The coming crash of intellectuals
WA lost a Liberal MP, and barely anyone noticed
Trainee MP David Farley makes a mistake and sits with the Green (whoops!) and all hell breaks loose. Headline after…
This is the end of the Teals
Hold on a moment… Conservatives are given plenty of stick for not being able to define what they stand for,…
No, One Nation isn’t giving land to Musk or Israel
In a podcast livestreamed this afternoon, Senator Malcolm Roberts clarified One Nation’s position in regard to Gina Rinehart’s comments about…
Nuclear will save us from renewables
It has been convenient for renewable energy enthusiasts to blame nuclear energy policy for Peter Dutton’s demise. Of course, this…
Data centres: the panopticon of the 21st Century
In 1791, Jeremy Bentham described in his book Panopticon: The Inspection House how a panopticon could allow a single guard…
Grand Theft memory
Last week, gamers rejoiced as pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto 6, the most anticipated game of all time, officially opened.…
Is One Nation trolling the Coalition?
Pauline Hanson is often likened by her detractors to Donald Trump. Now, I don’t want to detract, but she’s no…
The coming crash of intellectuals
Every bubble looks like progress while it inflates. Many investors have been wondering whether there is an AI bubble or…
The Parliament in Crown: a constitutional thought experiment
Contemporary discussion of constitutional legitimacy tends to smuggle in the assumptions of one particular constitutional tradition and mistake them for…
One Nation supporters are the underdogs
None of them get it – not journalists, academics, big business, policymakers, or the major parties. One Nation supporters are…
Blair, Starmer, and the destruction of greatness
‘I met Murder on the way – he had a mask like Castlereagh.’ – Percy Bysshe Shelley With Keir Starmer…
Australian schools must teach Anne Frank
The decision by any school to refuse to teach The Diary of Anne Frank should concern every Australian who values…
Sage advice for One Nation
They say the worst vice is advice. However, if I were advising Pauline Hanson or One Nation, my first piece…
The hidden costs of incompatible immigration
If Australians are serious about social cohesion and the safety of women and children, we must have difficult conversations about…
Albanese puts the brake on Australia’s next resources boom
Australia’s resource sector has long underpinned our national prosperity. From iron ore and gold to lithium, rare earths and critical…
Which party has the best energy policy?
One Nation’s climate and energy policy is central to the savings they expect to make if they win the next…
Who ends the churn?
On the night of June 18, in a sliver of north-west England few outside Wigan could place on a map,…
One Nation’s Gen Z problem
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is currently one of the most popular parties in Australia, with polling suggesting that a growing…
Mr President, take a leaf out of the Desert Storm playbook
Israel and the US have waged a stop-start war against the Islamic Republic Guard Corps (IRGC) since February 28, 2026.…
Karl Stefanovic’s departure from Nine points to bigger themes
The circumstances surrounding the departure from Nine of its biggest personalities, Karl Stefanovic, points to the future of mainstream or…
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…
The good ol’ days
I’m not really one for pining for the good ol’ days, when things were splendid and now, they’re not. Apart…
Labour’s messiah seizes the crown
The momentous 18 June Makerfield by-election in Wigan, in northern England’s once-industrial heartland, marks the second time the town has…
Chalmers’ war on capitalists
How many Australian businesses must fail before another generation of politicians learns one of the oldest lessons in economics? State-directed…
Chokepoints seldom last
In 1973, Opec Arab members cut production and imposed an oil embargo to inflict revenge on Western countries for supporting…
An American Monarch
On the Fourth of July, the United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of their separation from the British Crown.…
Comrade Chalmers’ class war budget
Labor’s 2026 budget delivered barely six weeks ago, is a masterclass in deception and incompetence. It attracted widespread, well deserved,…
The world’s worst case of TDS
I write this week from Britain’s first and oldest colony. If you’re thinking, ‘He’s in Bermuda’ that’s a good guess.…
Housing daze
Australia’s love affair with property is older than the nation itself. From the earliest days of settlement, land was the…
Why is the New York Times celebrating slave-trading Vikings?
Norway play the Ivory Coast later today in the first knockout phase of the World Cup, and one suspects the…
The true cost of ending the doctors’ strikes
After three years, and a cost to taxpayers of over £3 billion, the junior doctor strikes are finally over. For…
Why asylum seekers probably won’t have to pay back their accommodation costs
It’s clearly asylum week at the Home Office. On Sunday, destructive new ‘safe and legal’ routes for asylum seekers which…
Why does Starmer think he could become Nato chief?
When the incumbent prime minister – presumably Andy Burnham – lays a wreath at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday this…
How ideology hollowed out children’s literature
Self-immolation is a horrible way to go, but no one seems to have told that to the children’s publishing industry.…
Why do the French have a problem with air conditioning?
In the French city of Nantes, the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the city’s long-anticipated railway station was a big event. The…
Revealed: How the Treasury abandoned numeracy to boost diversity
On Monday, Andy Burnham finally set out some of his plans for government. To the surprise of no one, much…
E. Jean Carroll’s banana republic justice
E. Jean Carroll gets to keep her money. The Supreme Court has declined to review the $5 million sexual abuse…
Burnham won’t be the first prime minister to have tried levelling up
Every generation of politicians seems to believe that they are the first to discover the North. In Andy Burnham’s speech today…
Andy Burnham’s tragic Blairite tribute act
‘What a fitting venue to be sat in – The People’s History Museum’. So began the introduction to Andy Burnham’s…
Is Andy Burnham really ready to become prime minister?
Andy Burnham is not prime minister yet, but he has already outdone John Major. Whoever thought of putting him in…
Does anyone want what Burnham is promising?
This morning Andy Burnham has set out his devolution agenda for government. At the People’s History Museum in Manchester, the…
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…
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…
Will the Iran deal destroy J.D. Vance?
Beauty, blarney and banshees
It’s a bit odd in its way that a fair fraction of the more or less British theatre we watch…
Striped caps and striking shoes
June 11 saw the death of the Yorkshire-born English painter David Hockney who was arguably the most celebrated painter of…
A man of music
The other day saw the opening of the Peter Corrigan Collection at RMIT which comprises his personal collection of architectural…
Such stuff as dreams are made on
When Ken Branagh took the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford for the first time in thirty years…
Dull, duller and Dulles – was Churchill’s jibe about America’s Cold War icon unfair?
In the era of Trumpian foreign policy incoherence, a new intellectual biography of the American Cold War icon John Foster…
Nagging doubts: Twenty Minutes of Silence, by Hélène Bessette, reviewed
One critic memorably described Waiting for Godot as a play in which nothing happens, twice. Twenty Minutes of Silence is…
Chinese puzzle or matryoshka doll – the complexity of Sino-Russia relations
China and Russia are twins. Both are great Asian land empires; both are continental, multi-ethnic powers that expanded by pushing…
Hot and bothered: Trouble Was, by Charlotte Edwardes, reviewed
Child narrators are tricky little beasts. Misjudge their vocabulary and they lose all credibility or are unreadably twee. Even the…
Blame the Enlightenment for species extinction
As if she hadn’t got enough on her plate already, the high-powered Danish journalist and mother of three Lea Korsgaard…
The imaginative genius behind the Great Exhibition
If you want to understand Victorian Britain, look to the Great Exhibition of 1851. At a time of unprecedented technological…
Who needs an Italian beach when we have our own lidos?
With his 2012 book, The A303: Highway to the Sun, the author and psychogeographer Tom Fort pulled on his driving…
The tragedy of Paul Celan – trapped in his own allusive poems
Some time in the late 1950s, Jacques Derrida and other intellectual luminaries at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris were…