Third anniversary, October 7
Wake up, Bowen. Nap time is over!
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen doesn’t seem to be enjoying is multi-million-dollar pre-COP soirée. Aside from criticism that…
Shoebridge’s obsession with turtle politics
You have to admire the commitment to delusion. Newly appointed Greens Leader, David Shoebridge, fronted the cameras and declared his…
The price of coffee could lose Albo the election
The price of coffee is set to become an election-defining issue after the Prime Minister was ridiculed and community-noted across…
Defiling Asimov’s Laws
Laymen concerned by the encroachment of AI assume CEOs and world governments are designing the digital age loosely around the…
Albanese is a global citizen, but whose world is it?
Perhaps Latika Bourke asked the question many Australians will be thinking… While Anthony Albanese was preparing to receive the Atlantic…
Ted Lasso was wrong about kindness
Think of the last meeting where somebody floated a dud idea and the whole room knew it. Did anyone say…
Boys are no longer educated, they are emasculated
Boys are struggling in literacy, completion, and behaviour. It is no secret. In March 2026 Education Minister Jason Clare opened…
Never forget the evil of October 7
It seems like only yesterday, but it was in fact three years ago when David Adler rang me on that…
From Reith to Rishworth and beyond
In 1993, Peter Reith wrote in his diaries and republished in his memoir, The Reith Papers, that even though the…
Rumble in the shallows
Coogee has always known how to draw a crowd. On Anzac Day 1935, a tiger shark on display at the…
Louise Clegg is right about the Teals. Now, the hard part…
I should declare a bias. I have always been a little wary of Louise Clegg’s view of the world, partly…
Chris Bowen doesn’t need a Khemlani, he’s got you and me
Whitlam’s infamous Minister for Minerals and Energy, Rex Connor, set in motion the wheels that led to The Dismissal on…
Flight 1073 and what we can learn from modern-day Spartans
While we celebrate the heroism that saved many lives on board Flydubai flight 1073, we should take the opportunity to…
Multiculturalism and the great Australian levelling
With One Nation now polling at or above Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition a distant third, Australia appears to be…
Iran needs another Cyrus the Great
At a time when Iran’s name has once again become a focus of international attention, the recent remarks by Benjamin…
Bill 691 and the French crisis of trust
France is once again on the streets. Across the country, students are protesting over overcrowded classrooms and deteriorating educational conditions.…
Albo was the only person who thought coffee would get cheaper
In a classic case of not having a clue, Anthony Albanese has made himself out to be the goose we…
Never stop campaigning
Donald Trump is a perpetual campaigner, whether in or out of office. We only have to look to the recent…
Who should we blame for high inflation?
It would make my life easier if Australia’s inflation problem had a simple cause done by a single villain. Alas,…
Listen to the Alborithm
One of the defining features of our age is the tendency for ostensibly democratic governments to introduce legislation that curtails…
ALBO, THE COFFEE WHISPERER – Labor might be the worst economic managers of all time | S3 Ep 22
In this episode… Albo’s ‘not-so-cheap’ coffee. ☕️ Is Jim Chalmers a good Treasurer? Is the 5% house deposit scheme causing…
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?…
Third anniversary, October 7
The release of the Coalition’s immigration policy coincided with the third anniversary this week of the horrific 7 October massacre,…
Albo’s out of control spending
Almost fifty years ago, in his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan said, ‘We don’t have inflation because the…
Cowardly corporate crony capitalists rule
Last week, I attended the annual conference of the H.R. Nicholls Society. The society is ‘dedicated to advocating for sensible…
Giggle v. Tickle v. Macbeth
Talking recently with an old acquaintance, now a barrister, I spoke of how disappointing it was that the High Court…
Go directly to jail!
Having addressed the position of the ever-shrivelling teals last week, I was well into drafting a piece turning to focus…
Business/Robbery, etc
There’s now a coal boom in Asia that the ideology-driven, anti-coal Albanese Labor government doesn’t want to know about –…
En garde! China and AI
Early in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Butch finds himself facing the intimidating Harvey Logan, who has decided that…
Painted clay
‘The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation: that away, men are but gilded loam or painted clay.’ That’s…
Hamas: Triumph of the intellectuals
On 7 October 2023, the world experienced in a real-time livestream what the absence of a secure Jewish state meant…
Australia on a road to ruin
Australians’ pessimism about the future of the country is now probably at its highest level. Polling suggests an extraordinary two…
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…
Jaguar’s new electric car is a terrible mistake
At least it has dropped the bright pink. But in every other respect the new, all-electric Jaguar launched in New…
October 7 was a jihad against Jews
It is not as though I was unaware that Hamas was a jihadist terrorist organisation. After all, I grew up…
Shabana Mahmood has said the quiet bit out loud
Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, has said that every woman travelling illegally to the UK will probably have been raped…
Must the Free Palestine mob march on October 7?
It is the third anniversary of the killing of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the worst such massacre…
Trump official: ‘anti-Semitic’ European countries risk US sanctions for boycotting Israeli settlements
European countries that impose boycotts on Israel are ‘anti-Semitic’ and risk retaliatory sanctions from the United States, a senior Trump…
Reports about taking out Los Angeles and San Diego are greatly exaggerated
It’s four weeks until Election Day and Donald Trump is doing his utmost to dig Republicans out of their polling…
At conference, the Tories are haunted by their past
Day three of the Tory conference. A giant drone hung over the stage for the afternoon’s session on defence. Plenty…
Has the plague broken out in Russia?
On the evening of Friday October 2, Daria Shipilova, an employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute, died in a district…
Jeffrey Archer on his final novel, Margaret Thatcher and his perfect day
Michael Gove interviewed Jeffrey Archer in late September, several weeks before the novelist and politician died at the age of…
Badenoch’s ‘Britannia shield’ won’t stop Russia
In March 1983, Ronald Reagan announced on television that the era of mutually assured destruction could come to an end…
Is the Home Office finally waking up to the migrant threat to women?
Illegal migration is a threat to women and girls. That grim fact has gradually dawned on the public, as the…
Cutting inheritance tax is immoral
Kemi Badenoch is set to announce that the Tories will cut inheritance tax, a levy she has described as ‘immoral’.…
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…
Andy Burnham begins the long march left
That sinister sense of comic patter
Harold Pinter is one of the great dramatists of the last hundred years, perhaps the only one who can hold…
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…
Did the Bayeux Tapestry succeed as a tool of Norman propaganda?
It makes for a good pub quiz question: what has 632 people, 202 horses, 55 dogs, 41 ships and only…
A passion for music: Partita, by Barbara Kingsolver, reviewed
Barbara Kingsolver’s bestselling novels tackle political and social issues and win prizes, among them the Pulitzer and Women’s Prize for…
The triumph of virtue over fear and malice: The Bridge, by Colm Tóibín, reviewed
A small, beautiful book about betrayal, the cost of isolation and the persistence of human decency, Colm Tóibín’s The Bridge…
Abstract ideas made concrete
The Iron Curtain, or at least its most visible symbol, was not metal. Berlin’s Antifaschistischer Schutzwall (Anti-Fascist Protection Wall) was…
‘I shall always want to say thank you to this country’: the gratitude of a former kindertransport refugee
For all that it is an anachronism, the House of Lords contains some remarkable specimens, not least Alf Dubs. The…
Terrorism nearly always fails – so where does that leave the ‘freedom fighter’?
This book begins with rueful comments on the absence of philosophy from terrorism literature. The phenomenon is frequently analysed through…
Battling the elements – Claude Monet’s litany of anguish
For a painter we acknowledge as a master of atmospheric effects and ever-changing light, whose early work ‘Impression, Sunrise’ sparked…
Warnings, omens and the end of days: the surreal times of the Emperor Charlemagne
I don’t know if it is still the case, but there was a time in London when the ring of…