Columnists Australia
Brown Study
This week marks the 50th anniversary of my election to the House of Representatives on 25 October, 1969. What has…
Simon Collins
For aesthetic reasons I did not participate in this year’s Sydney Skinny, the all-nude fund-raising harbour swim organised by my…
Brown study
I need your help. I am applying to the Australia Council for a literary grant and I need a few…
Brown study
I am just amazed that we seem to be sleepwalking into a complete overthrow of our structure of government and…
Simon Collins
No institutions play a bigger collective part in the socio-economic future-proofing of a country than its universities. That’s where its…
Beige open plan work space
It may seem strange that a columnist should write about his own column and, in particular about a feature as…
Brown study
There is no doubt about the vigour and enthusiasm of the Morrison government in bringing about social reform. Only the…
Woodstock woes
Thanks to the refusal of Australian weather to stick to the IPCC script, Sydneysiders have just experienced one of the…
Brown study
I have recently been reading two political books each of which was a complete waste of time and money. Then…
Brown study
I made three gigantic mistakes in my political career. Not just the usual stupid things that politicians do, like wasting…
Simon Collins
If last ditch Remainer attempts to block a no-deal Brexit fail, our head of state, already seen to have aided…
Vale Tim Fischer
Tim Fischer’s penultimate speech in the House of Representatives was in response to a motion condemning the September 11 terrorist…
Simon Collins
In a recent Speccie column my friend Giles Auty recalled his late father’s difficulties with door handles. This may have…
Simon Collins
When I filed my first Spectator piece the Aussie edition was still a twinkle in the eye of the then…
Latham’s law
If only all Australians had the same intellectual luxury available to them as the Victorian Labor Premier, Dan Andrews. Earlier…
Simon Collins
Thanks to the increasingly infantile appetite of cinema audiences and the laziness of modern screenwriters, two distinct but related film…
Latham’s law
In political history, 2019 will be remembered as the year Labor lost the unlosable election due to wrong-headed tax policies.…
Brown study
As you know, The Spectator Australia Political Research Bureau scours the globe searching for new ways in which the democratic…
Australian notes
Superglued to the Greens The great satirical novelist Evelyn Waugh once catalogued a fictional, remote and newly-converted Christian sect who…
Simon Collins
‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,’ is the opening line of The Go-Between, L. P.…
Brown study
As you know, here at The United Nations Cultural Reform Unit we have embarked on a major project to remake…
Brown study
You do not need me to recommend good books. But I will do it all the same, or at least…
Brown study
As we speak, a bright new class of newly-elected MPs and Senators is assembling in the cities, towns and remote…
Simon Collins
You keep yourself nice, you shake the right hands. You spend decades cultivating the good opinion of punters of every…
Brown study
The long march through our institutions goes on, and they are falling over like ninepins. The latest victim is the…
