The Twelve Apostles: public asset, or government revenue stream?
Matt Canavan elected leader of the Nationals
Popular conservative Senator, Matt Canavan, has been elected as leader of the Nationals. He replaces David Littleproud who, yesterday, said…
China and Russia have their sights set on Antarctica’s oil reserves
On the weekend, I tweeted that Antarctica would become the next frontier of geopolitical conflict as oil shortages in the…
Insatiable greed: Labor to charge for Twelve Apostles
‘It’s only fair that visitors to the region pay a small fee to visit this world-class destination so that we…
How to avoid world war three
Politicians used to be generals because politics was created as an extension of war. In the decades of peace, we…
A farewell to harms
Scene: A VCE French class, mere months from their finals. They are reading a French article on surveillance technology. A…
Can China switch us off?
Our ABC has woken up to the fact that Chinese buses can be, in theory, switched off. This is just…
The Twelve Apostles: public asset, or government revenue stream?
The Victorian government has announced that visitors will soon have to pay an entry fee to see the Twelve Apostles…
The sinking of the IRIS Dena: legal, reckless, or justified?
The Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese admitted that three Australians served on the submarine that sank the Iranian frigate IRIS…
The Trump pivot
Since the issue arose, the Albanese government has maintained a chillingly bureaucratic silence regarding the fate of the Iranian women’s…
Weighed down by the Australian government
The world faces increased insecurities as a result of the US and Israel (with little help from others in the…
The Canzuk-Aukus convergence: two alliances hiding in plain sight
When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stood before both Houses of the Australian Parliament last week and declared that middle…
Chalmers has never met a tax he didn’t like
Jim Chalmers’ proposed new CGT regime, and mooted changes to negative gearing, would amount to a tax on renters, retirees,…
A preventable Armageddon?
Many have been foreshadowing a war involving the United States, Israel, and Iran, for quite some time, but now that…
Ukraine is wearing Russia down
Here in Ukraine, there is the sense that the grinding war imposed by Russia has reached a turning point, and…
The legless green energy transition
Think of wind, solar, and batteries as the three legs of a stool supporting the Net Zero transition program. The…
‘Yes’ to ISIS brides, ‘no’ to the Iranian women’s football team…
If only the Iranian women’s football team were ISIS brides, our government would have pulled out all stops to help…
Regulated to death
A country that has spent a quarter of a century methodically building the world’s most sophisticated machine for preventing wealth…
Reasons for hope in Iran’s future
In the context of US-Israeli attacks that have decapitated the Iranian leadership, prophets of doom are already predicting an Iranian…
The excellent Australian Constitution
How do you describe the Constitution of one of the most successful Western liberal democracies in history? We can be…
The Persian vacuum
As the smoke clears over the decimated bunkers of Semnan and the industrial ruins of Isfahan, a chilling silence has…
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…
Pauline? Not our sort of person
Somewhere in Australia tonight, a senior Liberal is having dinner at a good restaurant. The food is excellent, the conversation…
Divisive diversity divas
‘Diversity is our strength.’ One hears this, or myriad variants of the same idea, unrelentingly. Certainly, I work in an…
The Great Rort
To paraphrase Charlie Munger: ‘show us the oversized government program and we will show you the scams and the rorts.’…
The terrifying case of Dr Amos
Last week, Dr Andrew Amos, a leading Queensland psychiatrist and academic, was silenced by the national regulator. The Australian Health…
Nice work if you can get it
In May 2020, in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, two rock shelters, Juukan 1 and Juukan 2, were destroyed by mining…
Middle-class revolutionaries
When the Iranian regime was struck and the death of the Supreme Leader confirmed, one might have expected a straightforward…
Lionesses in the land of Oz
Last Sunday was International Women’s Day, a socialist jamboree, adopted by the United Nations. But it said little about the…
Pauline warns of jihad
The firestorm surrounding Senator Pauline Hanson’s comments regarding ‘good Muslims’ continues to swirl, fuelled by the obviously false claim that…
Where is the new Supreme Leader of Iran?
Situation report Nearly four days after Iran named Mojtaba Khamenei as its next ‘Supreme Leader’, his whereabouts remain unknown. The…
Multicultural Britain is becoming harder to defend
‘Britain’s most precious asset is our diverse and cohesive democracy’, trilled the opening of a government social cohesion plan just…
Why the Venezuela model would be a disaster for Iran
What next for Iran? Donald Trump appears to have a plan: the Venezuela model. The US president has hinted that,…
The social media moral panic
There is rarely much to commend Keir Starmer for. But on Monday he blocked an amendment to the schools bill which would have required…
Why do Britain’s councils hate patriotism so much?
The war waged by those in authority on those who make overt displays of patriotism shows no sign of relenting.…
Will Alberta become the 51st state?
Albertans are very good at keeping things that damage their prosperity out of their province. Take rats, for instance. The…
The Iran war is just what Putin’s depleted coffers need
Of all the parties watching the chaos in the Middle East unfold, one should be rubbing its hands together with…
Why Alba failed
Farewell, then, Alba, the little party that tried to take on the Scottish political establishment and learned, as others had…
Should Reeves cut fuel duty?
With Donald Trump signalling that he does not want a long war in Iran, markets have started to settle down.…
No, Britain is not about to run out of gas
Over the weekend, following continued US-Israeli attacks on Iran and the resulting disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz,…
What would Katie Lam’s defection to Reform mean for the Tories?
Fresh from chastising Labour for not involving Britain more deeply in another American misadventure in the Middle East, Kemi Badenoch…
The BBC will regret jettisoning the Oxford vs Cambridge Boat Race
And so, slowly but regularly, the BBC loses touch with British national life. The BBC has just lost the radio…
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…
What will Jacinda Ardern do next?
When I first met Jacinda Ardern in the early 2010s, the notion that the young MP with the toothy smile…
The de-Wokification of New Zealand’s education system
The conservative coalition government of New Zealand came to office promising to wind back an enormous, government-run system of ‘Woke’…
The inconvenient truth about polar bears
Uncanny mutations
Isn’t it odd the way we can start watching a streamer in absolute disgusted disbelief only to discover that we’re…
That glimpse of grandeur
The death of Robert Duvall the other week was a reminder of how long ago some of our cultural landmarks…
A hoard of lost treasure
Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is the most celebrated of all Australian plays; and this story of the…
Strange and familiar
One of the excitements of seeing Ngaire Dawn Fair in the full trilogy of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll…
The curse of gold for the Asante nation
As a metal, gold never corrodes. As a possession, the reverse is too often true. It has the power to…
The glory and tragedy of Trafalgar
The historian of naval warfare is to be envied by his land counterpart. The Duke of Wellington wrote to a…
The sorrows of the young Melvyn Bragg
The leaves had yet to fall as Melvyn Bragg left his native Cumbria and arrived in Oxford by train in…
Seeing the trees for the wood
You’re up an oak tree somewhere between Ashtead and Epsom in Surrey. Wet lichens glow as you hunt for a…
How Ulysses horrified the stuffed shirts of New York’s literary establishment
The word ‘obscene’, according to the dictionary, refers to anything ‘offensively or grossly indecent, lewd’. By the standards of the…
Ghastly middle-class materialism: The Quantity Theory of Morality, by Will Self, reviewed
In ‘Ward 9’, the central story of Will Self’s lauded debut collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), it is…
A nasty little tale about a marriage: Look What You Made Me Do, by John Lanchester, reviewed
Adultery and betrayal have always been richly rewarding subjects in fiction, as John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do…
‘Evil visited that day and we don’t know why’ – Dunblane 30 years on
Shortly after 9.30 a.m. on 13 March 1996, a man walked into the gymnasium at Dunblane Primary School, near Stirling,…