Hot air con
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…
Chris Bowen’s long, slow climate controversy
For years I have clung to the academic excuse that climate change is ‘not my field’. But politics is my…
Designated devils v. designated survivors
The new reality show on the world stage is, a bit like the Truman Show, not a reality show at…
The disaster of institutionalised childcare and why choice matters
One does not have to conduct multitudinous studies and surveys to recognise that mothers innately understand and appreciate it is…
Digital Duty of Care (censorship) laws pass the Lower House
Last month we warned you about the government’s latest attempt to censor the internet, via the Digital Duty of Care…
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…
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…
Watch: Zia Yusuf reminds Alastair Campbell about Iraq
Alastair Campbell is on a book tour promoting his new work Persevilience, which Mr S has not read but hears…
The greatness of Patrick Stewart
It says a lot for the late, great Sir Patrick Stewart, who has died aged 86, that two wholly disparate…
When did the world stop caring about Ukraine?
‘Russian troop movements near Ukraine border prompt concern in US, Europe’ ran the headline in the Washington Times on 30 October 2021,…
Is this the real reason Christine Lagarde is leaving the ECB?
She wants to speak freely about the upcoming presidential election in France. Or she may have a tempting offer from…
In pictures: Murdoch’s World
On Wednesday night, The Spectator welcomed readers and guests to our home in Manhattan for Murdoch’s World: The empire that…
How long must Britain wait to see Healey’s defence spending boost?
Politics can be a rollercoaster. When Andy Burnham chose John Healey as the new Chancellor of the Exchequer in July,…
The price we’ll all pay for the minimum wage hike
How Chancellors love jacking up the minimum wage, as John Healey has just done in his Budget, by 3.9 per…
Our politicians are depressingly low calibre
A Labour chancellor called Healey grappling with the public finances amid fears of an economic collapse. Pressure from the right…
RIP Jennifer Lawrence’s face
It was another Jennifer – Jennifer Grey of Dirty Dancing fame – whose desire to tamper with the face that the good…
This was a Budget for Martin Lewis’s Britain
The Budget is without doubt one of the most overrated days in British politics. Now that we are entirely at…
John Healey’s Budget in nine graphs
John Healey has just delivered the biggest Budget in recent history. The 98 policy measures on the government’s scorecard are…
Sayeeda Warsi would make a terrible Islamophobia tsar
The name of the government’s highly-controversial ‘special representative’ to oversee its equally controversial definition of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ will be announced…
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…
In praise of Piedmontese wines
Authors hate it when reviewers refer to their book as a ‘weighty tome’ as it implies that the contents are…
One for the Prefab Sprout diehards
‘One for the heads’ is the phrase that traditionally covers the more outré elements of a band’s career: the outtakes,…
Singsong vapidity: The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse, by Heather Morris, reviewed
The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse is from Heather Morris, whose 2012 novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz began the vogue for…
How can we fool ourselves that chatbots feel anything for us?
Imagine that a good friend of yours has fallen for a psychopath, a man or woman who seems superficially charming…
Why a frothy Jane Austen adaptation is always imminent
There has never been a good screen adaptation of a Jane Austen novel. There have been plenty of films with…
The felled tree that devastated Britain
It was just a tree, a beautiful tree, in a strikingly beautiful place. Yet when the two friends Daniel Graham…
Return of the war-weary: Gjak, by Dimosthenis Papamarkos, reviewed
The Second Greco-Turkish War (1919-22) ended catastrophically for Greece and led to a massive population exchange: аt least 1.2 million…
‘An inspiration to all under his command’: the cheerful courage of Brian Franks
They say there are old soldiers and bold soldiers but very few old, bold soldiers. Well, Tim Spicer is pretty…