Celebrate 2038: in twelve years, Australia turns 250
Don’t panic! Fuel rations, price limits, and lockdowns
Every time Chris Bowen ducks out of an aeroplane to say, ‘Don’t panic!’ Australians are left with the distinct feeling…
Here come the Teslas
I can’t prove this, but I can tell you that while walking through the upper-middle-class North Shore of Sydney on…
Custodians of patriotism: One Nation earned this
One Nation has pitched itself as the party of patriotism. The weight of this cannot be understated. The electoral landscape…
Alex Antic: Will he, or won’t he?
Even before the Liberal Party found itself in an existential crisis, whispers were circling South Australian Senator Alex Antic and…
Wisdom, truth, and joy
In Zoroaster’s thought, the human being is not passive or bound by fate, but a conscious and responsible agent who…
What did I miss?
This week turned out to be an Albanese Method™ masterclass. If there’s one superpower our Prime Minister possesses, it’s the…
Celebrate 2038: in twelve years, Australia turns 250
In 2038, Australia will mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of Australia. It is now time to start preparing…
Australia’s fuel crisis: political incompetence, not Iran
The severity of the global fuel crisis hitting Australia – that may well reverberate for years to come – is…
Shabbat Shalom: to those who run towards the fire
There is a line I have found myself returning to this week, watching events unfold in different corners of the…
Care factor ‘zero’ for striking ABC staffers
More than one thousand ABC journalists and staff walked off the job this week as the latest three-year enterprise bargaining…
ABC staff chuck a tantrum while taxpayers foot the bill
From Hong Kong: While the rest of Australia is doing it tough under Labor’s cost-of-living catastrophe, state-owned media, the ABC,…
Behind the Manosphere: the vacuum we won’t fill
The rules of the manosphere are simple: get rich, get fit, get girls. Just as the rules are simple, so…
Celebrating the resources sector
This week Australia marked Minerals Week 2026 – an opportunity to recognise a sector that does not merely talk about…
Australia has a gas problem
By demonstrating the reality of One Nation’s rise, the South Australian election confirmed turmoil in Australian politics. This brought to…
Why is this man still Treasurer?
Anyone paying even half attention knows it – Jim Chalmers is completely out of his depth, and Australians are paying…
What happens to centre-right politics if One Nation continues to grow?
Some people have asked me why the fascination with One Nation in South Australia – after all they have only…
The myth of scarcity
Have you ever felt guilty leaving a light on, running a bath instead of taking a shower, or staying in…
The old parties had their turn, and failed
From Kowloon: The final tally from the South Australian state election will take some time. That’s because something remarkable is…
They burned ambulances. What more do you need?
You think you know where the line is? You think there are things that simply wouldn’t happen here in the…
No Schönborn in sight
Europe did not stumble into the Thirty Years’ War. It was dragged there by aristocrats who clothed ambition in sacred…
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…
Move over Saint Jacinda
The progressive mob needs heroes. People they can admire, people who demonstrate their seeming worthiness through words and actions. We…
Business/Robbery, etc
For the Liberal party, 1996 and 2026 are, depressingly, much further apart than just in years. Survival, let alone a…
Hey Dunning and Kruger, have you met Chris Bowen?
In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger described a phenomenon that has become depressingly observable. Those least capable of…
We need real US-style federalism
I have written before about how broken Australia’s federalist constitutional arrangements are. They were broken by over a century of…
Libs stuck in the middle
‘Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you.’ It…
Trump’s selfless war
It’s been a real hoot watching commentators and pundits from both sides of the fence tying themselves in knots trying…
Bot in my backyard
A popular 1960s superhero comic book series which never made it to the big screen, for reasons which will become…
Lawson, Lakemba and Labor
South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas was always going to win last Saturday’s state election, so many die-hard political junkies didn’t…
Reeves’s energy bailout risks solidifying Britain’s welfare trap
This week Rachel Reeves ruled out a blanket energy bailout to manage the fallout from the Iran war. That’s the…
Trump has shattered America’s ‘illusion of omnipotence’ in Iran
Donald Trump likes to use the phrase ‘go big or go home’ to describe his political strategy. It looks as…
Ed Miliband can’t keep blaming Iran for high energy costs
Sooner or later it is going to dawn on Ed Miliband and the rest of the government that anger over…
Sarah Mullaly makes me grateful to be a Catholic
Granted, I was not the most obvious person to appreciate the installation of Sarah Mullaly in Canterbury, even though I…
What McSweeney’s stolen phone says about modern Britain
If there were ever an event to describe our present moment, it would surely be the theft of Morgan McSweeney’s…
Why rabbit makes the best Easter lunch (yes, really)
Dissonance is necessary around Easter. Fluffy lambs and chicks are everywhere: on cards and decorations, in countless chocolate forms and…
Why Ukraine’s Russian oil strikes are backfiring
Every drone Ukraine fires at a Russian oil terminal is meant to defund Moscow’s war in Ukraine. Right now, each…
What do the White House’s cryptic X videos mean?
The White House X account has won notoriety as a coven of young memesters scandalizing the nation. There have been…
Don’t let doctors strike again
We are on the verge of yet another round of resident doctor strikes – the fifteenth in the dispute which…
How the Danish election backfired for the left
In the aftermath of the bitterly contested 2000 US presidential election, Bill Clinton famously commented: “the American people have spoken;…
Reform toast success of ‘Ipswich-gate’
An own goal or back-of-the-net? The pundit class are divided on Reform’s latest stunt, with Nigel Farage rocking up to…
Britain’s defence spending is lower than we thought
Whenever Keir Starmer and his ministers are pressed on the lack of a plan to raise Britain’s defence spending with…
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’…
‘We’ll wake up on 8 May and realise that the Conservative party’s gone’: Inside Reform’s plan to devour the Tories
A daily beauty
It’s fascinating to see that Sharmill are presenting a new Othello from London’s Haymarket from 28 March with David Harewood…
A versatile and virtuouso figure
Well, the Oscars have come and gone and we tend only to remember the anomalies. Julie Andrews winning the Oscar…
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…
Tales of quiet intensity: The News from Dublin, by Colm Toibin, reviewed
Colm Toibin is a master of understatement, his work characterised by great emotional intelligence coupled with redoubtable restraint. This is…
Two Tokyo misfits: Hooked, by Asako Yuzuki, reviewed
Following the enormous success of Butter’s English translation in 2024, it seemed inevitable that another of Asako Yuzuki’s novels would…
James Baldwin – dogged by painful uncertainties throughout life
James Baldwin, like many American novelists before him, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos included, spent his formative years…
The misery of working with Chuck Berry
In Ian Leslie’s John & Paul, the creative relationship between the titular Beatles is treated as a platonic love story.…
The mystery of what makes us special remains unsolved
Consciousness is thought by many to define what it is to be human. We know that animals are conscious to…
Dark family secrets: Repetition, by Vigdis Hjorth, reviewed
‘Back then, of course, I didn’t know my parents were locked into an impossibility even greater than mine. That I…
The ‘ecocide’ that is Canada’s shame
For a fortnight, four women have been combing through a 30-metre forest plot with infinite care. They have noted the…
No Hungarian rhapsody: Lázár, by Nelio Biedermann, reviewed
Few first novels, let alone literary debuts in translation from German, arrive with quite so many plaudits – or better…