Nicholas Khoo Associate Professor of International Politics and Principal Research Fellow, Institute for Indo-Paciifc Affairs (Christchurch), University of Otago. Last week’s visit of the Australian and British defence and foreign ministers to Adelaide and Canberra is another step in the evolution of the trilateral AUKUS security and technology partnership.
As Anthony Hopkins once admitted, “actors are pretty stupid”. Nowhere is this more obvious than when actors, as they regularly do, subject us to the dreary ritual of lecturing us on current affairs. Mostly, of course, these overpaid, preening parrots are merely doing what they do for a living: squawking
One of the more prominent Australian politicians during the 1980s and 90s was a man called Neal Blewett. He was Minister of Health, Minister of Trade, and Minister of Social Security during the Bob Hawke and Paul Keating Governments between 1983 and 1994. As long serving Health Minister Blewett oversaw
Word to the wise, University of Auckland: quit while you’re ahead. Here in Australia we’ve already seen the debate over racially segregated spaces at universities played out, and it did not work out well for the segregators. And that was without even a firebrand senior government member on
It’s well established by now that the loudest “climate change” botherers are almost invariably the worst climate offenders. Anecdotally, BFD readers will be familiar with the likes of Izzy Cook, the teenage “climate striker” so deservedly mocked by Heather du Plessis-Allan for her rampant hypocrisy. Quantitatively, university studies have
When is this madness going to end? The derangement of record-high mass immigration is so out of hand that even the bien pensant lefty readers of The Age can see it. Even if the scribblers at Pravda-on-the-Yarra can’t quite bring themselves to. But how much longer can anyone keep
Sooner or later, even the most demented, smooth-brained Climate Cultist has a discomforting collision with reality. Across the world, governments and corporations have been quietly backing away from their “climate commitments”, as they realise, firstly, how ruinously expensive they are, and, secondly, how utterly useless. Car rental giant Hertz is
Despite Anthony Albanese’s unconvincing pledge not to allow anti-Semitism to “find so much as a foothold” in Australia, it’s horrifyingly obvious that it has not just a foothold, but a stranglehold. Jewish households and businesses are fleeing certain Melbourne suburbs. Mobs chant anti-Semitic, genocidal slogans, with politicians marching
Remember Eric Von Daniken? The Hitler Diaries? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? All of them were frauds which fooled a great many people for a very long time. Many people still are being willingly duped. Then there’s Bruce Pascoe. Pascoe has been resolutely exposed as a fraud.
“Simpsons did it!” is a South Park joke that just keeps coming true. After all, a topical satire which has run for 35 years, 761 episodes, a feature film, and videogame and comic book adaptations, is inevitably going to cover nearly every topic imaginable. 9/11, the Trump presidency, even
There are few wider gulfs ‘twixt self-regard and reality than exist in the minds of mainstream media journalists. In their own minds, they’re still running All the President’s Men and Network on loop, imagining themselves as the lone, brave heroes “speaking truth to power”. To the rest of
Tasmania’s election is done, if not yet dusted, and the result is a warning shot for both major parties at the federal level. Of course, Tasmania’s hare-brained Hare-Clark election system, which makes MMP look almost rigorous, doesn’t help. This is a system which actually punishes electoral success
The Albanese government is in grave political danger — and seems as blithely unaware of it as they were of the groundswell of opposition to the Voice referendum. For all his chutzpah, Anthony Albanese seems too often to forget that his government was elected with the second-lowest Labor vote in the
No doubt, being a more discerning group of media consumers than most, BFD readers already practise my Third Law of the Media: Always assume that ‘fact-checkers’ are trying to bullshit you. Especially when it’s a government-funded ‘fact-checker’. Especially when it’s Australia’s very own taxpayer-funded leftist propaganda unit.
Never mistake a Climate Cultist for someone who actually cares about the environment. After all, someone who genuinely cared about the environment wouldn’t be burying vast acres of rural landscape under deserts of aluminium and glass. Anyone who genuinely cared about wildlife wouldn’t be erecting vast fields of
Ming sojournal.co.nz “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked…” EPHESIANS 2:1-2A Introduction Recently, Australian news sources have been abuzz with plans for a bill outlawing conversion therapy to be passed in New South Wales. Though I do not think that
