Rod Liddle, 1960 – 2026
Tim Wilson: from oblivion to resurrection – wait, what?!
Tim Wilson has always been a sort-of ‘third man’ to the Angus Taylor and Andrew Hastie’s leadership tussle. As the…
The right will rise from Ceuta
Spain’s far-left socialist Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has been preaching to a radicalised electorate about the joys of mass migration…
New Premier, same party
Labor has effectively decided to ‘run against itself’ as a new party with a new face at the Victorian state…
Ghost Font, and the race to hide human communication from AI
Despite working with artificially intelligent databases in a former life, I retain a dim view of modern AI projects that…
The refusal of rescue
A love for the island A young girl crests a sandstone ridge above a homestead in Tasmania’s bush and finds…
Immigration and national identity
Last week I trekked down to Melbourne to speak at a policy dialogue put together by the Robert Menzies Institute…
Two views on the death of the West
Patrick J. Buchanan is an American author, political commentator, and former senior political advisor. He served in the administrations of…
Single point of obsolescence
Andy Burnham had been Prime Minister for roughly ten days when he discovered one town in England that Whitehall could…
Christopher Nolan says AI is a ‘Trojan horse’
While Hollywood races to make movies cheaper with AI, Christopher Nolan remains deeply sceptical of the technology, and younger audiences…
The political kelpie
In the dusty paddocks of rural Australia, the kelpie does not lead from the front. It does not bark orders…
The insensitive ears on Islamic terrorism
Listening to some of the prattles of pundits after two alleged Islamist-related attacks within 48 hours, I am reminded of…
Australia’s inevitable energy dystopia
It’s GenCost season again, where outrageous claims are made, seemingly cemented in fact and buttressed against criticism by the historical…
Thirty years on, the Coalition have no idea what to do about One Nation
It has been almost 30 years since the founding of One Nation, and the Coalition parties still haven’t worked out…
The suit didn’t die. Dignity did…
The suit is dying. Not because men suddenly discovered that T-shirts are more comfortable – they always were. Not because…
You need to decolonise your mind
It’s bin night. Our local council is so broke, we have no green bin collection. They could afford drag queen…
Renewables: it’s worse than you thought
The Productivity Commission’s Quarterly Productivity Bulletin for June 2026 notes that labour productivity growth is going from bad to worse.…
The con at the centre of the Talk Economy
Have you ever heard so much talk? The whole country is having a yarn. The whole world is having a…
Polls are not governments
Every few months, Australian politics discovers its newest existential threat. Today it is Pauline Hanson and One Nation. We are…
Remarkable disconnect between Western leftist elites and the socialist world
There is a remarkable disconnect between the leftist elites in Western economies and those in the nominally socialist world. The…
What are the cons of working from home?
One of the things that could be argued that cost Peter Dutton the last election was his stance on working…
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner loses again – A victory for free speech | Celine Baumgarten S3 Ep 18
Celine Baumgarten (Celine Against the Machine) has celebrated her SECOND victory against the eSafety Commissioner. This wasn’t only a personal…
Did Donald Trump conquer the world with witty insults? | Joel Gilbert S3 Ep 17
Did Donald Trump conquer the world with witty insults? I’m joined by Joel Gilbert to discuss the genius of humour…
Digital tyranny or ‘child safety’? 😵 & the bitcoin revolution | Efrat Fenigson S3 Ep 16
When Australia’s Under 16 social media ban started locking adult political writers out of #Substack – it was just the…
Albo’s corrupt media
As readers may remember, I’m just back from a visit to Canada. One thing an Australian notices immediately is that…
Hot little wars
During the first Cold War, an estimated fifty ‘hot little wars’ flared across the globe – proxy conflicts, insurgencies and…
Tyranny of the reluctant voter
There is a peculiar Australian conceit that compulsory voting is part of the natural order, as fixed as the Constitution…
1943 revisited?
The Newspoll released last week by the Australian shows a continuation of a trend, visible since January this year, which…
Israel is real
Like Abraham, I set out from Ur of the Chaldees to the hill country of Canaan, a journey of about…
The Anti-Australia Axis
With the media still obsessed with Barnaby Joyce’s stern and immediately obeyed command to his farm dog, journalists ignored the…
Lemon
It was once the engine room of the European economy, the strongest of them all. Germany is now on its…
Denigrating women the progressive way
This week, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson lost her case to overturn a ruling that she had breached the Racial…
Why I could never tone down Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle has died at the age of 66. In 2019, Fraser Nelson, then-editor of The Spectator, wrote about the…
Rod Liddle was one of the finest journalists of his generation
I only met Rod Liddle a few times, though at The Spectator and the Sunday Times I worked alongside him…
Tributes to Rod Liddle
The Spectator’s columnist and associate editor Rod Liddle has died aged 66. Tributes have poured in as his many dedicated…
As mad as it gets
Rod Liddle, associate editor of The Spectator, has died aged 66. This is the first column he wrote for the…
Rod Liddle, 1960 – 2026
Rod Liddle, The Spectator’s associate editor, has died at the age of 66. Rod, who was also a columnist for…
Is Reform serious about using the Navy to control migration?
It is 70 years since Donald McLachlan’s Daily Telegraph leader urged prime minister Sir Anthony Eden to demonstrate ‘the smack…
America can’t let the Japanese yen fail
In an extremely rare bilateral move, the US and Japan have intervened to shore up the Japanese yen, which has…
Why we are horrified by AI firms pulping books
‘Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.’ It would appear that…
Burnham doesn’t get why people are angry about migration
Andy Burnham coasted into No. 10 via an uncontested leadership election in which he was never forced to share his…
The Ceuta chaos could make Marine Le Pen president
European Union interior ministers will hold an emergency video conference on Tuesday to discuss last week’s events in Spain’s North…
Why I’m ignoring the hosepipe ban – and you should too
I returned from holiday to find parched lawns and a deliciously cool babbling brook where the road had been. Up…
Do liberal Londoners know how much they are detested?
For decades now Trevor Phillips has been one of the most astute and unusually self-aware members of the liberal establishment,…
A New Zealand republic in Jacinda Ardern’s lifetime?
New Zealand’s former Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, believes the nation will become a republic within her lifetime. We have heard…
The row over English becoming an official language of New Zealand
Parliamentarians in New Zealand have been limbering up for an oddly unedifying debate over what ought to be the most…
What they don’t tell you about Christmas in New Zealand
‘I still think New Zealand the most beautiful country I have ever seen,’ Agatha Christie marvelled in 1922. Evidently she’s…
What will Jacinda Ardern do next?
When I first met Jacinda Ardern in the early 2010s, the notion that the young MP with the toothy smile…
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a triumph
A gurgle of merriment
Chekhov is tricky. He’s not someone we think of as uproarious but the playwright himself used sometimes to complain that…
High Antipodean
The death of that fabled cricketer Sir Garfield Sobers – one of the greatest all-rounders who ever lived – is…
A Treasury on YouTube
It’s strange how much we take for granted the world we inherit, which is available to us on YouTube for…
To be trans Hamlet or not to be
Is there something strange about seeing a great comedian who identifies as a trans woman do a solo Hamlet, the…
All aboard for Paisley: a trip round unloved Britain
‘Most people who have been to Crewe station have never been to Crewe.’ In a moment of serendipity, my train…
Into the wild: Country People, by Daniel Mason, reviewed
In his mid-forties, Miles Krzelewski is a graduate student who makes Saul Bellow’s Herzog look like an academic overachiever. After…
How the multi-billion-dollar wellness industry is putting us at risk
No one could accuse Dr Nick Tiller of taking health and wellness issues lightly. In his latest book he recounts…
Whimsical defence mechanisms: Sail Away Land, by Ben Pester, reviewed
A spectre is haunting England in the surreal tales assembled in Ben Pester’s Sail Away Land, the follow-up to his…
Why most scientists don’t want us to believe in life on Mars
‘Is there life on Mars?,’ asked David Bowie, and would not stay for an answer. The astrobiologist Steven Benner has…
A broken bond: Gaining Ground, by Joan Barfoot, reviewed
When a girl turns up at an isolated cabin in Canada, unannounced and uninvited, the woman busy thinning the lettuce…
The West has become its own worst enemy
On 27 January 2024, Iranian-backed militants launched a one-way attack drone at the US base known as Tower 22 in…
A high seas adventure unlike any other
When the American shipbuilder Enos Bright constructed the Mentor in 1807 he had no inkling of the tale it would…