flat white

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? Not our sort of person

Somewhere in Australia tonight, a senior Liberal is having dinner at a good restaurant. The food is excellent, the conversation…

14 Mar 2026

Divisive diversity divas

‘Diversity is our strength.’ One hears this, or myriad variants of the same idea, unrelentingly. Certainly, I work in an…

14 Mar 2026

The Great Rort

To paraphrase Charlie Munger: ‘show us the oversized government program and we will show you the scams and the rorts.’…

The terrifying case of Dr Amos

Last week, Dr Andrew Amos, a leading Queensland psychiatrist and academic, was silenced by the national regulator. The Australian Health…

14 Mar 2026

Nice work if you can get it

In May 2020, in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, two rock shelters, Juukan 1 and Juukan 2, were destroyed by mining…

14 Mar 2026

Middle-class revolutionaries

When the Iranian regime was struck and the death of the Supreme Leader confirmed, one might have expected a straightforward…

14 Mar 2026

Lionesses in the land of Oz

Last Sunday was International Women’s Day, a socialist jamboree, adopted by the United Nations. But it said little about the…

14 Mar 2026

Pauline warns of jihad

The firestorm surrounding Senator Pauline Hanson’s comments regarding ‘good Muslims’ continues to swirl, fuelled by the obviously false claim that…

14 Mar 2026

Where is the new Supreme Leader of Iran?

Situation report Nearly four days after Iran named Mojtaba Khamenei as its next ‘Supreme Leader’, his whereabouts remain unknown. The…

11 Mar 2026

Multicultural Britain is becoming harder to defend

‘Britain’s most precious asset is our diverse and cohesive democracy’, trilled the opening of a government social cohesion plan just…

11 Mar 2026

Why the Venezuela model would be a disaster for Iran

What next for Iran? Donald Trump appears to have a plan: the Venezuela model. The US president has hinted that,…

11 Mar 2026

The social media moral panic

There is rarely much to commend Keir Starmer for. But on Monday he blocked an amendment to the schools bill which would have required…

11 Mar 2026

Why do Britain’s councils hate patriotism so much?

The war waged by those in authority on those who make overt displays of patriotism shows no sign of relenting.…

11 Mar 2026

Will Alberta become the 51st state?

Albertans are very good at keeping things that damage their prosperity out of their province. Take rats, for instance. The…

11 Mar 2026

The Iran war is just what Putin’s depleted coffers need

Of all the parties watching the chaos in the Middle East unfold, one should be rubbing its hands together with…

11 Mar 2026

Why Alba failed

Farewell, then, Alba, the little party that tried to take on the Scottish political establishment and learned, as others had…

11 Mar 2026

Should Reeves cut fuel duty?

With Donald Trump signalling that he does not want a long war in Iran, markets have started to settle down.…

11 Mar 2026

No, Britain is not about to run out of gas

Over the weekend, following continued US-Israeli attacks on Iran and the resulting disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz,…

11 Mar 2026

What would Katie Lam’s defection to Reform mean for the Tories?

Fresh from chastising Labour for not involving Britain more deeply in another American misadventure in the Middle East, Kemi Badenoch…

10 Mar 2026

The BBC will regret jettisoning the Oxford vs Cambridge Boat Race

And so, slowly but regularly, the BBC loses touch with British national life. The BBC has just lost the radio…

10 Mar 2026

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…

4 Mar 2026

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…

22 Dec 2025

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…

8 Nov 2025

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’…

3 Nov 2025

Aussie life

I’ve probably enjoyed as many long lunches as any old adman, and in the 1980s and ’90s may well have…

14 Mar 2026

Language

Are our governments guilty of ‘menticide’? This uncommon word is recorded from 1951, in which year it first appeared in…

14 Mar 2026

Aussie life

In a recent speech, artist Tim Storrier made a powerful attack on the current state of arts administrators in Australia,…

7 Mar 2026

language

Albanese has spent the whole of his political life a member of Labor’s socialist left. As a result we get…

7 Mar 2026

The curse of gold for the Asante nation

As a metal, gold never corrodes. As a possession, the reverse is too often true. It has the power to…

7 Mar 2026

The glory and tragedy of Trafalgar

The historian of naval warfare is to be envied by his land counterpart. The Duke of Wellington wrote to a…

7 Mar 2026

The sorrows of the young Melvyn Bragg

The leaves had yet to fall as Melvyn Bragg left his native Cumbria and arrived in Oxford by train in…

7 Mar 2026

Seeing the trees for the wood

You’re up an oak tree somewhere between Ashtead and Epsom in Surrey. Wet lichens glow as you hunt for a…

7 Mar 2026

How Ulysses horrified the stuffed shirts of New York’s literary establishment

The word ‘obscene’, according to the dictionary, refers to anything ‘offensively or grossly indecent, lewd’. By the standards of the…

7 Mar 2026

Ghastly middle-class materialism: The Quantity Theory of Morality, by Will Self, reviewed

In ‘Ward 9’, the central story of Will Self’s lauded debut collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), it is…

7 Mar 2026

A nasty little tale about a marriage: Look What You Made Me Do, by John Lanchester, reviewed

Adultery and betrayal have always been richly rewarding subjects in fiction, as John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do…

7 Mar 2026

‘Evil visited that day and we don’t know why’ – Dunblane 30 years on

Shortly after 9.30 a.m. on 13 March 1996, a man walked into the gymnasium at Dunblane Primary School, near Stirling,…

7 Mar 2026