two people he knew who had read Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers…
A gurgle of merriment
Chekhov is tricky. He’s not someone we think of as uproarious but the playwright himself used sometimes to complain that…
High Antipodean
The death of that fabled cricketer Sir Garfield Sobers – one of the greatest all-rounders who ever lived – is…
What Israel can learn from its long history of sectarianism
According to conventional wisdom, David was a proper hero. He slew Goliath; he wrote beautiful psalms; he built Jerusalem. His…
A heady cocktail of coquetry and extortion: The Millionaire Waltz, by Anthony Quinn, reviewed
Anthony Quinn’s deliciously dark, theatrical-set murder mystery Curtain Call announced the former film critic as a popular novelist of the…
The tiny island in the wild North Atlantic that ‘feels like the safest place in the world’
Tim Ecott has always been drawn to islands, and the seas that surround them: ‘I once ran away from England…
How a young inventor with no printing experience revolutionised the newspaper world
Here’s a quiz for you. On the third floor of the New York Public Library is a vast mural painted…
A question of identity: Passage, by Colin Thubron, reviewed
Colin Thubron’s compact, elegant and beautifully written new novel opens with a woman undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumour.…
Do we really want to live in a world where we’re perpetually spied on?
Some people think that the United Kingdom ranks as an unusually surveillance-heavy society, what with all the CCTV installations, doorbell…
What’s in a kiss? A millennium of mixed messages
Kissing is a tricky subject. It has a complex, baffling history. The kiss of a baby is one thing; the…
Together and apart: How to Make a Woman, by Marie Darrieussecq, reviewed
Two girls in Basque south-west France in the 1980s have been best friends since early childhood. Rose is the good…