A recent Spectator Australia article (link below), asks, "Who owns Australia?" and answers, with characteristic Australian humour, that nobody really knows. Australia has sailed beyond a trillion dollars in Commonwealth debt, around 60 per cent of Australian Government Securities are reportedly held by non-residents, and we cannot conveniently prod...
A licence is a narrow thing. It is permission granted by a named authority, on published terms, subject to appeal. You know who issued it. You know what you must do to keep it. You know where to go when it is taken away. A driver's licence works this way. So does a liquor licence, a broadcasting licence, a mining lease. Each is an exception to a ba...
In mid-September 2025, a week after the anniversary, House Resolution 741 was introduced. It was a resolution, not an appropriations bill. It did not cut a cheque. It recited post-9/11 "hate" and "government targeting" of Muslims, Arabs, and related groups, asked Congress to "allocate resources" and "various forms of relief," wanted JTTFs, watchlis...
Greenland's icecap is melting away thanks to global warming, at least that is what we are told. According to the EU's European State of the Climate 2025 Report, the ice sheet lost 139 Gt last year. They say that is equivalent to about 1.5 times the amount of ice stored in all the glaciers in the European Alps, and raised global mean sea level by 0....
There is a question buried inside the reaction to the Lindsay Clancy case that almost nobody wants to ask, and it is this: if a significant portion of the female population of the US and West, has concluded that women should not be held responsible for killing their children long after those children are born, then what, exactly, is the principle t...
There are bad days, bad years and then there is Max Planck. Whenever life seems determined to put the boot in, it is worth remembering one of the greatest physicists who ever lived, because Planck managed to combine one of the most triumphant scientific careers in history with a private life that reads like the Book of Job rewritten by a part...
There are statistics that sound bad and statistics that sound like the opening scene of a dystopian film. The latest results from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment belong rather uncomfortably in the second category. Across the developed world, 15-year-olds are performing in reading at approximately the level that would...
Kakistocracy is an old word for a familiar feeling. From the Greek kakistos, the worst, and kratos, rule: government by the least fit. George Clooney used it as a jab at one American administration and stopped there, as celebrities do. The term is larger than his target. Rule by the worst is not a Left specialty or a Right specialty. It is what hap...
There is a phrase that has become the secular equivalent of a prayer card, flashed whenever inconvenient questions arise: "I believe in science." It is worth pausing on how strange those four words actually are, because the moment you have to believe in something, you have left the method behind and entered the church. Belief is what you do in the ...
There's a particular kind of intellectual violence that happens when an entire policy edifice, carbon taxes, net-zero mandates, the gutting of industrial economies, rests on a single causal claim that almost nobody is allowed to interrogate. Jonathan Cohler's work is an attempt to do exactly that interrogation, and he does it with the tools the est...
Data from Italy's Interior Ministry for 2024 shows that foreigners commit nearly half of all rapes, while only representing 9 percent of the country's resident population. Specifically, the graph shows they are arrested in 44 percent of cases. The troubling data, which was cited by Italian journalist Francesca Totolo, also shows that when it comes ...
An asylum system is a moral instrument or it is a racket. It cannot be both. The claim now circulating from inside the Home Office is that, in the judgment of a long-serving decision-maker who has seen thousands of cases, it is already the second of those things. "At best," he says, one claim in a hundred is genuine. Almost no part of the mac...
When 62,000 people are arrested for speech, the country that invented the liberal case for free expression has forgotten what the argument was for. The exact number is 62,199. That is how many people British police arrested for communications offences in five years, according to Freedom of Information work assembled by Big Brother Watch. Of t...
The birth dearth is no longer a rumour from East Asia or a footnote about Italy. Global fertility has fallen from about 3.3 births per woman in 1990 to around 2.25. More than half the world's countries now sit below the rough replacement line of 2.1. The usual explanations arrive in separate files: people cannot conceive; people do not want to; peo...
The modern city is an extraordinary machine whose inhabitants seldom notice the machine until it stops. Turn off the electricity for a few minutes and people complain about the inconvenience. Turn it off for a day and supermarkets, petrol stations, communications networks, traffic systems and businesses begin to struggle. Turn it off across a large...
Gloria Steinem died at age 92, and the obituaries are doing what obituaries do: sandblasting the edges off a figure whose legacy is sharp enough to cut yourself on. But the Spectator piece lands on the thing that matters: not the Bunny Girl stunt, not the CIA money, not the internecine feminist spats. The phrase. "Reproductive freedom." Three sylla...
Western intellectuals cannot finish with Mao because the Cultural Revolution is the last respectable dream of unlimited political will. Not the grain statistics. Not the backyard furnaces. The image: a leader points at the universities, the party elders, the old plays and the four olds, and a generation of students becomes a weapon. Struggle sessio...
Japan is not Greece. It prints its own currency, most of its government debt is denominated in yen, it continues to run a current-account surplus and it possesses one of the world's largest net foreign-asset positions. People have been predicting a Japanese sovereign-debt crisis for thirty years and have repeatedly been wrong. What is happening in ...
There is a particular sound that the European political establishment makes when an election result tells it something it does not want to hear, and it is the sound of a thousand think-tankers, commissioners and editorialists suddenly discovering that democracy has an alarming tendency to produce outcomes they did not pre-approve, and that sound ha...
Something has been building in the Australian media over the past few months, and it is worth paying attention to, because the destination of this campaign is not especially mysterious. In August, the University of Melbourne publicised research on misogyny, online radicalisation and youth extremism in Australia, based on surveys of 1,122 teenagers ...
