Australia signed a 10-year Bilateral Security Agreement with Ukraine on 23–24 September 2026 on the sidelines of UN General Assembly High-Level Week in New York. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy formalised a framework for defence and security cooperation, accompanied by a further A$60 million package. Official figur...

There is something peculiar about the Australian immigration debate. We hold elections over tax cuts, electricity prices, Medicare and relatively minor changes to industrial relations. Yet one of the largest decisions a government can make: how rapidly the country's population should grow, tends to disappear into Treasury forecasts, visa categories...

Stanford has built a mouse whose forebrain is mostly not a mouse. Sergiu Pașca's group genetically cleared much of the developing cortex and hippocampus, about half the brain, then filled the gap with human organoids grown from reprogrammed skin cells. A few hundred thousand human neurons went into newborns. In two or three months the graft had mul...

A war against Pauline is the wrong war. Angus Taylor should not let Andrew Hastie's feud with One Nation become the Coalition's main event while Anthony Albanese is the one holding the Lodge. That instruction only makes sense if you still think the Liberals are in opposition to Labor. Watch what they actually do when Hanson rises, and the other rea...

Channel Nine sent a reporter to the United States, sat down with Thomas Robb of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and asked whether it was "heartening" to see "anti-immigration Pauline" doing well in Australia. He said yes. The clip went into a documentary about Trump's divided America. Pauline Hanson called it disgusting and a new low. Barnaby Joyc...

Michael Snyder has been predicting economic and geopolitical disasters for so long that regular readers know to apply a discount to the apocalyptic language. But his latest "perfect storm" argument deserves attention because its central point does not depend upon believing that the end of civilisation is arriving next Tuesday. Something unusual is ...

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...