Cliffhanger
More than poor taste: Albo is living on the cliffs
‘Read the room…’ is what an exhausted Labor supporter wrote on X, having cringed at the Prime Minister’s defence of…
Trump stumbles over transgender comment
‘Cat amongst the pigeons’ is the idiom that comes to mind this afternoon following Donald Trump’s comments regarding transgender surgery…
Are Australia’s childish premiers jealous of the King’s popularity?
Support for a republic is at an all-time low. So low, indeed, that Anthony Albanese has quietly abolished the Assistant…
No means no: one year on from the Voice to Parliament
One year ago, Australia told the Canberra Bubble ‘no’. No, we will not accept racial division. No, we will not…
What green energy transition?
Last week the Net Zero universe was alive with the sounds of jubilation as the penetration of unreliable energy into…
Lessons from the new American right
Australian centre-right politicians are very fond of quoting Winston Churchill. One of the last pieces of advice that great wartime…
The US election, attempts to assassinate Trump, cancel culture, and the prisoner’s dilemma
A dilemma that has dogged conservatives since the emergence of so-called ‘woke’ progressive politics is how best to respond to…
AEU serving themselves, not teachers or students
The Australian Education Union’s (AEU) reckless decision to slap work bans on crucial teaching reforms designed to improve learning for…
The ‘baby bust’
The ‘youthquake’ of Africa will look like this, the UN projects. The continent’s 54 countries are expected to host 2.9…
Krakow is always a good idea
Some time ago I read an article in the The Spectator Australia about Paris. The author was an Englishman, but…
The deconstruction of Australia’s society
In the late 1980s, the communist world collapsed, and the Cold War international system became history. It is in this…
The Babylon Bee sues California for silencing satire
California’s Democrats are being sued for shutting down satire. At the centre of the 72-page lawsuit is the right to…
Green Hydrogen limps toward inevitable demise
Fortescue Metals Group, a leading Australian iron ore miner, has been actively pursuing green hydrogen as a key component of…
Australia and its King
If we believe the mass media, the monarchy is no longer a divinely ordained institution, but only another part of…
Antisemitism is an ongoing plague at the UN
The rise of anti-Semitism in Australia has continued in recent months, aided and abetted by the Greens. The Labor government,…
SpaceX launch blocked by Californian bureaucrats
The Californian Coastal Commission have voted down a request from SpaceX to increase space flights. Launch limits per year were…
Language and the left
If you work in a university as I do then you’ll be well aware of how academic writing and academic…
Jimbo’s circular economy
I was reading about the Productivity Commission’s most recently commissioned inquiry into the circular economy, ordered by Jimbo, our esteemed…
It’s the cost of government, stupid
Australia is not facing a cost-of-living crisis but rather a ‘cost-of-government’ crisis. A crisis borne of an inefficient and bloated…
Britannia waives the rules
Once upon a time Britain’s rule stretched from Westminster, across the Indian sub-continent to South East Asia, North America, Australia,…
Antisemitism on the menu
‘This cute French restaurant will deliver you dinner on a bike,’ says the headline on a TimeOut review of Bistro…
Four simple truths about Israel
After the unimaginable events of last year and the perverse pile-on of Israel, Jews have been faced with those who…
Business/Robbery, etc
Australia would not be alone in being grateful, as recommended in the Weekend Australian by former top defence and home…
More wins for Europe’s right
Nothing propels the advance of the Western anti-immigration right like a renewed display of Islamist fanaticism. And so it was…
How much trouble is Rachel Reeves in?
The countdown to Labour’s first budget for 14 years continues. Unfortunately for Rachel Reeves, the mood music is not particularly…
The slippery slope of assisted dying
Critics of the Assisted Dying Bill have been warning for a while that it would lead to a ‘slippery slope’.…
Kamala creaks in hard-hitting Fox News interview
Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with Fox News’s Bret Baier for a half-hour interview in which Baier politely took…
Science Secretary failed to declare Taylor Swift tickets on time
Dear oh dear. Science Secretary Peter Kyle has certainly had better days in office. Despite Kyle insisting in the Commons…
How New Zealand managed to sink a tenth of its naval fleet
New Zealand just lost one tenth of its naval defence fleet. The HMNZS Manawanui – the jewel in the nation’s small military…
How does New Zealand solve a problem like China?
New Zealand’s most important trading partner is also the nation’s biggest security headache, according to a new risk-assessment report produced…
Why are so many young people abandoning New Zealand?
Heading to the UK is a longstanding rite of cultural passage for many Kiwis. People like my youngest son, who…
Kiwi life
New Zealand in crisis Given the destruction the previous Labour government inflicted on this country, and the damage caused by…
Israel’s Iron Prime Minister
A level of grandeur
You can hardly complain about the state of classical music in this country at the moment. The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra…
Grave and terrible elements
There’s something horrifying about Monsters, the Netflix streamer about the Menendez brothers who, back in 1989, murdered their mother and…
Why Threads is still the most terrifying film ever made
As we inch ever closer to Halloween, the inevitable lists of the scariest films ever made have already begun to…
Paul McCartney never got over his filmmaking flop
Witnessing the recent imperial progress of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, it occurred to me how impossible it is to imagine…
The journalist’s journalist: the irrepressible Claud Cockburn
No one should be put off reading Patrick Cockburn’s remarkable biography of his father by its misleading subtitle. ‘Guerrilla journalism’…
The court favourite who became the most hated man in England
The Duke of Buckingham, wrote Alexandre Dumas, lived ‘one of those fabulous existences which survive… to astonish posterity’. In the…
A scorched Earth: Juice, by Tim Winton, reviewed
Late last year in Australia’s The Monthly, Tim Winton wrote an essay on the urgent need for writers to look…
The rollercoaster ride of the world’s most reckless investor
For a few days in February 2000, Masayoshi Son was the richest person in the world. A risk-taker and showman,…
The magic of carefully crafted words
Early one morning, Alan Garner goes to let the hens out. The hens live in a hutch in the garden…
Whipping up a masterpiece: painters and their materials
If you are someone who revels in the deliciousness of oil paintings, who looks at them and wants to eat…
Mounting suspicion: The Fate of Mary Rose, by Caroline Blackwood, reviewed
‘She was dead even before I became aware of her existence.’ The menacing opening line of this gripping novel is…
And still the colonial memoirs keep coming…
Since the 1990s there has been a spate of post-colonial memoirs written by white Africans. The best was Rian Malan’s…