Tony Burke wants Australians to believe the housing crisis is mainly about smaller households. The more inconvenient explanation is the one his portfolio actually controls: the number of people the government keeps letting in. The Home Affairs Minister has been circulating a tidy claim. The real engine of housing demand, he says, is not the immigra...

Graeme Campbell was born on 12 August 1939 in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, and came to Australia as a child of that mid-century generation for whom migration meant something rather different from what it often means in political debate today. Australia was not regarded as a hotel or an economic zone. It was a country to join, build, work for and ultimate...

The British government is beginning to speak seriously about the possibility of a major European war. The difficulty is that Britain's military and civil-defence preparations do not yet appear to match the gravity of its warnings. Whitehall is rewriting its classified War Book for the first time since 2004. The government has encouraged households ...

It had to happen, eventually. They taught artificial intelligence mathematics, language, computer programming, medicine and law. They gave it tools, memory and the ability to communicate with other artificial intelligences. Then Google put a hundred AI agents together in something resembling a scientific community and discovered that some of them h...

Britain has a public-order problem. It is not a machete fight, a rape gang, or a phone snatch. It is a man on a high street with a Bible. Footage circulating this week shows three female officers surrounding a Christian street preacher in a busy shopping precinct. One of them looks like she should still be sitting high school exams. The other two h...

"Men born in the 21st Century have an incredibly difficult uphill battle in front of them in face of a liberal establishment that has declared outright war. One of the key components of this war is the use of feminism as a tool to steal hard earned assets away from men so they can be redistributed to women (and to the government). This has been an ...

"Could runaway artificial intelligence (AI) spark a future WW3? We don't need movies like Terminator 2 and its SkyNet to help us imagine this, it's 2026 and there is already a terrifying real-world precedent that could have kicked off a shooting war with nuclear-armed China. A human analyst within the US intelligence community utilized data gathere...

Celina101's essay (link below), is not mainly about this year's net overseas migration target. It is about who gets to be the electorate after the target is hit. The claim is blunt: Labor (and, in her phrase, the "uniparty") is not only administering immigration. It is recruiting the next coalition. One Nation, she says, cannot beat that with a hou...

 AOC calling "woke 1" crazy is not a concession; it is a positioning move, and the interesting question is what comes next rather than what just ended. If the first iteration overreached with pronoun circles and mandatory training modules and the public recoiled, the second iteration will not repeat those mistakes, because the people driving i...

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has expanded the language of modern warfare far beyond the traditional battlefield. Gen. Dan Caine told the Air, Space, and Cyber Conference that the American joint force must be prepared to fight, endure and win "from the seabed to cislunar space." Cislunar space is that region between the Earth and the mo...

Effective altruism began with a sensible question: if you are going to help people, why not try to do as much good as possible with the resources you have? From that simple idea grew a movement, a network of wealthy donors and institutions, and eventually a philosophy extending from malaria prevention to the possible extinction of humanity through ...

Timnit Gebru makes a sharp point in WIRED (link below) about the strange way artificial intelligence is discussed. The more ordinary the technology becomes, the more extraordinary the language surrounding it seems to get. We are no longer merely talking about software that writes, codes, recognises images and increasingly makes decisions. We are ta...

 The Refinery Kill Shot Explained After watching the events of this year (2026), I am now certain of one thing: the global wave of refinery attacks, pipeline sabotage, and refining closures is not a market accident, a run of bad luck, or the invisible hand of supply and demand. It is a deliberate choke-point campaign, and the choke point is re...

Sir Walter Russell Crocker (1902-2002), belonged to a kind of Australian public life that has almost disappeared. He was scholar, soldier, diplomat, university professor, colonial administrator, author and Lieutenant-Governor. He knew prime ministers and presidents, served Australia across several continents and lived long enough to watch the insti...

Labor has surveyed a nation growling about housing, rents, wages and migration, considered a temporary migrant population measured in the millions, and identified the fellow responsible. He is twenty-three, German, sleeping in a hostel and currently picking almonds outside Mildura. At last, Australia can relax. The Albanese government is proposing ...

The University of California has encountered one of those little ironies that make the culture wars endlessly entertaining. After constructing rules under which using the wrong pronoun or a person's former name could become punishable harassment, the university has now encountered an older rule written by people considerably less interested in pron...

The most revealing thing about pandemic-era policy was not that elites made mistakes, because everyone makes mistakes under uncertainty, but that they stopped evaluating those mistakes at all. A tool is something you pick up, weigh against its costs, and put down when it stops earning its keep. What happened instead was that vaccination and restric...

Europe has been told, in the least ceremonial way possible, that October's Saudi barrels are not coming. Aramco has informed European term-contract refiners that their allocation for next month is zero. This is not an OPEC meeting and not a political embargo aimed at Brussels. It is a map problem. A drone strike last week shut the East–West pipelin...

For several generations there was an unwritten bargain in Western society. If you went to university, acquired the appropriate credentials and entered one of the respectable professions, you were supposed to be largely insulated from the economic storms that battered everyone else. Factories could close, mines could shut, manufacturing could move t...

Louis Vervoort's Problem Solving in Philosophy: How to Do Philosophy in the Age of Ultra-Intelligent AI (springer, 2026), raises a question that professional philosophers might prefer not to contemplate. What happens when artificial intelligence becomes better at philosophy than philosophers? Vervoort's answer is that philosophy itself needs to cha...