Any hope of a quick return to stable, abundant oil and gas flows is already fading. The structural problems plaguing global energy markets run far deeper than this latest diplomatic pause. Even if open conflict is avoided for now, Western nations, including Australia, face persistent fuel difficulties driven by years of policy failure, underinvestm...

Northwestern Europeans are psychologically strange by the standards of our species. This is not an insult. It is one of the most important facts in human history. For most of humanity, across most of time and most places, people have understood themselves primarily through relationships: son of X, member of clan Y, from village Z. They have reasone...

President Trump had been preparing to claim a form of victory in the ongoing conflict with Iran by securing the full reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Reports indicate he was even open to walking away without a comprehensive nuclear deal. Iran's recent hard-line demands, billions in reparations and a total U.S. troop withdrawal, have disrupted tho...

Welcome to the crepitant groans of the collapse. You think some people suffer during this time and most would agree they do. However, imagine this situation: you are one of the most gifted composers in history but God or nature has allowed you to become stone deaf. What a tragedy? Maybe a comedy? Depending on how you view hardship, a special few ig...

Labor's immigration story changes with the audience and the polling, but the method stays the same. Claim control. Claim reduction. Claim purpose. Then watch the numbers and the outcomes refuse to match the words. Ministers announce that net overseas migration has fallen dramatically from its peak. Technically true if you measure from the post-pand...

Walk around an Australian university campus long enough and sooner or later you will encounter one of the most durable political arguments ever devised. Mention the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, East Germany or another disastrous communist experiment and somebody will produce the magic words: "But that wasn't real commu...

I came to university expecting an education. What I found was a carefully managed performance in which everyone pretends not to notice the obvious. Students are admitted who are plainly not prepared for the work, and we all know the reason. Race is treated as a qualification. The results are predictable. Those students cannot keep up, so the standa...

On 5 August 2026, Senior U.S. District Judge William B. Shubb issued a preliminary injunction in Kory v. Bonta. The order bars California's Attorney General and its medical boards from investigating, prosecuting, or sanctioning three physicians: Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Le Trinh Hoang, and Dr. Brian Tyson, based on the viewpoint of the COVID-19 advice ...

It might be wondered why climate catastrophising clots bother with coral and in particular the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). For years as GBR coral cover hit new record highs, it let them down all the time. A bout of temporary natural 'bleaching' in 2024 gave a little Armageddon hope with the Guardian reporting last year that GBR coral may reach a "tip...

Australian data centres sit at the centre of the AI boom: massive economic opportunity colliding with hard physical limits on power, water, and the grid. Main Issues Energy demand and grid pressure. Data centres currently consume around 2% of electricity on the National Electricity Market (roughly 4 TWh, or the equivalent of 700,000+ homes). Demand...

Something remarkable is happening in Australian politics, and Victoria may be where the political earthquake finally becomes impossible to ignore. Labor is on the nose, but the really interesting part is not simply that voters are abandoning it. It is where some of those voters are going. They are going to Pauline Hanson's One Nation. For decades, ...

Something has gone missing from journalism, and it is not merely "objectivity." Objectivity was always an aspiration more than a clean achievement. What has disappeared is the temperament that once made the press dangerous to every orthodoxy at once. H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), remains the clearest example. He did not write to improve the public or ...

Llew O'Brien's Children Born Alive Protection Bill addresses something so basic that it should barely need saying. When a child is born alive, that child is a person and a patient. The child should be assessed and given the same medically appropriate care as any other newborn in the same condition. Australians will continue to argue about abortion....

Public indifference to the threat of nuclear war has grown dangerously widespread. On social media, some cheer the escalating violence in Ukraine while others openly call for nuclear weapons to be used in the Middle East. Few of these voices appear to grasp the scale of destruction modern nuclear arsenals can inflict. Even a limited exchange would ...

A few days ago on a sparkling Sydney ferry ride, with tourists photographing the Opera House and schoolchildren laughing in the sun, the author of a recent Spectator Australia piece overheard something that froze the blood. The kids were not chatting about the usual excursion excitements. They were bantering about unpleasant things they might do to...

The older I get, the more I find myself missing a world that no longer exists. This is probably something every generation eventually says, and perhaps there is an unavoidable trick of memory involved. Childhood summers seem longer because we were children. Christmas seemed more magical because we had not yet learned what the electricity bill cost....

If the events unfolding around us were merely the plot of a movie, they might register as mildly amusing absurdities, the kind of over-the-top satire that leaves an audience chuckling at the sheer inventiveness of human folly. Because they are happening in the real world, the same scenes feel considerably less funny. The old computer maxim was "gar...

We won't get fooled again. That line from rock group The Who has always carried a certain swagger, a declaration that the next round of official promises will meet harder scrutiny than the last. In August 2026 it found an unexpected echo in the voice of Kyle Sandilands, the long-time radio provocateur who once lent his platform and his rhymes to th...

For years I have been hearing that people like me should acknowledge that we are living on somebody else's land. The radical Left has spent decades telling Australians of British ancestry that we are settlers, colonisers and beneficiaries of an historical invasion. At university ceremonies we acknowledge that sovereignty was supposedly never ceded,...

A British telecoms giant is quietly supplying thousands of free SIM cards, each loaded with six months of data, to a charity that hands them out to people who have just crossed the Channel in small boats. Care4Calais has already distributed more than 162,000 items to nearly 30,000 individuals: hoodies, joggers, T-shirts, cold-weather packs, weather...