Columnists Australia

Brown study

9 November 2019 9:00 am

I had just settled down in Air Canada’s luxury airliner that would whisk me across the Pacific to Vancouver and…

Simon Collins

2 November 2019 9:00 am

With its manicured beachfront and sparkling, yacht-speckled view out across the water to the harbour heads, The Bathers Pavilion at…

Brown study

2 November 2019 9:00 am

I am catching up on writing my award-winning treatise on practical politics. Here are three general principles about politics on…

Brown Study

26 October 2019 9:00 am

This week marks the 50th anniversary of my election to the House of Representatives on 25 October, 1969. What has…

Simon Collins

19 October 2019 9:00 am

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

19 October 2019 9:00 am

I need your help. I am applying to the Australia Council for a literary grant and I need a few…

Brown study

12 October 2019 9:00 am

I am just amazed that we seem to be sleepwalking into a complete overthrow of our structure of government and…

Simon Collins

5 October 2019 9:00 am

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

5 October 2019 9:00 am

It may seem strange that a columnist should write about his own column and, in particular about a feature as…

Brown study

28 September 2019 9:00 am

There is no doubt about the vigour and enthusiasm of the Morrison government in bringing about social reform. Only the…

Woodstock woes

21 September 2019 9:00 am

Thanks to the refusal of Australian weather to stick to the IPCC script, Sydneysiders have just experienced one of the…

Brown study

21 September 2019 9:00 am

I have recently been reading two political books each of which was a complete waste of time and money. Then…

Brown study

14 September 2019 9:00 am

I made three gigantic mistakes in my political career. Not just the usual stupid things that politicians do, like wasting…

Queen's Land

7 September 2019 9:00 am

If last ditch Remainer attempts to block a no-deal Brexit fail, our head of state, already seen to have aided…

Vale Tim Fischer

31 August 2019 9:00 am

Tim Fischer’s penultimate speech in the House of Representatives was in response to a motion condemning the September 11 terrorist…

Simon Collins

24 August 2019 9:00 am

In a recent Speccie column my friend Giles Auty recalled his late father’s difficulties with door handles. This may have…

Simon Collins

10 August 2019 9:00 am

When I filed my first Spectator piece the Aussie edition was still a twinkle in the eye of the then…

Latham’s law

3 August 2019 9:00 am

If only all Australians had the same intellectual luxury available to them as the Victorian Labor Premier, Dan Andrews. Earlier…

Simon Collins

27 July 2019 9:00 am

Thanks to the increasingly infantile appetite of cinema audiences and the laziness of modern screenwriters, two distinct but related film…

Latham’s law

27 July 2019 9:00 am

In political history, 2019 will be remembered as the year Labor lost the unlosable election due to wrong-headed tax policies.…

Brown study

20 July 2019 9:00 am

As you know, The Spectator Australia Political Research Bureau scours the globe searching for new ways in which the democratic…

Australian notes

20 July 2019 9:00 am

Superglued to the Greens The great satirical novelist Evelyn Waugh once catalogued a fictional, remote and newly-converted Christian sect who…

Simon Collins

13 July 2019 9:00 am

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,’ is the opening line of The Go-Between, L. P.…

Brown study

13 July 2019 9:00 am

As you know, here at The United Nations Cultural Reform Unit we have embarked on a major project to remake…

Brown study

6 July 2019 9:00 am

You do not need me to recommend good books. But I will do it all the same, or at least…