When the Law of War comes home to roost
Every little bit helps. How to waste $20 million on an ad campaign
While the Treasurer plots how to take money out of our pockets in the next Budget, we discover the Albanese…
From Pluto, with love
The debate about whether or not to include Pluto as a planet is part-nostalgia, part-history, part-historical justice, part-science, and part-aww,…
France takes its 129 tonnes of gold out of New York
France has sold its 129 tonnes of gold being held in the New York Federal Reserve and purchased an equivalent…
No fuel rationing for April, as Albanese heads to Singapore
There are species of sloth that move faster than the Prime Minister. This much is evident as we discover today…
One Nation is protecting cash, not the Treasurer
Those who heard Senator Michaelia Cash’s speech about One Nation’s decision to vote against Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ Competition and Consumer…
What did I miss?
Anthony Albanese sulked, cap in hand, to Singapore. Fossil fuel is better for the environment if someone else drills for…
What if they held an election and nobody came?
The South Australian state election in March saw Labor comfortably home, yet again, but the insurgent One Nation became the…
Let’s ‘turn back time’, Albo
Our Prime Minister, in one of his frequently mundane press conferences, reminded us that ‘we can’t turn back the clock’…
Addressing Australia’s self-inflicted energy crisis
How could Australia be suffering a double energy crisis when the nation exports several times more energy than it consumes…
A five-point plan for Aussie AI
Last week, OpenAI released a white paper titled Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age. It’s unusually candid about the risks…
Zen and the art of truck driving
Philosophy, at its best, is not some airy-fairy meditation on the meaning of life. It is a set of rules…
‘How to Save Our Churches’ – A Catholic Perspective
Kemi Badenoch is right to draw attention to the crisis facing Britain’s historic churches. When nearly a thousand places of…
After October 7, deterrence is no longer enough
The October 7 Hamas terrorist attack did more than expose a catastrophic intelligence failure. It exposed the limits of deterrence…
The foundations of Iran
In this writing, I want to introduce the world to the true foundations of Iran. The ‘infrastructure of Iran’ is…
Government set to make extreme police powers permanent
The ‘frog in boiling water’ is a common anecdote. According to the story, if you put a frog in boiling…
The media v. Trump
Let me start with some rather startling numbers from the US. One survey they’ve been running in America since 1972…
Is One Nation more Liberal than the Liberals?
If you are a Liberal Party supporter, this will hurt to read. But truth hurts. The rise of One Nation…
Iran and the death of the decarbonisation empire
Online publications with a habit of operating like mouthpieces for the renewables industry, have been scathing at the suggestion Australian…
Ben Roberts-Smith case brings out the armchair experts
But for the Ben Roberts-Smith arrest this week, you would never know there were so many experts in criminal martial…
ASIO and the eternal police state
In Mid 2025, the Australian government began debating amendments to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2025…
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…
My fellow Libs, we need to pick a side
The Islamic terrorist attack at Bondi Beach brought us to a crossroad. The tearing apart of the national fabric has,…
Unstoppable wind and sun
The Albanese government thought it had scored a political win from the leaking of the Coalition’s talking points in the…
The land we forgot to remember
The Prime Minister recently characterised One Nation as ‘…some politicians, some of which have risen up recently in the polling,…
Blind Freddy goes fracking
We are now paying the price after decades of demonising fossil fuels. The mythical fraudulent human-induced climate change ideology and…
When the Law of War comes home to roost
Ben Roberts-Smith VC was arrested this week after a long-running investigation into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan. He was not…
Ben Roberts-Smith and the confused battlefield
So Ben Roberts-Smith has been arrested, and his life will never be the same again. Over the next few years…
Labor is busy fuelling the fuel crisis
When a product becomes scarce, prices rise to ration demand. That is not a moral judgement. It is a mechanism,…
Labor’s fossil fools
It’s hard not to experience cognitive dissonance watching Labor’s hapless ministers respond to the global energy crisis. For five weeks,…
On the road with a Myanmar revolutionary leader
When Khu Reedu first joined the resistance following the 2021 Myanmar coup, it was like a prophecy had been fulfilled.…
Is this how the ad industry dies?
A few nights ago, I sat down to watch a movie on Amazon Prime. At the beginning, it said, ‘This…
What I learned from complaining to the BBC
Back in October, the comedian Stewart Lee and the Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci hosted an episode of Strong Message…
The curious case of the £10 toilet
In May’s local elections, most of the attention will fall on the larger contests: the devolved elections in Scotland and…
Swalwell sexual assault accusations detonate California governor’s race
Is it Swal-over for Swalwell? Congressman Eric Swalwell – the longtime anti-Trump crusader, MS Now and CNN mainstay, and a…
Why is Prince Harry being sued by Sentebale?
It must be unpleasant to be Prince Harry at the moment. Not only is he waiting on the judgement of Mr Justice Nicklin for his…
Starmer referred to UN over ‘crime against humanity’
It seems that the Chagos deal is the grift which keeps on giving. The government last night confirmed that it…
This isn’t the end of the Chagos debacle
The policy that seems closest to the government’s heart – the surrender of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius – is…
What can we expect from the Iran negotiations?
The eyes of the world are on Pakistan’s capital Islamabad as it plays host to this weekend’s make or break…
Bash Back are thugs posing as victims
There are times when it seems that violence against women and girls – forever these days being hand-wrung over by…
How Pakistan became central to ending the Iran war
When the Iran war kicked off in late February, if you’d been asked to place a bet on which country…
Ireland shouldn’t send in the army against fuel protestors
When a government’s answer to protesting truckers is to send in the army, something has gone badly wrong. At present,…
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
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…
A versatile and virtuouso figure
Well, the Oscars have come and gone and we tend only to remember the anomalies. Julie Andrews winning the Oscar…
Motherless friends: Kin, by Tayari Jones, reviewed
Set in the American South during the Jim Crow era, Tayari Jones’s Kin follows the parallel lives of Annie and…
Singing of arms and the man: Son of Nobody, by Yann Martel, reviewed
Yann Martel, the author of Beatrice and Virgil and Life of Pi, typically explores competing storylines, narrative reliability and the…
Landscapes of longing in illuminated Books of Hours
Christopher de Hamel is an outstanding salesman. At Sotheby’s, back in the 1990s, he brokered the sale of the 15th-century…
Defiantly creative to the end: the transgressive Dorothea Tanning
I received this book for review on the same day that Dorothea Tanning was making headlines in the auction world,…
How the paralysed Franz Rosenzweig continued to translate the Bible
In the early years of the 20th century, a young philosopher named Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) set himself the task of…
Self-betterment through contemplation of the Seven Deadly Sins
What mistake did Narcissus make when he looked into the water? To fall in love with his own ravishing self,…
Rebarbative relatives abound: The Palm House, by Gwendoline Riley, reviewed
Like its predecessor My Phantoms (2021), Gwendoline Riley’s new novel is stuffed to the gills with the sort of people…
The harm of dwelling on a traumatic past
Back in the 1970s, people in Britain were mystified by the enthusiasm of Americans – especially New Yorkers – for…