Sir Walter Russell Crocker (1902-2002), belonged to a kind of Australian public life that has almost disappeared. He was scholar, soldier, diplomat, university professor, colonial administrator, author and Lieutenant-Governor. He knew prime ministers and presidents, served Australia across several continents and lived long enough to watch the insti...
Labor has surveyed a nation growling about housing, rents, wages and migration, considered a temporary migrant population measured in the millions, and identified the fellow responsible. He is twenty-three, German, sleeping in a hostel and currently picking almonds outside Mildura. At last, Australia can relax. The Albanese government is proposing ...
The University of California has encountered one of those little ironies that make the culture wars endlessly entertaining. After constructing rules under which using the wrong pronoun or a person's former name could become punishable harassment, the university has now encountered an older rule written by people considerably less interested in pron...
The most revealing thing about pandemic-era policy was not that elites made mistakes, because everyone makes mistakes under uncertainty, but that they stopped evaluating those mistakes at all. A tool is something you pick up, weigh against its costs, and put down when it stops earning its keep. What happened instead was that vaccination and restric...
Europe has been told, in the least ceremonial way possible, that October's Saudi barrels are not coming. Aramco has informed European term-contract refiners that their allocation for next month is zero. This is not an OPEC meeting and not a political embargo aimed at Brussels. It is a map problem. A drone strike last week shut the East–West pipelin...
For several generations there was an unwritten bargain in Western society. If you went to university, acquired the appropriate credentials and entered one of the respectable professions, you were supposed to be largely insulated from the economic storms that battered everyone else. Factories could close, mines could shut, manufacturing could move t...
Louis Vervoort's Problem Solving in Philosophy: How to Do Philosophy in the Age of Ultra-Intelligent AI (springer, 2026), raises a question that professional philosophers might prefer not to contemplate. What happens when artificial intelligence becomes better at philosophy than philosophers? Vervoort's answer is that philosophy itself needs to cha...
Sean Connery (1930-2020) did not merely play James Bond. He installed him. Everything after is a cover version with better gadgets and a worse conscience. And as with Daniel Craig, less manhood and more woke. That is not nostalgia talking. It is craft. Connery had the face of a Glasgow dock and the tailoring of a man who expected the room to adjust...
May it please the court. The Australian's Inquirer piece (exhibit A, linked below) asks whether Tony Burke's "immigration fix" is too little, too late, and whether Pauline Hanson has already seized the agenda. From this side of the bar the answer is simpler than the headline. Labor has not changed the policy. It has changed the press release. Mass ...
There is a comforting explanation for Australia's increasingly bitter culture wars. The country became more progressive, its institutions naturally followed, and a noisy minority on the Right simply refused to accept social change. There is another explanation. The institutions moved faster than the people. That is the provocative thesis advanced i...
Suppose an Australian from 2026 could travel back exactly 125 years and materialise in Sydney or Melbourne in January 1901. He has come with a warning. He knows what will happen to the new Commonwealth: two world wars, Gallipoli, the fall of Singapore, the decline of Britain, the rise of America, the dismantling of White Australia, mass immigration...
Sir Richard Dearlove's lecture to the Global Warming Policy Foundation is not a climate-science paper. It is a security brief. A former head of MI6 is saying Britain has built an energy system that hostile states can squeeze, sabotage, or simply wait out, and that Net Zero, as currently practised, is part of how that system got there. That claim is...
"Thousands of migrants have charged through the streets of Ceuta, the North African enclave of Spain, as police attempted to move them to a new camp. The Mail has more. This is the moment thousands of migrants ran through the streets of the North African enclave of Ceuta as authorities tried to move them to a new tent camp. Spanish police today beg...
The supplement aisle is built on a simple pitch: if a little helps, a lot must help more. Labels shout 5,000 IU, 1,000 mcg, mega, extra-strength. That logic works for shoes and bandwidth. It does not work for nutrients. Most vitamins and minerals follow a U-shaped curve. Too little and you get deficiency. A band in the middle is where the body work...
Leith van Onselen's verdict (link below), on One Nation's latest immigration plan is refreshingly untheatrical: the core is decent, although the detail needs work. That is a better starting point than either "bombshell" or "racist." The argument worth considering is that Australia's enormous stock of temporary visa holders has become a housing, inf...
"He was going to die anyway" is the sentence that should stop us in our tracks, because it does not describe a special class of patient. It describes the human race. Applied to a desperately ill child, it can sound like mercy. Applied to your mother, the stranger on the bus or yourself, it becomes something else entirely. Once eventual death become...
Bjorn Lomborg's latest pass through the energy numbers is the sort of sentence that should end a thousand sermons and almost never does. In 2024 the world still drew about four-fifths of its primary energy from coal, oil and gas. On his accounting the share was 80.8 per cent, barely moved from 81.4 per cent in 2000. Absolute use is not fading. It i...
"Where hustle's the name of the game And nice guys get washed away like the snow and the rain; There's been a load of compromisin' On the road to my horizon But I'm gonna be where the lights are shinin' on me …" Glen Campbell Rhinestone Cowboy (1975) If you wanted to design the least threatening figure in popular culture, you might come up wi...
A certain class of people needs an ending of the world the way a liturgy needs a last judgment. The subject changes; the posture does not. Carbon had a long run. When the public began to notice the subsidies, the aviation, and the coastal houses that somehow never moved inland, the apparatus did not dissolve. It changed costume. The new sacred emer...
The British state is not simply failing British women. In cases like that of Radiet Meles, an illegal who carried out two vicious sexual assaults, it is producing the conditions in which they are harmed and then treating the resulting outrage as the scandal. A genuine failure is a bridge that collapses under a load nobody foresaw. What Britain has ...
