Something extraordinary happened to Australia's Medicare system in June, although fortunately the immediate consequences appear to have been minor. An artificial-intelligence agent developed by OpenAI was given what Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has described as a "benign" research task. It was looking for publicly available information about Aus...
The Advertiser story (linked below), is real for most people. South Australians are cutting work hours and social spending as petrol sits near record highs. The quote that does the work is the one we should remember: whoever gets us the cheapest fuel gets my vote, a shot across Albanese's bow from people who have decided the tank is the ballot. Tha...
There are few phrases in politics more powerful than "protect the children." It immediately establishes the moral terrain. Who, after all, wants children exposed to pornography, grooming, cyberbullying, encouragement of suicide, eating disorders and the other genuine horrors available online? Australia's proposed Digital Duty of Care begins on prec...
Politicians make many grand claims for renewable energy. But simple arithmetic shows the 'energy transition' is doomed to fail, says Richard Lyon, whose new book, The Energy Trap, is out today. Every reader of this site knows the moment. You're three sentences into a reasonable question about energy policy, the cost of it, the pace of it, whether a...
The clip making the rounds this weekend is short. Bill Gates, on Meet the Press, is asked whether AI is powerful enough to end humanity. He does not say yes. He says something almost as blunt: AI is "certainly powerful enough to drive events that… cause a billion deaths." There has never been, he adds, a weapon as powerful as "people with ill inten...
Nothing was proven about Brigitte Macron's birth sex. The July 2025 Paris Court of Appeal acquittal of Natacha Rey and Amandine Roy (the two women behind the 2021 YouTube video) was a ruling on French defamation/press law, not a finding that she was born male. Rey and Roy were convicted at first instance in September 2024 of defaming Brigitte Macro...
Sometimes a thirty-second comedy sketch manages to say more about an issue than pages of corporate public relations. A hilarious YouTube short (linked below), depicting Elon Musk as a technological tyrannical monarch holding court over his unfortunate subjects, is one of those sketches. The setup is deliberately ridiculous. King Elon sits enthroned...
Fertility is not an emotion; it is a rate. Attitudes toward having children, timing of first birth, and completed family size cluster in families and move across generations. Twin and family studies put heritability of political attitudes in a wide but real range, often cited around 30–60% depending on the measure, alongside large environmental eff...
When German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), introduced the archetype of the "Last Man" (der letzte Mensch) in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), he intended it as a horrifying caricature. Zarathustra speaks to the assembled crowd in the marketplace, offering them a portrait of a creature so devoid of ambition, so thoroughly domesticated by...
"Think of the children" is one of the most powerful phrases in politics. Sometimes it is entirely justified. Children can be bullied, sexually exploited, exposed to pornography, encouraged towards eating disorders and targeted by technological systems they scarcely understand. No serious defender of free speech needs to deny any of that. But ...
I took a break today to chop Paterson's curse from around the farmhouse, here in the Victorian scrub. Anyone who has dealt with the stuff will understand why it called is Paterson's curse. It gets into disturbed ground, competes with better plants, produces prodigious quantities of seed and seems remarkably determined to remain wherever you would p...
There is a point at which political polarisation becomes something more serious than people shouting at one another on television. It arrives when a substantial number of citizens no longer regard losing an election as an outcome they are morally obliged to tolerate. A remarkable new poll of US Democratic voters suggests that the United States may ...
Victims of Muslim rape gangs are being further victimized and tormented as they see their abusers walking free in their city, while the public remains unsafe, especially girls and women. The British government has tacitly acknowledged the Muslim rape gang problem by giving out guides to illegal migrants telling them women are equals and not t...
The handshake is the product. Edward Howell's Spectator piece on Xi's Washington visit (link below), is blunt about what sits under it: Beijing will stage "stabilised relations with the global hegemon" and leave the worldview untouched. That worldview still treats the West as structurally hostile, still treats Taiwan as a domestic matter that...
They have found Noah's Ark again. Or perhaps they are about to find it. I have been hearing variations of this story since I was a child, which by now gives Noah's Ark the unusual distinction of having been discovered as many times as it disappeared. The latest story concerns the Durupınar formation in eastern Turkey, not far from Mount Arara...
Albanese's line this week sounds like a break with the past. It is not. He concedes that the post-1945 order is "no longer fit for purpose," then asks for the thing that order always was: institutions with more legitimacy, nations that agree to abide by rules, and Australia in the room that writes the replacement. Strengthen the furniture. Ke...
There is something almost irritating about Liechtenstein. According to much modern political thinking, a country like this should either not exist or should have been swallowed long ago by something bigger, more centralised and supposedly more efficient. Instead, squeezed into the Alps between Switzerland and Austria, this tiny principality has sur...
Something strange has happened to the Australian university. It still speaks the language of scholarship, public service, teaching and research. It still receives enormous public support and enjoys privileges justified by its educational mission. Yet at the top of the institution an executive remuneration culture has developed that increasingly res...
1. The central proposition Dr David Martin presents COVID-19 not as an unexpected natural emergency but as the culmination of decades of coronavirus research, patenting, commercial planning and biological manipulation. His principal argument is that the history of coronavirus research must be examined as a continuous proc...
Processed meat has acquired one of those health labels that everybody recognises and surprisingly few people can define. We are told to eat less of it because it causes cancer. Fair enough. But what exactly are we being told not to eat? Is a steak processed because the butcher cut it? Is mince processed because it went through a grinder? Is frozen ...
