In a recent Flat White item, Where is Australia’s conservative intellectual movement?, Jonathan Cole and Simon Kennedy argued that Australia, in contrast to both Britain and United States, does not have (and indeed has ‘never seen’) ‘a robust and energetic’ community of conservative thinkers. Instead, we have ‘eccentric and maverick right-wing commentators’ who tend to ‘carp and pillory from the sidelines’. This, the authors suggested, is a recipe for continued irrelevance.