Something remarkable is happening in Australian politics, and Victoria may be where the political earthquake finally becomes impossible to ignore. Labor is on the nose, but the really interesting part is not simply that voters are abandoning it. It is where some of those voters are going. They are going to Pauline Hanson's One Nation. For decades, ...

Something has gone missing from journalism, and it is not merely "objectivity." Objectivity was always an aspiration more than a clean achievement. What has disappeared is the temperament that once made the press dangerous to every orthodoxy at once. H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), remains the clearest example. He did not write to improve the public or ...

Llew O'Brien's Children Born Alive Protection Bill addresses something so basic that it should barely need saying. When a child is born alive, that child is a person and a patient. The child should be assessed and given the same medically appropriate care as any other newborn in the same condition. Australians will continue to argue about abortion....

Public indifference to the threat of nuclear war has grown dangerously widespread. On social media, some cheer the escalating violence in Ukraine while others openly call for nuclear weapons to be used in the Middle East. Few of these voices appear to grasp the scale of destruction modern nuclear arsenals can inflict. Even a limited exchange would ...

A few days ago on a sparkling Sydney ferry ride, with tourists photographing the Opera House and schoolchildren laughing in the sun, the author of a recent Spectator Australia piece overheard something that froze the blood. The kids were not chatting about the usual excursion excitements. They were bantering about unpleasant things they might do to...

The older I get, the more I find myself missing a world that no longer exists. This is probably something every generation eventually says, and perhaps there is an unavoidable trick of memory involved. Childhood summers seem longer because we were children. Christmas seemed more magical because we had not yet learned what the electricity bill cost....

If the events unfolding around us were merely the plot of a movie, they might register as mildly amusing absurdities, the kind of over-the-top satire that leaves an audience chuckling at the sheer inventiveness of human folly. Because they are happening in the real world, the same scenes feel considerably less funny. The old computer maxim was "gar...

We won't get fooled again. That line from rock group The Who has always carried a certain swagger, a declaration that the next round of official promises will meet harder scrutiny than the last. In August 2026 it found an unexpected echo in the voice of Kyle Sandilands, the long-time radio provocateur who once lent his platform and his rhymes to th...

For years I have been hearing that people like me should acknowledge that we are living on somebody else's land. The radical Left has spent decades telling Australians of British ancestry that we are settlers, colonisers and beneficiaries of an historical invasion. At university ceremonies we acknowledge that sovereignty was supposedly never ceded,...

A British telecoms giant is quietly supplying thousands of free SIM cards, each loaded with six months of data, to a charity that hands them out to people who have just crossed the Channel in small boats. Care4Calais has already distributed more than 162,000 items to nearly 30,000 individuals: hoodies, joggers, T-shirts, cold-weather packs, weather...

There was a time when saying someone had a university degree told you something reasonably definite. It did not mean the graduate was a genius, morally superior or even particularly sensible, but it generally indicated that he or she had survived several years of demanding intellectual work, acquired specialised knowledge and demonstrated an abilit...

 Middle-class progressives have long proclaimed that refugees are welcome in Britain, confident that the practical consequences of that welcome would fall on someone else. For years the small-boat arrivals from the Channel have been housed overwhelmingly in poorer communities, the kind of places that vote Reform and that the progressive classe...

We have all been taught the story. Oil and natural gas are "fossil fuels" because they are the transformed remains of ancient life. Marine organisms died, accumulated in sediments, were buried for millions of years and, under suitable conditions of pressure and temperature, became kerogen and eventually petroleum and natural gas. It is one of those...

 The next important cancer treatment might not come from an enormous pharmaceutical laboratory, an artificial intelligence system searching through millions of synthetic molecules, or some enormously expensive piece of medical technology. It might come from inside a frog. Scientists at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology hav...

FLEMINGTON — Racing Victoria announced this week the formation of a high-level committee charged with answering the single most important question facing Australian racing: what, exactly, is a horse? The move follows growing pressure from advocacy groups who insist that any animal identifying as a thoroughbred must be allowed to compete in the Melb...

 Australia's housing shortage is often blamed on a simple lack of workers willing to pick up tools. The official response has been to keep the immigration taps open in the hope that new arrivals will fill the gaps on building sites. A construction boss, and the data behind him, now say the opposite is true: migrant tradies are not the solution...

Australia's native title map expanded again on 14 August 2026, when the Federal Court recognised native title over more than 170,000 hectares of northern Queensland. Chief Justice Debra Mortimer made a consent determination recognising the Western Yalanji People as native title holders over approximately 170,827 hectares of Cape York. The determina...

Foreign Minister Penny Wong has made the right decision in terminating an Australian National University joint venture with a Chinese university linked to China's nuclear weapons establishment. The more disturbing question is why such an intervention was necessary in the first place, and how many other university relationships deserve the same scru...

For years the political consensus treated high net overseas migration as an unchallengeable good. Record intakes after the borders reopened were defended as essential for growth, skills and demographic balance. Public concern about housing shortages, infrastructure strain and social cohesion was routinely dismissed as fringe or worse. That consensu...

The ageing crisis was always the growth lobby's favourite scare story. For years the argument ran like this: the population is getting older, the ratio of workers to retirees is collapsing, and without a constant inflow of younger migrants the budget will buckle under pensions and health costs. High immigration was therefore sold as the responsible...