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...

There are stories that are funny until suddenly they are not. The extraordinary saga of Professor Jason Arday was one of them. Now Arday is dead at only 41 years of age, and whatever amusement could once be extracted from the increasingly incredible story of his academic career has disappeared with him. Arday was found unresponsive at his home in B...

Penny Wong's recent Lowy Institute speech (August 2026) explicitly stated: "Multicultural Australia is the only Australia that has ever existed." She framed calls for a "monoculture" (associated with Pauline Hanson/One Nation) as a "melancholic fantasy" that would turn Australians against each other, make the country "weaker at home and more vulner...

For decades Hollywood has been teaching us to fear the machine. The Terminator gave us Skynet, an artificial intelligence that concludes humanity is the problem and proceeds to exterminate it. The Matrix turned the relationship around: machines have already won and human beings have become biological components of their technological civilisation. ...

During the COVID pandemic, scientists sequenced millions of SARS-CoV-2 genomes and built detailed "family trees" (phylogenies) showing how the virus mutated, split into variants, and moved around the world. Those trees guided public-health decisions, variant naming (the Pango system), and claims about how the virus evolved. A 2026 study published i...

Australia has fought many wars, but one of the longest has been against an enemy weighing about two kilograms, armed with nothing more formidable than teeth and an extraordinary capacity to reproduce. The rabbit wars may be starting again. Reports from around Australia suggest rabbit populations are increasing substantially. In the South Australian...

Dark chocolate has acquired an almost medicinal reputation. It contains flavanols and other compounds associated with potential cardiovascular benefits, has less sugar than milk chocolate, and is routinely presented as the chocolate you can eat without feeling quite so guilty. Buy organic dark chocolate and surely you have improved the equation eve...

It's a grim read (link below), and Brimelow has been making essentially the same argument for three decades with a consistency that's hard to dismiss. The core of it isn't really controversial once you strip away the rhetoric: immigration is a policy, not weather. The government sets the numbers, the origins, and the skill mix. That's just a factua...

Dutch politician Geert Wilders has issued one of his strongest warnings yet about the demographic transformation of Europe, arguing that mass immigration rather than climate change represents the more fundamental long-term challenge to European civilisation. Writing for Breitbart, Wilders argues that anyone travelling through Western Europe can see...

A cultural war has been declared on J.K. Rowling and Sophie Cunningham. Their offence is defending a proposition that, a generation ago, would scarcely have required explanation: human beings are sexually dimorphic, organised around the two reproductive sexes, male and female, and male puberty creates physical advantages that matter when men and wo...

The major parties still talk as if the problem is messaging or a temporary mood. It is not. Large numbers of Australians have come to despise them, and the reasons are neither mysterious nor unjust. Decades of promises followed by quiet abandonment, of lectures delivered from insulated lives, and of self-interest dressed up as public service have d...