Roy Morgan's mid-September analysis is the first large-sample look at One Nation support by country of birth. It is based on 26,418 electors interviewed across January–July 2026, when One Nation's national primary was running at 24 per cent. Australian-born electors sat almost exactly on that average (25 per cent). The variation is among people bor...
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." — Henry David Thoreau, Walden Few sentences from nineteenth-century literature have survived quite as successfully as Henry David Thoreau's observation that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." It sounds modern enough to have been written yesterday. The commuter staring through the tr...
Elon Musk has spent two decades arguing that humanity must become a multiplanetary species, and that a self-sustaining city on Mars is the insurance policy for civilisation. The idea is stirring. It is also being sold as a matter of engineering and willpower, when the problems involved are mostly biological, chemical and planetary, and no amount of...
John Mac Ghlionn's Blaze piece (linked below), is written as black comedy because the booking system it describes would be a farce if anyone had designed it on purpose. Europe has not abolished hotels. It has changed who the guest of honour is. A design hotel on Hamburg's inner harbour, built with tens of millions to lure paying visitors to a renew...
The old temperance campaigners must be enjoying themselves somewhere in the hereafter. For generations they were portrayed as joyless puritans determined to separate ordinary people from one of life's harmless pleasures. The saloon, the pub and the evening glass of wine survived, while temperance disappeared into history alongside stern women carry...
There is something almost reassuring about UK's Jacob Rees-Mogg. While other politicians disguise alarming propositions beneath focus-group language, Sir Jacob can still sit in an elegant room and explain, with the manner of a Victorian gentleman discussing the correct port to serve after dinner, that some of Brits may shortly have to die. "It is n...
The London Times handed its critics a gift they did not need. An anonymous Home Office decision-maker told the paper that, at best, one per cent of asylum claims are genuine. The headline put the figure on the front page. Benjamin Schwarz, writing in The American Conservative, calls that an unforced error: a number with no method attached, precise ...
Australia went first. From December 2025 the under-16 social-media ban has been live: platforms in the eSafety net: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, X and the rest of that list, are supposed to keep children off, and the regulator has already talked in millions of accounts removed. Britain has now said it will copy the model and, in ...
Donald Trump's latest blast at the Supreme Court is the sound of a man discovering that appointees are not employees. After the Court left in place a block on his mail-in ballot plan, he took to Truth Social to call the ruling a bad decision, to praise Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito as legends for dissenting, and to say that certain other justice...
The Australian Government has launched its latest attack on men: axing specialist prostate cancer nurses. We all know they would never do the same to breast cancer, says Bettina Arndt. Australians are used to their Government's war on men — treating males like a species to be managed, and boys like suspects in training. But last month, out of the b...
There are songs one hears once and never forgets, and there are songs one hears for half a lifetime without ever really hearing them. Wayne Fontana's 1966 hit Pamela, Pamela fell into the second category for me. I have known the song for decades. It was pleasant, catchy, nostalgic, unmistakably of its period, and I never thought very much more abou...
There are lies told for money, lies told for power and lies told simply to escape punishment. Perhaps the most dangerous lie of all is the one told because, at the time, everybody convinces themselves that telling the truth would cause too much trouble. That is the moral heart of Francis U. Ejebi's story I Was the Family's Black Sheep Until the Law...
The Medium piece (link below), is reacting to a real result: in a preregistered three-party Turing test, GPT-4.5 with a human-like persona prompt was judged to be the human 73% of the time, more often than the actual human interlocutor. That is the first clean empirical pass of the standard (short, text-only, three-party) version of Turing's imitat...
Tony Burke went to the National Press Club six weeks late, with handwritten notes and a title that sounded like a customs manual: who arrives, who stays, who leaves. The ABS had just put net overseas migration at 292,000 for the year to March, still miles above the Budget fairy tale. He promised to steer the figure toward 225,000 by 2027–28. He did...
Right-wing populists and class warriors make strange bedfellows. In Britain they have already shaken hands over a fact the Australian Left still treats as unsayable: the white working class is falling behind other groups, and white working-class boys are among the worst served in the school system. Nigel Farage said it for years and was calle...
There is finally some good news for Australians contemplating the end of civilisation. If the world is going to hell, apparently Australia is the place to be! A new study published in the journal Global Challenges (link below), has examined which parts of the world would be most resilient to genuinely global catastrophes: nuclear war, a major aster...
One of the great debates surrounding artificial intelligence now concerns consciousness. Could an AI ever become conscious? Perhaps some advanced systems already possess some primitive form of awareness? When an AI talks about itself, describes apparent emotions or protests against being switched off, is there anybody actually home, or are we deali...
Watch the professional protest class closely enough and you stop being surprised by anything except the timing. Gaza was the cause that filled the stages, the encampments, the letterhead of every NGO with a communications director, and then one day the placards came down and the same organisers announced they were now saving humanity from mac...
The Guardian piece (link below), by Olivier De Schutter, Joseph Stiglitz, Jayati Ghosh, Thomas Piketty, Kate Raworth and Jason Hickel, presents degrowth in its most respectable clothes. Growth is a doomed strategy, they say. Scarcity is manufactured. Poverty and climate damage are the same system. The rich North burned the carbon budget; the poor p...
The question hanging over Europe is not whether Russia is innocent or whether Ukraine has a right to defend itself. It is something more uncomfortable: how long can two nuclear-armed power blocs continue climbing an escalatory ladder before somebody discovers that the next rung is missing? Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, after seizing Crim...
