EU threatens Australia’s tea tree oil industry
Tea tree oil is a proud Australian export worth around $40 million per year to the essential oils and cosmetics…
Who needs the Department of Climate Change anyway?
One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce sent the collective Left into fits of hysteria by repeating Senator Hanson’s desire to make the…
Has protesting gone too far?
If you walk through the city today, you’ll come across four or five dedicated anti-fossil fuel protesters. They are frequent…
Part of Victoria’s petrol production up in flames
The Iran war made it obvious Australia has not completed any serious war-gaming on fuel shortages. Theoretical papers, maybe. A…
Negotiation, delay, and strategic reality
There is a recurring instinct in Western policymaking to believe that with enough persistence, enough goodwill, and enough diplomatic effort,…
Energy crisis demonstrates the benefits of war
Many governments are suddenly realising that economies do not operate on sunbeams and zephyrs. This is less so for the…
You can trust One Nation to keep their word on migration
The Liberal Party could not be more rattled by the rise of One Nation and the speech by Angus Taylor…
Glory and shame, two noble myths corrode
There is a temptation in Australia to treat the Ben Roberts-Smith affair as though it were, at heart, a simple…
ABC’s war on those who fight wars
There is a particular kind of arrogance that only flourishes at a safe distance from danger, and the arrest of…
Before the Dawn Service, there was this
The staged arrest of Ben Roberts-Smith, just weeks before Anzac Day, is not just bad optics. It is a signal…
The judicial invention of freedom: A bridge too far?
The recent NSW Court of Appeal decision in Jarrett v NSW stands as a stark monument to the folly of…
Sisters are doing it for themselves
Back in January I wrote a piece for The Spectator Australia on the US Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) hearing of an…
Private health insurance: time for a reset?
Australia’s $6.9 billion annual subsidy supports a model that’s losing consumer confidence. There’s a proven alternative. The crisis is real…
Strait of Hormuz: Where geology, myth, and international law converge
The geography of the Strait of Hormuz is not man-made; it is the result of a long process shaped by…
International Law in dire straits
The United States’ decision to impose a naval blockade is a legally contentious move under International Law. The measure follows…
Angus Taylor’s ‘wrong rein’ on immigration
The immigration horse is definitely the one that has wandered off to the One Nation side of the paddock, but…
Albo government’s perfect storm of weakness
I first set foot in Brunei in 2019. It was, and remains, a jewel of Southeast Asia. Verdant, orderly, and…
How multiculturalism destroys societies, Australia included
The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported in March that net overseas migration rose to 311,000 in September 2025, marking a…
Iran at a crossroads: Australia’s opportunities and pitfalls
Over the last few weeks, the Islamist regime in Tehran has expanded the scope of its hostage-taking operation. Not satisfied…
The Australian apocalypse approaches
An apocalypse is considered to be a number of events that cause widespread destruction on a catastrophic scale. You may question…
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…
What do you most despise?
The great and recently deceased playwright Tom Stoppard was once asked what he most despised. This, by the way, is…
Remembering Bert Kelly
I was lucky enough to become friendly with Bert Kelly MP in the last years of his life. Bert had…
The ignorant Aussie
In my view the true nature of the Liberal party became apparent during the vote on the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate…
Australia is fast becoming a failed socialist state
The Hawke government, with Paul Keating as Treasurer, spent the 1980s dragging Australia away from the economic model that was…
Modern slavery
Ruqia was a 21-year-old Afghan woman building a new life in Australia. She and her family fled Afghanistan after the…
Labor’s crazed ideological bent
I know how Father Damo feels. The delinquent young priest in Father Ted arrives on Craggy Island, clocks the situation,…
FoolWatch
Having abandoned the notion of pretending it isn’t facing a fuel crisis, the Albanese government’s bright idea to bring down…
Top Brasso
After my article last week on what is called the ‘civilianisation’ of military justice, I found myself in a series…
Driverless cars will kill the London taxi
After an eleven hour flight, I stepped out of Phoenix International Airport into the balmy Arizona heat. It felt like…
How the Mandelson scandal could prove fatal for Keir Starmer
It is judgment day in the Commons for the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, over what he knew, and when, about…
Andrew Lloyd Webber and the dangerous truth about alcohol
There’s something, I think, very heartening and touching in reading Andrew Lloyd Webber talk about joining Alcoholics Anonymous at the ripe…
What is the supply side of Britain and Europe’s decline?
In his new book Why Populists Are Winning: and How to Beat Them, British MP Liam Byrne argues that it’s…
The changing economics of war
On 15 September 1916, at Flers-Courcelette, 49 Mark I tanks rolled into no-man’s land. Most broke down. The ones that…
Why attacks on British synagogues no longer surprise me
The news this week that two people had tried to burn down Finchley Reform Synagogue in London wasn’t even surprising.…
Trump’s armchair geography is costing him in Iran
In the 19th century, the geographer and explorer David Livingstone was scathing of what he described as ‘easy chair geographers’…
The tale of the quiet Englishman who helped make Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant, who was born on 22 April 1722, is perhaps best known for two things: writing The Critique of Pure…
What happened to Provence?
The best time to visit Provence, I always advise when asked, is in the spring before the scorching heat and…
Oxford needs to fight back against the university
The news that the original Oxfam bookshop on St Giles in Oxford is not to close is not just a…
Can I read Trump’s mind?
Making time to prepare to host the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has not been easy. Presently I’m flying back to…
How Peter Mandelson became Britain’s ambassador to the US – despite failing vetting
I have just been contacted by a source who knows much more about what happened with Peter Mandelson’s vetting. It…
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’…
Organised crime is targeting artisanal food
Like him or loathe him
It’s cheering to hear very promising reports of Barrie Kosky’s production of Siegfried at Covent Garden suggesting that the Melbourne-born…
Cruelties of popular culture
Ethan Hawke is an extraordinary figure. He has made straightforward Hollywood classics like Training Day but he also comes out…
Deaths in the mind
It’s strange the way certain deaths stay in the mind perhaps because of the fascination and interconnection of the lives…
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…
Why one of Renoir’s most celebrated paintings languished unloved
Shimmering off the cover of The Renoir Girls are sisters Alice (aged four) and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers (six), portrayed in…
Unravelling the infinite mysteries of physics
Can artificial intelligence become godlike? Can such technology unravel the world’s great mysteries? Can everything, from love and intuition to…
Derided as ‘feminists’: the unsung witnesses of the Nuremberg trials
There are several things wrong with James Vanderbilt’s new film Nuremberg, least of all, some might say, the fact that…
A dying fall: The Last Movement, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed
Robert Seethaler is known for celebrating the unsung: commonplace characters – peasants, labourers or shop assistants – who draw us…
The typo that spelled death in the Soviet Union
‘As anyone who has gleefully spotted a typo in a prestigious publication, felt a flicker of schadenfreude at a pompous…
‘A lost generation’: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, by Deborah Levy, reviewed
In a 2013 interview, Deborah Levy said: ‘Modernism is the soft typewriter of the womb that made me.’ But what…
The cormorant – symbol of gluttony and the Devil
Greed, death, hate and clouds of destruction – this is the cormorant season all right. I was hungry to read…
A deadly imitation game: the fate of the British teenager who posed as a Russian oligarch’s son
This story is little more than a brutal anecdote, which Patrick Radden Keefe has chosen to tell at excessive length.…