A fundamental question is being raised in Australian politics, one that the political establishment has too often preferred to avoid: who has the right to decide the future population of Australia? Is it the Australian people, acting through genuinely accountable democratic institutions, or a combination of politicians, bureaucrats, employers, univ...
One of the oldest principles of the rule of law is that citizens should be able to determine, with reasonable certainty, what conduct is prohibited by criminal legislation. This is particularly important where the consequences of getting the answer wrong include a substantial fine or imprisonment. Yet South Australia's machete prohibition rai...
Trump is About to Light the World on Fire... Again I have watched this movie before, and I know how it ends. The Democratic blowout in Tuesday's midterms was not a narrow rebuke of this president or a quirk of turnout; it was a national rejection of the Iran war and its staggering costs at home [1]. Voters across the United States were loud and cle...
Geoffrey Hinton, one of the people most responsible for the neural-network techniques that made modern AI possible, has said the quiet part aloud. In a recent Guardian interview he observed that it could turn out we would have been better off never developing the technology at all. He is careful not to call himself a doomer. He still thinks a "wond...
Political smokescreens are almost as old as politics itself. When a government faces an uncomfortable problem that it has helped create, one familiar response is to identify a smaller, more manageable issue, announce decisive action against it, and hope that public attention shifts away from the larger failure. The technique is ancient, but modern ...
Michael de Percy, writing in The Spectator Australia on 6 November 2026, asks why so many Americans voted like useful idiots in the midterm elections. His concern is that a weakened Donald Trump, confronted by an opposition-controlled Congress, may become a lame-duck president at precisely the moment when the West needs decisive leadership. H...
You drop a tenner in the bucket outside the supermarket because a child in a Barnardo's advert has a bruise and a sad piano track. You assume the money buys a bed, a meal, a caseworker. What it actually buys, in part, is a press officer and a policy team who will tell a government minister that the phrase "earned settlement" is offensive, and that ...
The telling thing isn't the quote. It's that nobody in the woke Leftist French press corps flinched. Jean-Luc Mélenchon stood up in Le Bourget, seventy-five years old and running for president of a nuclear-armed Western republic, and named Maximilien Robespierre as the moral anchor of his political project. Not as a historical curiosity. Not "for a...
"What is it about Western governments that makes them unable to enforce their own immigration laws? Something suicidal is at work here, although I am not at all sure it is empathy. The London Times headlines: "20,000 migrant criminals living freely in UK despite deportation orders." Fewer than one in 20 foreign offenders from certain countrie...
The recent revelation that the Albanese government dropped a cool $3 million of taxpayer funds on a brisk 75-minute documentary tied to COP31 is nothing short of a masterclass in bureaucratic detachment. While everyday Australians grapple with a stubborn cost-of-living crisis, squeezed by high interest rates, surging grocery bills, and energy...
The Albanese government's proposed Digital Duty of Care legislation represents a potentially profound threat to freedom of speech in Australia. Its danger does not lie principally in an explicit prohibition upon conservative political opinions, or even in the prospect of government officials ordering the removal of particular articles. The more ser...
Australia calls itself a democracy, but there is a rather obvious question that the political establishment seldom wishes to confront. What happens when the people want a law changed, but the politicians refuse? The conventional answer is that voters can wait until the next election, replace one collection of professional politicians with ano...
When even The Economist begins warning readers to expect an artificial intelligence crash, it is worth paying attention. In its leader of 12 November 2026 (US time), entitled "Why you should expect an AI crash," the magazine argues that the extraordinary enthusiasm surrounding AI may be approaching a painful encounter with economic reality. The tec...
The widespread Microsoft 365 disruption of 13 November 2026 (Australia time) is another warning about the extraordinary fragility of the digital civilisation that governments and corporations have constructed around us. Services associated with Outlook, Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft's artificial intelligence produ...
Kenneth Minogue's 2001 essay "How Civilizations Fall" opens with the classic image drawn from the fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun. A cultivated urban civilisation softens under luxury. Its people lose the sharpness that built the walls and the libraries. Then a tribe of hardier outsiders, Bedouin, in the Islamic case, rides in from the des...
Paraguay has just provided the world with a remarkable illustration of how quickly a supposedly stable political and financial system can unravel. Within days, the collapse of a rapidly expanding digital bank left millions of citizens unable to access their savings, brought protesters into the streets, forced the resignation of the country's centra...
Australians are being slowly strangled by taxation, and governments seem determined to tighten the noose. The process is not always dramatic. There is no single confiscatory tax that suddenly reduces everyone to poverty. Instead, there is an accumulating burden of income taxes, land taxes, council rates, consumption taxes, duties, levies and regula...
The Albanese government has decided against supporting any narrowing of the terrorism definition that would remove "religion" as a standalone motive category in the Criminal Code. Independent National Security Legislation Monitor Jake Blight is expected to recommend, in a report due around 20 November 2026, that violent religious extremism be absor...
There is something deeply ironic about Google, one of the greatest corporate collectors of personal information in human history, warning the Australian government that its proposed online safety legislation threatens to establish a system of mass surveillance. Yet that is precisely what has happened. And on this occasion, Google has a powerful arg...
Humans contribute just 4% of the carbon dioxide that enters the Earth's atmosphere each year but the 'settled' science of anthropogenic climate change states that this has caused a 50% rise in the trace gas since pre-industrial times. In fact, this arguable statement can be tested using carbon isotope data and the results are in from a detailed mat...
