Free speech: America is warning, Labor isn’t listening
Defiling Asimov’s Laws
Laymen concerned by the encroachment of AI assume CEOs and world governments are designing the digital age loosely around the…
Silence of the Lambie
Remember when Jacqui Lambie fantasised about throwing Elon Musk in jail? I had forgotten until Damian Coory pointed it out…
Kevin Rudd might be … right(?!)
Carrying on the great political tradition of ‘never buggering off’, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is back – sort of…
The Chalmers diet
Sydney’s working class look hungry. By that I mean, they are getting noticeably thinner. My advice to the political class…
AI’s show-me-the-money moment is approaching
For years, tech bros, politicians, and Wall Street have been spruiking artificial intelligence as the holy grail of productivity growth.…
Marx and Engels made a deal, Mephistopheles giggled
If Marx were rolled out of Highgate cemetery and landed in Marrickville today, the surprise wouldn’t be that he had…
Penny Wong’s Iran excuse expired in 2019
Penny Wong has said a regime that must murder its own people to keep power has no legitimacy. Yet when…
Free speech: America is warning, Labor isn’t listening
You would think that going against the United States – the most powerful country, with President Trump acting as the…
The tunnels NAZA refuses to enter
The Venice Film Festival has bestowed its Special Jury Prize upon NAZA, an 80-minute documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel…
Stop making martyrs
Cancelling people does not defeat their ideas. If anything, it amplifies their message and makes martyrs of the people spreading…
Wealth for toil, guilt for success
There is a world of difference between treating everybody equally and making everybody equal. The first limits the power of…
They’re not Menzies’ forgotten people, they’re One Nation’s fed-up people
Watching re-runs of Landline the other night, I saw a business backed by Gina Rinehart get to air without the…
Care-share or build-spend?
If you are 20, you will turn 65 in 2071. You have just started paying tax, or soon will. A…
Australia’s soft launch of authoritarianism
‘The freedom of speech may be taken away – and, dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to…
Inside the ‘Elysian’ world of the ABC
Over at Ultimo – the ABC’s ‘global’ headquarters – excitement is reaching fever pitch. The cause of the hullabaloo is…
Dressed to kill
Amorality of fashion has reached its height in the recent Met meltdown around John Galliano’s antisemitic antics and cancelled show.…
Albanese is talking to empty rooms
The picture from New York last week tells you most of what you need to know about Australian foreign policy.…
Gough Whitlam called
Everyone knows it. I know it. You know it. Households know it. Business knows it. The IMF and OECD know…
The Sydney Sweeney revelation
Well, knock me down with a feather. The advertising world has discovered that, wait for it, sex sells! It turns…
Germany at a crossroads
The recent German state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and in the city state of Berlin give cause to consider the…
GLOBALIST IN CHIEF – Albanese accepts his award & Trump cancels ‘Fake News’ Media | S3 Ep 21
This week… Javier Milei ‘rips the United Nations to shreds’. Albanese’s good little globalist award. Digital Duty of Censorship… I…
SILENCE OF THE ROYALS – Spencer’s memoir and the death of the last Royal carriage maker | S3 Ep 20
This week with Professor David Flint. Does the ghost of Princess Diana still pose a threat to King Charles’ legacy?…
PLEASE EXPLAIN! Why politicians are getting salty over satirical cartoons… | S3 Ep 19
This week… Jacqui Lambie’s rant over One Nation’s Andrew Hastie ‘traitor’ cartoon. Who dragged Albanese’s mother into the political conversation…
Return of the King
King Coal is back! This week the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission gave permission for two coalminers in the…
Brown study
I don’t know if Anthony Albanese actually learned anything from his recent sojourn at the United Nations, but I doubt…
You will live in a dog box and be happy!
I think someone needs to tell the hapless Housing Minister, Clare O’Neil, that the government’s housing target of an additional…
Time to fix our universities
This week I’m going to really depress readers, and especially those over the age of about thirty-five. You see, when…
Teal deal is dead
Remember what the teals were going to do? In 2022, they were going to change Australian politics. The Morrison government…
Australia – the failing state
Australians are getting poorer, and they know it. Real wages are going backwards as prices outpace pay packets. Productivity, the…
Trump’s honest bribe
Donald Trump has written the finest political satire of the decade. He did it in one sentence in Dallas this…
Shaggy God story
Every seven years or so there is a breathtaking announcement by an American fundamentalist Protestant group claiming they have found…
Albo’s left hook
Larissa Waters’ sudden resignation prompted a closer look at the political menagerie otherwise known as the Greens as they went…
How the far left plans to take over AI
Where else would our far-left Prime Minister Anthony Albanese go, other than the United Nations, to sound the alarm and…
Not OKKK
‘Is it heartening for you to see someone like anti-immigration Pauline doing well in Australia?’ asked the Channel Nine journalist.…
Bad laws outlive their victims
England once taxed daylight. It did so for 155 years. That is the number to keep in mind as we…
Javier Milei’s lawfare against the Falklands
Javier Milei, the embattled president of Argentina, has torn a leaf out of the playbook of 1980s dictator General Leopoldo…
The irony of Stella Creasy’s view on free speech
Stella Creasy may be a bona fide adult – a Member of Parliament, no less – but when it comes…
Is the government trying to radicalise me?
Is it possible to report the government to Prevent? I ask because I swear they’re trying to radicalise me. In…
Spare a thought for Ranulph Fiennes’s poor wife
The outrage about Sir Ranulph Fiennes, and the idea that he has ‘disappeared’ from public view in his twilight years,…
Why do we know so little about the RAF Fairford affair?
On Sunday, three suspicious trucks were spotted speeding toward the Royal Air Force airfield in Fairford, England. Shortly after, five…
14 things we learned from Andy Burnham’s speech
1) He’s the most effective speaker we’ve had in a PM for years I’ve been attending party conferences since 2001…
‘Far-left and Islamist’ group hails Red Ed
The ‘far-left and Islamist’ organisation Friends of al-Aqsa lavished praise on Red Ed Miliband on the sidelines of Labour conference…
Burnham’s brand of patronising tweeslop reigns supreme
Labour are in Liverpool and, as their conference reached its apogee, I was put in mind of John Lennon. What…
Can Burnham now sell Britain the vision of his promised land?
Andy Burnham has just finished his first speech as Labour leader. The Prime Minister delivered the message his party craved:…
Burnham’s tears alone won’t push through social care reform
Normally when politicians really cry, it’s because they’re on their way out of a big job, rather than just getting…
Burnham’s National Care Service is a Tory vote winner
Andy Burnham wants to thank the nation’s carers – except, possibly, the one he told us slipped his Granny Kitty’s…
Burnham calls time on the triple lock
Not all heroes wear capes. Some wear black T-shirts. Andy Burnham has done what nearly every British politician knows needs…
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 autistocracy: the men on the spectrum who rule our world
From another world
It’s striking what we can experience if we look back at the images of the recent past, aided by YouTube.…
An elegance that is hair-raising
Sometimes cultural news is just bad news. Everyone was delighted at the thought that Joanna Murray-Smith’s Switzerland was being turned…
A gorgeous evocation of the natural world
The world of artistic expression runs in a thousand ways. The Melbourne Symphony’s Spring Gala – paralleling the Opera’s Wagner…
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 myth of authentic English food
There were two butcher’s pork pies in my bag that also contained a copy of Lewis Bassett’s The Full English.…
An overpromised land: Farewell to Eden, by Sebastian Faulks, reviewed
Farewell to Eden, Sebastian Faulks’s 18th novel, is a timely masterpiece; a riveting story of war and lost love across…
The Cavalry in the Clouds: tales of the airborne Great War
The first aeroplane flight in Britain was made in 1909 by John Moore-Brabazon, holder of the first British pilot’s licence.…
Rain never stopped play – cricketing feats of Victorian Britain
Drawing on contemporary newspaper reports, this splendid book recreates cricket’s watershed year, 1864. At the time, Kit Harris explains, football…
Madness, mutiny and murder in the Canadian Arctic
The elegant, charismatic and narcissistic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson wasn’t the average adventurer that Alaska attracted in 1912. When he arrived…
A fatal mistake: Time Being, by Jude Cook, reviewed
Jude Cook’s intriguing third novel, Time Being, opens with a bang. A philosophy lecturer has been shot dead through the…
Around Britain with a theodolite: a celebration of the Ordnance Survey maps
It took six years, starting in the summer of 1784, for the Board of Ordnance to establish the baseline of…
The Great Uprising: Doom Painting, by A.K. Blakemore, reviewed
We can never know whether a historical novelist really gets it right, but there are clear missteps. One is ascribing…