I’m not much of an expert on social media. I’ve got a Facebook account, but I only use it to participate in occasional ad hoc choir events. Nonetheless, I’m well aware of how easy it has become to reinforce users’ predilections, fears and obsessions by algorithmic manipulation. In December, 2025, Australia’s Online Safety Amendment (Social […]

‘Elections are won from the centre!’ – it’s a shibboleth of 20th century policy-makers. And yet those same policy-makers now wring their hands at the rise of what they call, in their desperation, populist parties. There are two possible reasons for this phenomenon. Perhaps the electorate is becoming radically and unprecedentedly divided, in a way […]

I just got home from the UK, where I had gone to attend the funeral of my oldest friend, Ben Battle. Many of my fellow mourners were kind enough to say how much they enjoyed the eulogy I gave, and to ask for a copy of the text. It is principally for their benefit that […]

This is the decade in which the conceits and vanity of the bien pensant elites stopped being merely silly, and became outright dangerous, so exorbitant has their wealth-destruction become. The flagship preoccupation of the chattering classes, climate catastrophism, still has plenty of life in it, having long ago ceased to be a scientifically-informed anxiety, and […]

Few landmarks in Australia have the cultural resonance that attaches to Bondi Beach. Its name connotes the best of Australian hedonism – a stretch of sand and ocean rollers at the eastern margin of Sydney that has long been its favourite playground. Even the steam tram that once connected it with the rest of Sydney […]

What we ought to be saying about Nett Zero Scarcely a day passes without an article in the centrist press about the growing evidence that the Nett Zero project is incompatible with the preservation of the living standards that westerners have come to expect. Yet too much of this journalism confines itself to reciting the […]