Rumble in the jungle
In the surreal tropical politics of contemporary Malaysia it is good business sense to use government funds to make loss-making property investments in order to enrich personal bank accounts. Recent...
View ArticleDam busters
Mostly journalists pick their stories. Occasionally the story picks you. Ever since Lisa Spierling described how she ran for her life with seven children along a railway track to escape a wall of water...
View ArticleSledging takes its toll
In 1947 a black man named Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, ending segregation in Major League Baseball. Dodgers president Branch Rickey chose their first black player carefully...
View ArticleBandana republic
When the Australian nation comes together, it’s a rare emotional moment. This happened on 6 November 1999, when, dramatically, John Howard ‘broke the heart of the nation’. At least that’s what Malcolm...
View ArticleBusiness/Robbery etc
At last Australia’s beleaguered coal industry has something going for it. After being labelled unethical by Sydney’s Anglican church and a couple of equally precious universities that have decided to...
View ArticleDriving Dixie
I am driving my son from Washington DC to Charlottesville, Virginia, for a two-day ‘orientation’ at the university he will soon be attending. You can’t go far in this part of America without being...
View ArticleBlind Wendy
It could have been worse, much worse.That is probably the best that anyone concerned about the systematic demonisation of Israel in the media, the universities and much of the political class could say...
View ArticleThe racism of the Left
When two people are in a room, psychological theory tells us that there are really six people present. There are the perceptions that both people have of themselves and their companion as well as they...
View ArticleClosing young minds
It was a typically chilly Melbourne afternoon when we arrived at the NAB building in Docklands to attend Christopher Pyne’s book launch. Instead of dully walking through the corporate doors to be...
View ArticleBronny bad, Adam goodes
Even in the ultra-secular world inhabited by the commentariat, there seems to be a need for a parade of devils to revile and angels to worship. Accordingly, Bronwyn Bishop has been nominated this...
View ArticlePommy battlers
“They don’t like it up ‘em, Captain Mainwaring.” You read it in The Spectator Australia first, just a few short weeks ago in my Ashes preview: England would win the Ashes. However, not even the most...
View ArticleBusiness/Robbery etc
It had nothing to do with ensuring the survival of the yakka skink and the ornamental snake; they inhabit much of Queensland. And it had even less to do with Green celebrations about blocking a...
View ArticleIt’s the swill, stupid
It is easy to blame the lack of reformist zeal in Australia on the politicians, the politicians on both sides of the aisle. Low comparative productivity. Very high personal income tax rates. A...
View ArticleDon’t move Q&A, scrap it
Experts talk a lot of junk. The more famous they are, the more hooey they talk. The media tarts in a study by Phillip E Tetlock made worse predictions of future events than his control group of...
View ArticleSelf-loathing at first sight
Fresh out of a Bachelor of Arts program and brimming with useless postmodern gobbledygook, I feel I’m uniquely qualified to give you plebs the key to understanding Donald Trump’s incomprehensible...
View ArticleDragged to the Chair
Rejoice! At last we have a new Speaker. After weeks of scandal – and more helicopter jokes than anyone could bear – Bronwyn Bishop is officially out and Tony Smith is in. It’s a bit of a comeback for...
View ArticleDying in Turkmenistan (for a fag)
The last moments of the sun cast a pastel fire across the city of Mary in northern Turkmenistan, and five young men are sitting around a table at an outdoor bar getting edgy. ‘Those guys over there,’...
View ArticleBottom drawer
Left-handed politics would not be where it is today without a little help from cultural relativism, one of the most central approaches to left minded thinking. All groups within a society, big or...
View ArticleSurely our enemy’s enemy is our friend?
In a speech to the Sydney Institute, Julie Bishop declared the threat Isis pose to international order is greater than the one Soviet-led communism presented. The historical ineptitude of this aside,...
View ArticleShock! Horror! Abbott does what he said he would
The Constitution belongs to the Australian people, and to no one else. In demonstrating their support for this fundamental principle, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison have ensured that not only will the...
View ArticleAping racism
There has been a dark, delicious irony to the commentariat’s crying over the booing of Adam Goodes. These mostly white, footie-dodging, city-based scribes present themselves as implacable opponents of...
View ArticleRadio gaga
A series of programs on ABC Radio National, produced by a long-standing anti-Israel activist, has undermined the objectivity of the national broadcaster and exposed serious failings in its editorial...
View ArticleBoycott the boycott
I don’t know who essentially is pushing the Palestinians towards this story of an economic boycott of Israel; to the best of my knowledge, the Palestinians aren’t the ones setting the economic boycott...
View ArticleThe Conquest of Russia
The death of Robert Conquest reminds us of the centrality of the term ‘totalitarianism’, probably the dominating characteristic of twentieth century history that he did more than any individual, with...
View ArticleConflict resolution
After much inter-factional muscle-flexing, last month the ALP approved a resolution on Middle East policy at its National Conference in Melbourne. Some commentators argue that pro-Israel types should...
View ArticleBusiness/Robbery etc
It is plainly absurd. As things stand, a judge in an Australian Court apparently has the power to reject an economically vital multi-billion dollar Australian coal export project on the basis that...
View ArticleRaving right-wingery?
If we are to believe the ABC then this Abbott government is somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun. It is a union-bashing, mysogynistic, Islamophobic, tax-slashing, international-law ignoring, cohort...
View ArticleGrounding jihadists
‘JIHADIS GROUNDED’ the headline said, ‘Gang of five would-be terrorists stopped at Sydney Airport.’ I’m sure I wasn’t the only Tele reader to enthusiastically keep reading in the hope of a blow-by-blow...
View ArticleJoe for Prez
‘The key thing I wish to say today, is we are putting the band back together.’ Thus spoke Peter FitzSimons, as he and his old pal Joe Hockey announced their renewed push for an Australian republic....
View ArticleThe new wowserism
The first time I darkened the shores of Oz, in 2011, I was delighted to discover that the clichés I’d grown up with were true. No, there weren’t blokes in corkscrew hats and Fosters-stained boots,...
View ArticleLet’s just keep on voting until the plebs get it right
Treasurer Joe Hockey has done what no minister has ever done without resigning − thrown in his lot with the opposition to implement one of their key policies. This is not about joining some benign...
View ArticleSwill? Moi?
The internet is driving the biggest change to society since the industrial revolution drew people from the land to the city. Institutions in business, politics, education, media and entertainment are...
View ArticleSingapore singalong
Whenever I am feeling low I look around me and I know There’s a place that will stay within me… This is home truly. Where I know I must be Where my dreams wait for me… So we’ll build our dreams...
View ArticleBusiness/Robbery etc
What a difference a ‘u’ can make. On this side of the ditch, without a ‘u’, there is irresponsibility and hypocrisy but on the New Zealand side there is a rational concern for the national interest....
View ArticleLabor’s renewables target doesn’t add up
It has long been the standard fare of green evangelists to prosecute their cause with persuasion by emotion rather than sticking to the facts at hand. Labor’s recent decision to opt for a 50 per cent...
View ArticleWill the intelligentsia fall for polygamy?
Recent momentous events in Ireland and the United States regarding the legal status of same-sex marriage have triggered a debate reverberating around the world – what’s next? The Chief Justice of the...
View ArticleNSW: racists welcome
The failure of NSW authorities to prosecute the Australian head of Hizb ut-Tahrir, who called for deadly violence against Jews, means anyone is now free to call for the killing of racial minorities....
View ArticleI come to praise Tony, not to bury him
Senator George Brandis did a nice impression before the last election of wanting to be a latter day incarnation of John Stuart Mill, the go-to man to protect the core Western value of free speech. He...
View ArticleCan Turnbull win over Tony’s tradies?
I’ve just moved away from the ‘cashed-up bogans’, bling and boats of Melbourne’s bayside suburb of Patterson Lakes. Goodbye to the Kath and Kim house, that symbol of outer suburban culture. Goodbye to...
View ArticleSyrian Anzacs
Let me be the bastard who states the obvious: there’s no refugee crisis in the West. There’s an economic refugee crisis. And it’s not the same thing. A refugee is defined by the United Nations 1951...
View ArticleFeeling the guilt
The picture of the dead Syrian child is a high water mark of the politics of feeling. In a world of hollowed out identities, particularly in the post-religious societies of Europe and Australia, the...
View ArticleOn books and pollies
I am a lover of books. Reading has been one of the great pleasures of my life. In some ways, it has defined my life, and my political identity. It was reading Mill’s On Liberty when I was at school...
View ArticleAux bien pensants
If Malcolm Turnbull is remembered for anything, it will be for his supreme act of treachery in bringing down a successful prime minister merely to achieve, illegitimately, the office he has so long...
View ArticleDope ‘em up
Australian athletes only managed to get two silvers at the Beijing World Athletics Championships. But the good news is that one of them, Jared Tallent, is now a shoo-in for a gold at the Athens...
View ArticleManicurist nation
Do you lie awake at night fretting about the prospect of a Manicure Gone Wrong? A bungled pedicure? I do. I have mani nightmares. The local shellac parlour may as well be the Malaysia Airlines...
View ArticleBusiness/Robbery etc
It’s as questionable in business as it is in politics: when facing the prospect of disaster, just change the leader and everything will be OK. As the slide in profits and share-prices of Australia’s...
View ArticleWhy I support BDS
I’m writing this article with my Jerusalem travel notes on one side of my desk and a box of documents on the other. These contain my father’s family tree, Ashkenazi Jews from Berlin with a line to the...
View ArticleKing Cnut
Next year will see the millennium of Cnut becoming King of England. It is an anniversary which must be high on the radar of many of the politicians in Canberra. However I must confess to being...
View ArticleDesperately seeking Pax Americana
Remember this fateful sequence of events. It began on 21 August 2013, when Bashar al-Assad gassed 1500 of his own civilians. His deadly brother Maha al-Assad, and their Alawi loyalists, had just dumped...
View ArticleTurnbull vs evolution
Economists offer one way to understand the world. Evolutionary psychologists offer another. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes they don’t. Let’s consider what these two worldviews have to tell us about...
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