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Walk for Life

This was not the first time I marched at a Walk for Life, but it was the first time I…

19 Mar 2024

Four-year terms: an outsider perspective

Australia’s current Prime Minister has suggested that Commonwealth Parliaments should go four years between elections, instead of the current three.…

19 Mar 2024

Hobson’s leadership choice for Vic Libs

Over the weekend, the Melbourne media were full of fevered speculation that a challenge to struggling Victorian Liberal and Coalition…

19 Mar 2024

The cheap renewable thrill of climate protests

On March 13, 2024, Greta Thunberg was dragged away from blocking the Swedish Parliament entrance for a second day. She…

18 Mar 2024

Reject education furphies

Despite the additional billions invested over the last 30 years, countless educational enquiries and reports, several national reform agreements, and…

18 Mar 2024

Labor’s Brisbane horror election night could be a trap for the LNP

Queensland held its local council elections Saturday, which would normally be a big yawn outside the Sunshine State, except for…

18 Mar 2024

Australian banks need to be making much bigger losses on their lending

At a recent event I met and had a long chat with a retired economist who, in his professional career,…

18 Mar 2024

‘Hell to pay’ if gender equity activists get their way

Every year, like clockwork, the grievance industry works itself into a righteous fury over the annual Employer Census results compiled…

18 Mar 2024

Voiceless in Victoria: farmers horrified by renewable energy fast-tracking

‘It takes too long:’ Solar and wind farm blockers to be weeded out to fast-track renewable projects. That was the…

17 Mar 2024

Puberty blocker ban shows public opinion turning on gender ‘affirmation’

This week in Britain, a landmark historical move to ban puberty blockers in gender clinics has been motioned and overseen…

16 Mar 2024

Dystopian Google Gemini shows why misinformation laws are flawed

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. No matter how many revelations came to light of the rampant political…

16 Mar 2024

Woke tropes informing Australia’s Gaza response

ACT Senator David Pocock wrote about Australia’s response to the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza recently. The next day, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong…

16 Mar 2024

Hey scientists, it’s OK to express dissent

The public policy madness of the Covid years seems less and less believable with each passing week and month. Many…

16 Mar 2024

Fed up and grumpy

Maybe I’m becoming a grumpy old woman – OK, I’m already a grumpy old woman – but I am getting…

16 Mar 2024

Blowback to ESG tyranny

The world’s largest financial asset manager, BlackRock, has admitted that its bottom line could be hurt as a result of…

16 Mar 2024

There’s something in the water

In a recent TikTok video, a youngish US woman demands to know, ‘Am I the only one who didn’t know…

16 Mar 2024

Kategate

It’s four years since 11 March, 2020 when the WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic and with the media awash…

16 Mar 2024

Top five reasons to vote for Trump

In 2016, I didn’t know much at all about Donald Trump and, initially, I viewed his candidacy for President with…

16 Mar 2024

Dunkley opportunity missed

Apart from the election of the next US president and leader of the West, the most important issue facing Australia…

16 Mar 2024

We need an Aussie Samizdat Prize

In his blunt, plain-spoken way Donald Trump often says things that are true but that few other politicians will articulate…

16 Mar 2024

Putin crowns himself president of Russia again

As expected, following a three day ‘vote’, Vladimir Putin has once again crowned himself president of Russia. As of 9…

18 Mar 2024

Princess Kate, photographs, and the great thirst for significance

When Photogate, or Kategate, or whatever we end up calling it, first became news, I remember taking one look at…

18 Mar 2024

Meet the Russians in Serbia who voted against Putin

Today, Russians in Serbia are heading to the polls to cast their vote and protest against what many see as…

18 Mar 2024

We need to talk about war

‘Don’t mention the war!’ Remember that? Today, war seems nearly all that European leaders want to talk about. The prospect…

18 Mar 2024

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New Zealand’s imperial judiciary

If you cast your eyes across the Tasman right now, you can see the beginnings of an imperial judiciary, the…

2 Mar 2024

Subversion within New Zealand

Recently querying why New Zealand governments make annual January pilgrimages to the Maori Pa at Ratana, to celebrate the birth…

24 Feb 2024

Did Maori MPs mean to insult King Charles?

The co-leaders of New Zealand’s Māori party, Te Pāti Māori, have defended their actions at the swearing-in ceremony at parliament…

6 Dec 2023

Kiwi life

Given the UK’s Rishi Sunak sacking Suella Braverman for saying what many others would feel – that the police were…

25 Nov 2023

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Aussie life

Much has been written of Australian soccer captain Sam Kerr’s big night out in the back of a London cab.…

16 Mar 2024

Language

When we use Old Aussie we might call a bloke a ‘cove’ – but why? Why is an adult male…

16 Mar 2024

Cheltenham gave us a taste of what is to come

Writing a fortnightly column about a sport happening daily can be cruel. These words had to be delivered before the…

16 Mar 2024

Are hyenas really relatable?

A new television wildlife series called Queens (the ruling kind, not the screaming kind) shows competition among hyenas that involves…

16 Mar 2024

How ever did the inbred Habsburgs control their vast empire?

In 1960, Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo tell us, Lucian Freud went to the Goya Museum in Castres in…

16 Mar 2024

The dirty war of Sefton Delmer

There is an obvious problem with trying to judge who ‘won’ a propaganda war. Unlike its physical counterpart, there is…

16 Mar 2024

How much would your family stump up for your ransom?

‘I can’t quite believe I’m here, having a steak dinner with a killer,’ writes Jenny Kleeman, as she sits with…

16 Mar 2024

Work, walk, meditate: Practice, by Rosalind Brown, reviewed

Practice is a short novel set in a ‘narrow room’: one day in the life of an Oxford undergraduate writing…

16 Mar 2024

Conning the booktrade connoisseurs

Literary scandals – like actual scandals – come and go. Who now recalls, or indeed cares less about, the hoo-ha…

16 Mar 2024

You are what you don’t eat

If asked to think about food preservation for a moment you might picture an aproned woman boiling oranges for marmalade…

16 Mar 2024

The end of days: It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over, by Anne de Marcken, reviewed

How do you picture the end of days? ‘When I was alive, I imagined something redemptive about the end of…

16 Mar 2024

The stark horror of Barbara Comyns’s fiction was all too autobiographical

Barbara Comyns’s reputation rises and falls like a Mexican wave, making her one of the most rediscovered novelists of recent…

16 Mar 2024