Erasing the West
Lord of the sock puppets
Anthony Albanese has joined the Unplug24 campaign, announcing on X: The movement is in honour of Mac Holdsworth who, to…
Penny Wong vs Ralph Babet
United Australia Party Senator Ralph Babet has a knack for getting under Labor’s skin and this week, he succeeded in…
The conservatives are coming
There have been some seriously deranged things written about CPAC by left-wing publications. Conservative leaders spoke on stage in front…
AI is a psychopath
Did anyone else catch that fleeting headline in the Daily Mail, claiming: Chinese AI tool told researchers how to make biological weapons…
Albo not walking on water but thin ice
Jesus turned water into wine, but Albo went one better. He turned a ‘dirt sheet’ on Helen Haines into a…
The fair go was never a government program
Andrew Long has done something rather unusual in modern political commentary. He heard a speech, considered its arguments, and responded…
The right must unite, or Labor wins again
At CPAC Brisbane, conservatives, Liberals, Nationals, and One Nation supporters discovered that their minor differences matter less than the Western…
Erasing the West
Last week in Parliament, when I spoke on the Public and Bank Holidays Amendment Bill 2025, I knew that between…
New Zealand election musings
By the time you read this, the New Zealand election will be about a week away. Now I’d like to…
What happened to the Australia my grandfather believed in?
My grandfather survived the Holocaust and came to Australia believing he had found something precious: a country where his children…
Bradman read the ball. Brabham read the road. Can Canberra read AI?
Australian Formula One legend, Sir Jack Brabham, once observed that ‘good drivers can drive anything and can adapt to anything…
The Ben Roberts-Smith affair
This week, because of his PR campaign, the interview on News24, and on 2GB, every pet-shop galah has had his…
Raging at the ‘dying’ of Wokeism
Labor’s Digital Duty of Care bill forms part of an ongoing tantrum put on – jointly – by the Uniparty…
Politicians have changed their tune on crime
On the corner of a main street in a Southern Tablelands city this afternoon, three elderly people stood waving Palestine…
The 5:48am plan to reinvent Australia
At 2:52am last Sunday, a former employee and friend sent me ‘just a salute’. My writing was very good, he…
Victoria’s ‘Labor experiment’ fails spectacularly
In just 30 or so days – voters in Victoria have a single task – dumping the most dodgy, ‘clapped…
Frankfurt says ‘non’
Either the bond markets riot or the people riot, as a CNBC headline put it this week, and France has…
We should be a nation of citizens, not residents
Recently, I participated in the Robert Menzies Institute’s 2026 Policy Dialogue in my dual capacity as its General Manager and…
Labor ignores the criminals and bans the tools
The alleged attack on Dr Helen Haines MP and the revelations of an alleged ‘dirt file’ on her held by…
Higher or lower migration: at what cost?
Young Australians are repeatedly told Australia needs high migration to help them pay for an ageing population in coming decades.…
TURN THE POLITICAL TEMPERATURE DOWN… WHO TURNED IT UP?! – Labor’s outrageous hypocrisy | S3 Ep 25
In this episode: Macron’s ‘soft touch’ on far-left riot agitators. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni vows swift justice against looters. Labor’s inter-generational…
CHAMPAGNE SOCIALISM BURNS FRENCH CULTURE – and Australia’s descent into censorship | S3 Ep 24
In this episode: Far-left riots bring France to its knees while President Macron attends #CelineDion concert. Australia’s Royal Commission into…
THE GREEN GROCERS OF THE APOCALYPSE – communism is back in fashion | S3 Ep 23
In this episode: The ‘Green’ Grocers of the apocalypse bringing communism via your weekly shop. Victoria collapsing underfoot – but…
Hot air con
It would appear that the federal Labor government has been taking lessons from its favourite bureaucrats and serving up questionable…
Jimbo is toast
Jimbo is toast: it’s the scientific consensus. His term as Treasurer of this country must end as soon as possible.…
What went on tour should have been sorted on tour
You know something has gone awry when Labor’s Captain Sensible, former defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon, calls for an intervention against…
The housing crisis is a hoax
Australia’s Housing Accord is a five-year plan, and it is performing exactly as five-year plans do. It promised 1.2 million…
WA under Labor is rotten to the core
A small town in the north of Western Australia by the name of South Hedland has been the focus of…
France’s riots are a gift to Le Pen
Few in the mainstream media spotted the irony of the BBC’s Paris correspondent describing the recent anarchy across France as…
Australian notes
That the Bureau of Meteorology could fake and corrupt weather temperature data, as so egregiously revealed recently in a forensic…
Potholes, political mates and Toto
Somewhere in regional Australia, a council worker is staring into a pothole large enough to qualify for its own post…
The sewage hits the fan
A whiff of wastewater that wafted over the Cooks River has finally enveloped the Prime Minister. For weeks, Albanese insisted…
Political trends firming against Labor
There are two leading trends in Australian politics which are firming against Labor , and which, I suspect, will hold…
Left-wing violence
In a recent speech, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned about the deadly danger of left-wing activism, claiming that…
The left’s fraudulent language
Many years ago, I was on an appointments committee to select between two candidates for a lecturing position in the…
Ten things to look out for in the Budget
It’s Budget day. The run-up to Andy Burnham and John Healey’s first fiscal event has been rather less eventful than…
Can Netanyahu cling on?
Israel looks set for a lengthy period of back-room deals, coalition negotiations and potential political instability after neither of the…
Was Russia behind the Jaguar Land Rover cyber attack?
Last August, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), Britain’s biggest car manufacturer, was hit by a cyber attack that forced it to…
Why are the Chinese so sensitive about Chairman Mao?
Poor old Kylian Mbappe (well, not so poor, he’s worth some £200 million). Having just been pipped at the post…
Israel has never been more divided
The final results of Israel’s election will not be determined until Friday, when the ballots cast by military personnel are…
Kylian Mbappé is right about Mao. So why has he apologized?
Kylian Mbappé, one of soccer’s biggest stars, has made an abject apology after being dropped by Chinese brands for apparently…
Did Liz Truss use AI for her new book?
As a keen student of economics, Mr Steerpike has been hungrily devouring Liz Truss’s new book, Bank Job: A short…
France’s riots are shattering the Emily in Paris dream
In the aftermath of the riots and pillaging in my home city, I have been thinking about Emily in Paris.…
Students brought down Serbia’s president – but what happens now?
Serbs have been partying on the streets for two days after a leaderless student movement dethroned Aleksandar Vučić in a…
Brazil has voted for economic chaos
The shift to the right across South America has been stopped. One of President Trump’s key regional allies has been…
Britain must decide what its armed forces are for
General Sir Roly Walker, the Chief of the General Staff, said earlier this month that a ‘frank conversation’ with the…
The problem with this Paddington bear Budget
It risks turning Wednesday’s big speech into the Paddington bear Budget. The left of the Labour party, high on promises…
New Zealand election musings
By the time you read this, the New Zealand election will be about a week away. Now I’d like to…
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…
Revolting France: The riots are driving the country’s politics to its extremes
An urge to take over the play
It’s astonishing what awaits the culture vulture. A lot of people know the riches on offer when they see the…
The beauty of the ruthless truth
There are times when the screen, big or small, looks like a gift of the gods. In the last week…
Conflicting colours and tones of tragedy
Any fan of Gerald Murnane would love to see him win the Nobel Prize for Literature. And if it’s never…
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…
Instruments of war
Drum Major Henry Barnes Jackson was 40 years old, had served in the Great War in the British Army, and…
How Sweden has kept communism at bay
Stay-behind cells in the second world war and the Cold War are familiar to students of intelligence and military history.…
The end is nigh: Switzy, by Emma Cline, reviewed
Emma Cline’s first novel, The Girls (2016), sold more hardback copies than any other debut novel published in the UK…
Dark, dank and mysterious: the haunting strangeness of boglands
‘Bog’ is an unlovely word, and the expressions in the bog lexicon – ‘bogged down’, ‘bog standard’, ‘bog off’ –…
Alternative universes: Exit Party, by Emily St John Mandel, reviewed
The premise of this novel is weird and delightful. At a party in the year 2031, with the American civil…
‘There’s a 50-50 chance I’ll get bumped off’: an American scholar foresees his death
On a drizzly morning in January 1984, Malcolm Kerr, the president of the American University of Beirut (AUB), was walking…
The intellectual passions of J.R.R. Tolkien
It was December 1942 and J.R.R. Tolkien was having doubts about his new book, a sequel to The Hobbit published…
Homesick for Tennessee: The Newer World, by Sebastian Barry, reviewed
‘I am become a name,’ Alfred Tennyson has Ulysses declare in his 1833 poem, an epigraph that sets up Sebastian…