Henry Reynolds is always simplistic, always unreliable. Though his selection and use of sources is dazzlingly inept, his political objective is clear—the destruction of modern Australia and its replacement by Balkanised race states. To this end, in an excursion into unpardonable error, he twists and grossly misquotes Jeremy Bentham

Read More

No one likes Kamala Harris. No one even feels bad for not liking her. Her boss doesn’t like her; her aides don’t like her; even her Irish terrier doesn’t like her. Sixty per cent of Americans think Biden is unfit to be president, and the other sixty per cent feel the same way about Trump. But all 120 per cent loathe Kamala Harris

Read More

Time after time, Premier Palaszczuk has declared her faith that Commissioner Katarina Carroll is the right person to lead QPS into its brave new era of full-blown wokeness. This support is all the more remarkable for the findings of an inquiry that has found the state's top cop to be 'wilfully ignorant ... kept in the dark or ... deliberately obfuscating'

Read More

As the Labor government contemplates interventions in the energy market of a damaging kind, it would be nice if facts took centre stage -- that cyclones have trended down since 1970-71 or that drought and monster floods are and have always been Australia's lot. What’s hard about conceding those facts? They undermine the narrative and that cannot be permitted

Read More

Hugh White's Sleepwalk to War: Australia’s Unthinking Alliance with America is a genuinely memorable achievement, for few authors ever manage to get so much wrong in so relatively few words. As a blueprint for relations with Beijing and the US, its diagnosis is misguided and prognosis laughable

Read More

Our nation, based upon British traditions and institutions, owes nothing whatsoever to indigenous tradition or heritage.  Yet it is being brown-washed with a superficial ochre-tinged veneer of wokeness and virtue signalling that hints and suggests we are essentially an Aboriginal nation

Read More

Heard about one third of Pakistan being under water? Then you may have been listening to the ABC's version, which blithely passed on the news that it is all the fault of climate change. It isn't and, just by the way, floods never came anywhere near that reported coverage

Read More

Thanks to recent discoveries, including a remarkable find in the Fisher Library, the ongoing debate about the number of authentic Giorgiones remains unresolved. What is clear, however, is that his ardent colours and subtle gradations of light conferred a distinctive quality on Venetian art and exerted a lasting influence on European art

Read More

The Voice will create an elite ruling class of Aborigines seeking to bind the rest of the Aboriginal community to their will and opinions. It is a means to constrain and control, not to uplift and empower. The Liberals, near mute on the subject so far, are honour-bound by their professed belief in liberty and the individual to stand firmly and loudly against it

Read More

Originally, Gustave Eiffel's marvel was scheduled to be demolished after twenty years, but due to its enormous international popularity, it remains standing and will continue to do so most likely in perpetuity. A new film chronicles how, why and with what in mind the tower came to be built

Read More

Queensland's Labor Government – with support from the LNP opposition – has passed the Health Practitioner Regulation Amendment Bill 2022. This fundamentally reshapes the relationship between doctors, patients and health regulators by granting bureaucrats the authority to endorse medical treatments and shame doctors who beg to differ

Read More

Popular opinion held that the young poet and wastrel 2nd Earl of Rochester kept company with the devil from his teenage years, and his reputation for wildness only grew over what remained of a short and tempestuous life. So devoted was he to vice and strong drink that accounts of a deathbed repentance still conjure the faint taste of a grain of salt

Read More

Even if we accept the dubious proposition that early voting does not facilitate cheating and electoral fraud, as its defenders insist, it remains a practice that endangers democracy by encouraging premature decisions. Shouldn't voters be required to wait at least until candidates have faced off in open debate before making their choices?

Read More

'The next day I heard that Sontag had had cancer and had both breasts removed. I felt guilty—here I was pursuing a writer who was possibly dying. Needless to say, however, guilt was overtaken by a writerly curiosity.'

Read More

The democratic system (aka 'responsible government' and representative democracy) required two things in order to function properly: properly motivated politicians and informed voters.  Now we have neither, and this is why the system is so broken

Read More

In the parlance of the silver screen, Lawson so often gives a detailed 'treatment' of the film he envisages through his imaginary camera-eye. There is no dialogue, and he pays much attention to the actions and gestures of, for example, the ill-starred drover and his companions detailed in his short story The Australian Cinematograph

Read More

There are errors in Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain but they are minor and do little to diminish author Matthew Green's empathetic erudition or cloud his conjuration of still-potent places -- redolent symbols of sacrifice and future fragility in a Britain he observes less through its attributes than their absence

Read More

'Vivienne nearly was the death of me, but she kept the poet alive,' wrote T.S. Eliot some 12 years after the death of the wife whose sundry ailments, instability and mental cruelty made his life a misery. Nevertheless the torments of their marriage conferred its dividend: 'It brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land'

Read More

Sovereignty and native title, Bain Attwood points out in his worthwhile new book, were the subject of enormous political debate in New Zealand in the 1840s and 1850s, yet barely discussed in Australia. His meticulously researched explanation why this was so is as an antidote to the simplistic 'normative history' currently in vogue

Read More

A belated recognition of limitations and concerns with respect to genetic vaccines and the consequent failure to impact public health policies has at last begun to seep into the specialist and mainstream press. Better late than never, as they say, but there is much more to be discussed and addressed

Read More

If you take the IPCC and its oh-so-settled scientists at their word there is little chance the world can reach zero emissions by whatever the latest, constantly advancing deadline happens to be. So why aren't Chris Bowen et al building dams and generally preparing for the climate cataclysm they swear is ordained. Perhaps they don't believe it themselves

Read More

Milan Kundera believed that overcoming totalitarianism was a battle of memory over forgetting. As one of those who had come back from the land of the dead, such sentiments also were in the forefront of Solzhenitsyn’s mind. Like others, he felt under an enormous obligation to speak on behalf of all those fellow inmates who perished

Read More

In a previous article I made the case why William L. Crowther, Tasmanian Premier, philanthropist and doctor, could well be -- most likely is -- innocent of the crimes and indignities he is alleged to have committed against the remains of Aboriginal man William 'King Billy' Lanne. A review of his life and ideals makes this charge even less credible

Read More

The statue of Dr William. L. Crowther -- Tasmanian Premier, businessman, naturalist and renowned colonial surgeon-- has been deemed 'culturally unsafe' by Hobart City Council. The evidence strongly suggests the reputation of a good man is being besmirched while the real villain goes unmentioned

Read More