Victoria … now what?
Federal Liberal Party president Tony Abbott has emerged to back the disendorsement of Moira Deeming. The Victorian Liberal Party made…
The India question and Labor’s geopolitical ignorance
Defence is not a game. Our geopolitical advantages are not trivial election pieces to be moved around the board. And…
Before Lindsey Graham died
America was shocked by the sudden death of Senator Lindsey Graham who, it has been reported, died after a short…
Conservative civil war is a distraction
The civil war between the Coalition and One Nation began in earnest last week, so let’s talk about it. To…
Sixty years of hurt and seven Prime Ministers
In this time of political and social instability, there are two things I know for certain. Football is not coming…
Why OpenAI and Anthropic will never see Wall Street
Anthropic and OpenAI have spent the past few years laying the groundwork for public listings, but the path to a…
Multiculturalism and social cohesion
In addition to investigating and making recommendations to confront antisemitism, the Royal Commission established by the Commonwealth Labor government is…
A beautiful sight during the beautiful game
The World Cup proved once again what the left resolutely fails to understand: the path to overcoming racism is patriotism.…
What did I miss?
If you blinked this week, you would have missed the ABC cutting short coverage of President Trump’s speech. Mr Trump…
Stranger, which galaxy are you from?
We are the greatest nation on Earth … or so our leaders keep saying in a rather wooden and uncertain…
How will the Liberal Party atone for their ‘failings’?
I find it quite annoying that the media suggests that One Nation’s ‘slump’ in the polls (that keeps them 6…
A man on the train in Victoria
His family had voted Labor for generations. Even the Split hadn’t moved them. Something in the last ten years finally…
Net Zero prosperity, Net Zero children
Climate catastrophism rests on a moral inversion. It looks at the human activity that has made the world habitable and…
Hansonomics: ‘show us [our] numbers’
Barnaby Joyce is the gift that keeps on giving. He is possibly the greatest – genuine – ever gift to…
Discontent mistaken for virtue
What drives the anger and hostility of the more radical progressives? What makes them become impervious to facts and celebrate…
Australia must confront Iran’s shadow war on its shores
Recent warnings from Australian security agencies that hostile state actors, including the Islamic regime of Iran, are allegedly targeting teenagers…
Can One Nation break through the glass ceiling to the majors?
In Australian political history there have been minor parties that were setting up for a big swing but ended up…
Four years of failure from Labor
Most Australians know the economy is not working well. The GDP data show that Australia’s economy is growing, but many…
The Dartmoor Silence
Ann Widdecombe’s father, James Murray Widdecombe CB OBE, was born in Saltash, the small Cornish town where I grew up,…
What’s wrong with national service?
What’s wrong with National Service? Nothing. It’s the name that’s the problem… Mention ‘National Service’ to anyone over fifty and…
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…
Pauline’s economics problem
It’s all happening in Britain. If you didn’t follow Nigel Farage’s extraordinary week last week, you probably should. Debate still…
The World Cup and economics
I’m not normally much of a sports fan. I used to follow Aussie Rules – barracking for Carlton is in…
The 51st state
The reason why Donald Trump wants Greenland is obvious. He wants to show the world by using Greenland’s history that…
Hang together or hang separately
We all have heard Benjamin Franklin’s famous advice to the American revolutionaries: ‘We must, indeed, all hang together, or most…
A world of higher inflation
Edmund Phelps, the Nobel laureate for Economics in 2006, died this year aged 92 just as his breakthrough theory, which…
One Nation is not the enemy
As Leader of the Opposition, Angus Taylor’s job is to join in defeating the Albanese government at the next election.…
Business/Robbery, etc
There are mounting threats to the Australia I have known and loved throughout my 96 years – a milestone I…
The politics of trade-offs
One Nation wants to be regarded as a serious party of government rather than merely a protest party. Fair enough.…
Burnham is trying to do a Brown
Tomorrow, Andy Burnham will become Britain’s 59th Prime Minister. The team around him has been strikingly circumspect when it comes…
My Paris neighbourhood has become a no-go zone
When I moved into Paris’s seventh arrondissement, I was not expecting to find myself living in one of the city’s…
How Theresa May remade modern politics
Andy Burnham, the incoming prime minister, thinks English devolution will be the great stroke against Reform UK. On one level…
When did Brits become so rude to shop staff?
I was lost in Senegal and saw a police officer. My experience of Senegalese people up until then had been…
Trump is smoke-signaling with his forest fire tariff
The latest incursion into American airspace is forest fire smoke from Canada. An invasion, according to President Trump. And the…
Neil O’Brien: ‘This is a radically different party’
No one quite yet knows what Andy Burnham will be like as Prime Minister. But a preview of the coming…
Burnham must not neglect Britain’s trashed environment
Contrary to what you might think, Keir Starmer’s No. 10 and No. 11 had an almost Stalinist disdain for the…
The surprising truth about men and multitasking
One of the most popular and common beliefs of our times is that women are better than men at performing…
What’s the real meaning of The Odyssey?
The Roman poet Ovid summed it up in a couplet two millennia ago. Or what’s the Odyssey except a woman…
The coming battle between ‘Mr Brexit’ and the ‘King of the North’
It was Napoleon who said that ‘To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world…
Only cheats fear the SAVE Act
David Axelrod, Barack Hussein Obama’s chief strategist, was clearly worried about Donald Trump’s prime time speech about election integrity last…
Andy Burnham has a plan – but he won’t tell us what it is yet
Burnham’s schtick is that he is going to re-discover Labour’s true faith When I was covering Barack Obama’s battle with…
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…
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a triumph
A Treasury on YouTube
It’s strange how much we take for granted the world we inherit, which is available to us on YouTube for…
To be trans Hamlet or not to be
Is there something strange about seeing a great comedian who identifies as a trans woman do a solo Hamlet, the…
Tip-Toeing in Manchester
The world knows that Andy Burnham, the ‘King from the North’, was a very successful mayor of Manchester. There have…
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…
An alternative Paris: Château Rouge, by Amit Chaudhuri, reviewed
Nearly ten years ago, the author, critic and classical Indian musician Amit Chaudhuri took up a visiting fellowship in Paris.…
Bringing Homer into the home: how the Iliad and Odyssey became widely available
Homer’s ghost is particularly busy, popping up in the dreams of pretty much every poet going. In fact if you…
A feast of wartime espionage: the latest crime fiction
Do novelists need credentials? Once, almost a century ago, the vogue for hard-boiled fiction meant that in the masculine Hemingway…
Terrorists with a taste for luxury: the flamboyance of the Baader-Meinhof gang
In the summer of 1970, a group of West German radical activists flew from Berlin to the Middle East. They…
The past yields up its secrets: The Red Mouth, by Sheila Armstrong, reviewed
Sheila Armstrong’s strange and beautiful novel has 12 chapters, each named for a month of the year – though not…
The appeal of asymmetry: Contrapposto, by Dave Eggers, reviewed
There are novelists who seem to spend their entire careers either apologising for being themselves or trying to become someone…
Good moaning: the subversive sitcoms of the 1980s revisited
The foundations of all British situation comedy were laid by Charles Dickens. If you were to remove that tiresome fun-sponge…
Christian soldiers in retreat – the disastrous Fifth Crusade
The Fifth Crusade, which was fought between 1217 and 1221, marked a new direction for the crusading movement of the…