Woke, broke, ridiculed Victoria
The Chalmers diet
Sydney’s working class look hungry. By that I mean, they are getting noticeably thinner. My advice to the political class…
Nepal and the scam of climate reparations
When the Earth shakes – climate reparations fall out. That may be the eventual lesson of the Nepal flood that…
Why is Albanese so defensive about Bowen’s tropical talkfest?
The Prime Minister appeared distinctly agitated when answering questions about Bowen’s expensive and poorly attended paradise climate talkfest in Fiji.…
Is offshore wind a defence risk?
Here are two things worth considering… Firstly, green energy projects and state government agendas envision a version of Australia essentially…
One Nation stands against extremism on both sides
Immigration is the question of our generation. How we, as legislators and citizens, answer it will determine what sort of…
One Nation is here to stay … but where do they fit?
The rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has been meteoric. With the collapse in the Coalition’s polling, its own documented…
Beggars beware! The government is here to ‘help’
The Victorian government is proposing to decriminalise begging as an offence, but is this benevolence or perhaps something else more…
Establishment attacks! Pauline explodes leftie brains
Tim Burton’s 1996 black comedy Mars Attacks! used Slim Whitman’s song ‘Indian Love Call’ to blow out the brains of…
Woke, broke, ridiculed Victoria
This moment in Victoria’s history could not be more critical. With about 70 days until the most pivotal state election…
Throwing the first stone
There’s a quote I remember from my Sunday School days that has been brought to mind by this week’s news…
Politicians discover men
How refreshing to hear a man in power call out the bias baked into our institutions against men. Let alone…
Superannuation needs a new public debate
Fundamentally, superannuation is in place to ensure today’s income earners finance their own retirement. Around the world, old-age pensions, provided…
Has the curriculum been feminised?
The leader of the National Party, Matt Canavan, argues one of the reasons boys are attracted to toxic material on…
The cheque from Berlin
Germany wants to help pay for Britain’s nuclear weapons. Pause on that for a moment. The country that the non-proliferation…
A digital duty of care: taking failure to its illogical conclusion?
The Albanese Labor government has announced that a digital duty of care will be imposed on social media companies to…
Defend sacred ground
I am a co-convenor of the Defend Sacred Ground campaign, which I would like to frame in a wider context.…
Grievance: the insurgency with 50 years to run
Samuel Thawley’s essay in these pages this week did something Australian economic writing almost never does. It located the pain.…
Bicycle helmets and the bubble-wrapping of Australia
A couple of weekends ago, I was reminded of my recent trip to London by Bernard Salt’s article in The…
From Athens to Albo: free speech and history
In our late democratic culture, where rights come cheap and easy, one could be forgiven for thinking our freedoms work…
The wrong man answered
Andrew Tate’s apparent downfall has been satisfying to watch. It shouldn’t be reassuring. If Tate were the problem, his disappearance…
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…
Hastie & Pickering
It’s fascinating to compare the current imbroglio between two potential political leaders: Warren Pickering, of whom nobody had ever heard…
If 9/11 happened today
Twenty-five years on, if the 9/11 terrorist attack by al-Qaeda happened today, the response in Australia and countries such as…
The Plibersek paradox
It’s surely impossible to imagine Tanya Plibersek – Plibbers to most of us – ever being the prime minister of…
Business/Robbery, etc
Good news? Or the harbinger of a China-led destruction of the world financial order? When Australian gold exports soared last…
How the party elected to tackle debt fuelled it instead
That the Australian economy is in a mess should not surprise. It should also not surprise that the Albanese government…
Save Nepal – ban continental drift
India started to pull away from Antarctica 132 million years ago and 112 million years ago India fully detached from…
Climate exposé ignored
Artificial intelligence has an unintended talent to entertain through its predictability. Challenge elite orthodoxy on global warming and AI will…
Legacy media don’t get it
There seems to be an almost obtuse wilful blindness amongst the preponderance of those in our traditional, established political parties…
Pauline’s paper premiers
After the summer Pauline Hanson returned from Britain with Nigel in her handbag, even though he declined to meet her.…
Labor’s secret alborithm
Secret Harbour was Labor’s not-so-secret nightmare: a seat it had held since 1989 fell in a landslide to One Nation,…
Hoax of an inquiry
It is now clear that the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, designed to investigate the horrific Bondi massacre,…
Australian notes
One of the unforeseen consequences of the war in Gaza has been a significant erosion of freedom of speech in…
The real reason AI is so frightening
In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the anxious Colonel Cathcart is in the habit of compiling little lists of recent events. He draws…
Dario Amodei and the AI apocalypse alchemists
Such is the pace of change in AI that it has been, yet again, quite a weekend. On Saturday, Dario…
The paradox of Ealing Broadway’s ‘Calm Space’
When it emerged a fortnight ago that Transport for London (TfL) had unveiled a ‘Calm Space’ at one of its…
Emma Barnett was never the right fit for Today
As Oscar Wilde – were he a media correspondent – might have said, to lose one presenter is misfortune. To…
Is Britain racist? It depends who you ask – and what you watch online
Is Britain becoming more racist? Many people like me, who are from an ethnic minority, seem to think so. It’s…
Sunday shows round-up: Rayner warns that ‘you cannot buy your way into democracy’
Angela Rayner: ‘You cannot buy your way into democracy’ This week, Reform UK received an unprecedented £72m in donations from…
Labour is punishing low-tax councils
There is no doubt that local government is complicated. All the more so when you have one hand tied behind…
The price of British citizenship
Citizenship is often discussed as a catalogue of rights. There is a less fashionable question, rarely asked: what is the…
What will life look like on the Moon?
Space is back in the news. Whether it’s Donald Trump unveiling Space Force uniforms inspired by Starship Troopers, the SpaceX…
Cuts to army training will have lethal consequences
The army’s soldiers and officers are greatly disappointed by the suspension of much necessary army training and cuts to the…
What The Uprising gets wrong about the Peasants’ Revolt
Hollywood has a nasty habit of distorting history and telling falsehoods about the past in order to pander to the…
The Bayeux Tapestry must never be returned to France
The Norman Conquest is a crime against humanity that remains, over a millennium on, entirely unsettled. The French still refuse…
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 plan is for the country to fall in love with Nigel again’: Richard Tice on what’s next for Reform
A man of great suavity
They were both films that stay in the mind from a lifetime ago. Peter Pan is J.M. Barrie’s contribution to…
The sexiest kind of rock star
It’s strange and sad what the world throws at us. We are assailed by musicals – a production of Reg…
This silly and drivelling piece of tosh
Every so often something comes along that is so bad it fills the soul with wonder and dismay. It seems…
This devastating portrait of Americana
It’s more than 75 years since Lee J. Cobb opened in Elia Kazan’s production of Death of a Salesman and…
A life lived to the hilt: Clare Consuelo Sheridan
Tall, blonde, beautiful, ruthless, brave and amoral to her fingertips (many of this biography’s paragraphs end with ‘The two became…
For better, for worse: Death Do Us by Ruthy Mason reviewed
Bea should be elated: her sweet and loyal boyfriend Jake has just proposed, with the family ring, over dinner. Instead,…
Stop moaning and do something: the active vs the passive voice
The Jamaican-American poet and essayist Claudia Rankine won a slew of prizes for her book Citizen (2014). Her blend of…
Pongs of praise: the history and importance of smell for our antisceptic age
For smell historians and experts, of whom there are gratifyingly more than you’d think, a standard assumption to be skewered…
First among equals: what makes a great leader and does it matter?
Almost two decades ago, Jared Diamond cemented his international reputation with Guns, Germs and Steel, which argued that geography and…
A succession of selves: How Do People Stay the Same by Mark Bowles reviewed
Readers of Mark Bowles’s All My Precious Madness (2024) will find much that is familiar in How Do People Stay…
Double jeopardy: the story of history’s most audacious KGB defector
Two spies meet in a white-tiled bathroom in Tehran. One large chap is perched on a creaking laundry basket, while…
She lived frantically ever after: the jaw-dropping life of Barbara Cartland
Matthew Sweet’s jaw-dropping life of Barbara Cartland opens with the grande dame reclining on her chaise longue in the library…