As the shock of Hamas’ attack on Israel continues to reverberate around the world, the extent of anti-Israel sentiment on display has provoked a great deal of agonised confusion over the question of freedom of expression. Many from my end of the political spectrum, who have rightly bemoaned the curtailment of freedom of speech inherent […]

The Silly Billies are winning – for now. Harrumpf readers probably won’t need reminding of the phenomenon I call the Silly Billy Effect. When the number of people who have responded to a perceived threat by panicking, enacting costly, counterproductive and unethical regulations and generally behaving like silly billies exceeds the number of people who […]

In my last post, I expressed the hope that the Voice referendum had let the genie of Australian common sense out of its bottle, and might be the start of the rehabilitation of Australian liberal conservatism. It’s clear from Saturday’s result that a sizeable chunk of the rural aboriginal population share my distrust of their […]

The Voice referendum could be the start of a sea change in Australian politics. As a modest contributor, in time and money, to the campaign to reject the proposal to enshrine in the Australian Constitution, I join what I now know to be a considerable majority of my compatriots in breathing a sigh of relief […]

The Devil you know… In his latest podcast, the excellent Neil Oliver takes aim at the Canadian establishment for its apparent ignorance of history in lionising Jaroslav Hunka, a 98 year-old Ukrainian who served in a Waffen SS unit fighting against the Soviet Union. In doing so, I feel he takes less care than he […]

This post relates to an interview with Prof Niall Ferguson, which came up non my Youtube feed and which I took to be more or less contemporary. I penned and posted a riposte in the comments, before realising it was probably in fact a couple of years old. On reflection, though, it’s a pretty good […]

The Intellectual Asymmetry that should be rescuing us from bad policy. “Oh, I don’t know enough science to comment on that- I just have to trust the experts!” How often do you hear that when you try to persuade someone to treat with greater scepticism the claims of the climate catastrophists, or of the lock-down-and-vaccinate […]

For anyone who still clings to the quaint notion that the Covid vaccines were ‘safe and affective’, Dr Campbell’s analysis of the data released by the Western Australia’s Department of Health. In brief, the rate of reported serious adverse events following Covid jabs is 24 times greater than for all ‘scheduled’ vaccinations, such as annual […]

Have you ever visited France? Or Italy? If so, it’s likely that you flew into Paris, or Rome.  But did you? Or did you fly to ‘Parrree’, with a suitably uvulated ‘r’? Or to ‘Roma’, with its ‘r’ impeccably rolled? And when, in France, you heard the locals talking about visiting ‘Londres’, did you correct […]

Apparently it’s going to happen in October. The Referendum, I mean, to determine whether the Australian constitution should be amended to provide something called ‘a Voice’ for the 800,000 or so Australians who are, or claim to be, of aboriginal descent. I’m firmly on the No side. The Yes case seems to me to imply […]