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AUS Politics

Party Like It’s 1999

Party Like It’s 1999

As I write this, the song “1999” by Prince is playing through my headphones  and it certainly sums up what must have been happening in the Scott Morrison household in recent days. Had he been re-elected, he would have continued  being – horror of horrors – a target for the media and

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Political Myths Busted in 2022

Political Myths Busted in 2022

As the washout of last weekend’s Australian federal election continues, more and more interesting facts are emerging from the post-poll entrail-reading. The most obvious takeaway from the election result is that a great many Australians walked away from the two-party system in disgust. For the moment, this has favoured

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Stay Right Where You Are, NZ. Please

Stay Right Where You Are, NZ. Please

As Jacinda Ardern plays Harry Potter dress-ups and basks in the adulation of the five people who still watch Stephen Colbert, not all international commentary is the sort of uncritical adulation she’s become accustomed to buying. Even on American tv shows that people actually watch, like Tucker Carlson Tonight,

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First Labor Promise to Bite the Dust

First Labor Promise to Bite the Dust

One of the harsher lessons of the last decade in Australian politics is that honeymoons are getting shorter and shorter. Most of the time, the end of the affair is self-inflicted by newly-minted leaders who think that the old rule of getting the dirty work sorted as soon as possible

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Albanese Shows a Rare Flash of Character

Albanese Shows a Rare Flash of Character

As I wrote some time ago, about new Australian PM Anthony Albanese: Nice bloke, terrible politics. His first few days in the PM’s chair are going a long way to confirm that view, particularly the first part. As we all know, there are just two rules of public debate

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Marles Passes First Boats Test

Marles Passes First Boats Test

One of the greatest litmus tests of the Albanese government will be how it handles the issue of border security. Borders, which, given Australia’s geographic reality, means boats, are an electric issue in the country. On its first day, the Albanese government signalled that it would resist the powerful

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Which Way Now for “Indigenous Voice”?

Which Way Now for “Indigenous Voice”?

Well, there’s one thing Australia’s new parliament will be good for — testing how far to the looney left Anthony Albanese’s Labor will let themselves be dragged. Because the truth is that Labor barely won the election at all. Its primary vote was a near-record low and its

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Will It Be One-Term Albo?

Will It Be One-Term Albo?

The wake of an election campaign always brings a flood of beard-stroking “analysis” from Monday’s Experts. So, why shouldn’t I join in? Well, I already have but why stop when we’re having fun. And the most fun, post-election, is poking through the entrails of the losing side.

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Election 2022: Not Quite Done Yet

Election 2022: Not Quite Done Yet

Well might Anthony Albanese have overturned his own party’s rules in his rush to be sworn in as PM. Because, as it happens, Labor hasn’t technically even won the election yet. That’s not what you’ll read in the legacy media, of course. If you were fool

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green trees beside river during daytime

Australia Should Be Rewarded for Its Emissions

Whenever I’ve tried to debate climate cultists on facts, rather than slogans, it’s astonishing how little they really know. Which is probably no accident. Because, if they stopped and did even a rudimentary beer-mat calculus, their treasured beliefs fall apart. Far easier to just keep shouting, really. One

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How the True Elite Triumphed in 2022

How the True Elite Triumphed in 2022

As I wrote for Insight yesterday, one clear lesson from Australia’s federal election is: rich people vote left. The idea that the Liberals are the party of the rich is so fixed in the minds of the Australian left that they simply cannot, will not, countenance any suggestion to

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New PM’s First Each-Way Bet

New PM’s First Each-Way Bet

Well, we don’t call him “Each-Way Albo” for nothing. Newly-sworn in PM Anthony Albanese’s very first day on the job brought a splendid display of the Labor leader’s penchant for speaking out of both sides of his mouth. There should be no surprises that the issue was

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map of Australia

Voters Have Shifted Australia Hard Left

Lyle Shelton mercatornet.com Lyle Shelton blogs at www.lyleshelton.com.au In an election where neither of the parties of government offered an agenda of substance, many Australians voted for those who did. Whether they knew what they were voting for is a different matter, but it’s only

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They’re Better than You — And They Know It

They’re Better than You — And They Know It

Whatever its faults, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead is a dazzling tapestry of character study. Rand sketches her characters with acid wit and little sympathy. One of her few sympathetic characters, at least initially, is the innocently sincere Catherine Halsey. But even she ends up as a nasty harridan — a

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brown wooden mannequin on white ceramic toilet bowl

Conservative Parties Need a Good Purge

The colourful Sydney identity Graham “Richo” Richardson, who many of you may know from Sky News Australia, was once the Secretary of the New South Wales Labor party (this was 40-odd years ago). He, like Paul Keating, Neville Wran, and other senior ALP figures at that time in Sydney, was

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Boss Plod Has No Sense of Humour

Boss Plod Has No Sense of Humour

As Lauren Southern points out in her book, Barbarians, the Long March through the Institutions is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a conspiracy fact. We know it for a fact because Marxist theorists in the late 60s told us what they were going to do, and how. They planned

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