One Nation, the only answer to Uniparty’s sinking ship

The Uniparty got us into this mess. They cannot be trusted to get us out.

Tell me again why we need the Uniparty?

Punters keep saying that One Nation is intent on tearing our political institutions down. If these institutions were in good shape, they might be worth saving. Instead, we have political institutions that are sinking us more each day. This can’t go on forever.

The Uniparty got us into this mess. They cannot be trusted to get us out.

I’d rather take a punt on One Nation. If that means jumping ship on the Liberals, they only have themselves to blame.

In the Morning Double Shot newsletter, Terry Barnes wrote:

But will the centre-right parties, other than One Nation, actually do that? Many see them as a wing of the Uniparty, a duopoly in which Labor and the Coalition are interchangeable, and the policies they deliver are little different from each other. Michael de Percy is one of the many, and he argues that One Nation is the only answer to the Uniparty’s sinking ship. Indeed, your scribe got a dishonourable mention in Dr de P’s piece: gradualist Burkean conservatism is so unfashionable these days, and so is your avowed Burkean scribe. A full-on political revolution, in which Orange is the New Blue, is the only answer – or is it? As for the political class itself, Stephen Fyson has a few thoughts about them.

 My latest in The Spectator Australia, One Nation, the only answer to Uniparty’s sinking ship.

Can Pauline Hanson save us from the United Nations?

Will the Coalition leave the UN, or order an audit of the treaties Australia has been signed up to?

The High Court’s ruling on a major coal mine expansion in NSW, on the basis of Scope 3 emissions, is cause for alarm.

A 3-2 majority held that the NSW Independent Planning Commission failed its statutory duty under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act to consider whether conditions should be imposed to minimise greenhouse gas emissions ‘to the greatest extent practicable’, including Scope 3. These are the downstream emissions generated when the countries that buy our coal burn it.

Australian thermal coal is high-quality bituminous, with higher energy content and generally better plant efficiency than much of the sub-bituminous material sold by competitors, yet the court required decision-makers to grapple with the overseas combustion that makes up roughly 98 per cent of the project’s emissions.

The concept of Scope 3 draws on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the reporting norms outlined by the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement. The Coalition signed Australia up to the UN’s latest brain fart and the Labor government is loving this because it fits with their ideological agenda. Like everything to do with the UN, this is going to cost us big time.

Despite the best of intentions outlined by Angus Taylor at the weekend’s CPAC event, can Australians really trust the Liberal Party? After all, much of what they are saying now is the stuff they should have actioned years ago when they were in government. Hanson put it bluntly at the same event. The Liberals signed us up to Paris and Net Zero, so why would we trust them to get us out of it?

It’s not just about Taylor. The Liberal Party’s internal political stoush continues unabated.

My latest in The Spectator Australia, Can Pauline Hanson save us from the United Nations?

Labor’s credit card surcharge fiasco hits mums and dads

Mums and dads living from payday to payday have lost the card that carried them to Thursday.

The surcharge ban was sold as ‘money back every time you tap’. A month in, it has been reported that some childcare operators and private schools are tapping out on credit cards.

Anthony Albanese said a coffee should not cost extra because you paid by card, and that the price on the menu should be the price you pay. Yet cafes have done the obvious thing. They put the fee in the price.

The government’s figures, taken from the Reserve Bank, were $1.6 billion a year no longer paid in surcharges and $910 million in lower fees for business, with small business said to be the bigger winner from lower interchange. Shoppers are yet to see it at the till.

Even though the Treasurer has stepped in and the ATO will delay the credit card move for a year, the backlash showed cracks in Labor’s united front.

In the Morning Double Shot newsletter, Terry Barnes wrote:

Labor getting the RBA to abolish credit charge surcharges has not reduced the price of a coffee – it has increased it, and increased the prices of so many other goods and services. There were iniquities in surcharges being a percentage of a sale rather than the actual transaction costs, but banks are still charging businesses while those businesses can’t pass it on – except as higher prices. Michael de Percy looks at the unfairness of how this supposedly consumer-friendly thing is playing out.

My latest in The Spectator Australia, Labor’s credit card surcharge fiasco hits mums and dads.

Fizzer in Fiji takes the wind out of Bowen’s turbines

Seeing the Minister for Climate Change and Energy fall asleep at his own snooze-fest says it all.

Four years of promises, modelling, and National Press Club performances have run into higher electricity bills, angry people who live under the transmission lines, and billions poured into a policy failure that was obvious from the start. Bowen’s pre-COP31 fizzer in Fiji is the latest symbol of it. Seeing him fall asleep at his own snooze-fest says it all.

In Nadi this week he called the gathering a ‘pretty pedestrian affair’. It is costing taxpayers about $20 million, on the contracts published so far, and he refused to say how much when asked on national radio.

He has form. In March 2023, at the Sydney Institute, I asked him what happens if the plan fails and the lights go out. What is your Plan B?

My Plan B is for that not to happen.

That was the policy. Then as if on cue, the lights went out in Nadi.

My latest in The Spectator Australia, Fizzer in Fiji takes the wind out of Bowen’s turbines.

Boys are no longer educated, they are emasculated

A boy given neither work nor rough play nor a hard man to imitate will never get there.

Boys are struggling in literacy, completion, and behaviour. It is no secret. In March 2026 Education Minister Jason Clare opened an inquiry into the gap and noted that at least one in three Year 9 boys could not read to the Naplan baseline. A Queensland University of Technology study of 71,955 NSW public-school students found exclusions peaked in Year 9, with boys twice as likely as girls to be excluded once, and more than ten times as likely to be excluded sixteen times or more. Homeschooling is rising. In NSW, boys now slightly outnumber girls.

Almost any man could tell you that age 14 was probably his most internally challenging.

Emasculation is the antithesis of education. Yet here we are. Many of the mothers of young boys I have spoken to are fed up with the education system. The default response from the system is suspension and exclusion. For a system that lauds its focus on inclusiveness, it is excluding boys to the detriment of our nation.

In the Morning Double Shot newsletter, Terry Barnes wrote:

Who would want to be a boy these days? We have raised a nation of squibs, and confident, masculine boys and young men are deemed by the chattering classes to be misogynistic and toxic. Yet boys have fallen behind girls when it comes to educational progress, and society favours girls generally. Michael de Percy has written another personal piece exploring what it means to be a boy now, and what it was to be a boy when he was. I disagree with him on one thing though: corporal punishment in schools should be brought back: it was the best deterrent of bad behaviour since the atomic bomb.

My latest in The Spectator Australia, Boys are no longer educated, they are emasculated.

Chris Bowen doesn’t need a Khemlani, he’s got you and me

Could Bowen’s Green Dreams lead to a Dismissal 2.0 for Albanese's money-wasting government?

On the ABC’s 7.30 in September, Bowen said he had never quite bought all the hype on green hydrogen. That was after years of talking up an Australian export industry, and after a hydrogen production tax incentive the government costed at about $6.7 billion.

Regional Hydrogen Hubs were supposed to seed an export industry. Canberra paid out $31.7 million at Kwinana, $19.3 million at Gladstone and $1.06 million at Townsville.

Then the agreements were torn up, and little of it has come back. The May budget then took $1 billion off the second round of Hydrogen Headstart.

Connor misled Parliament and was stood down. Bowen merely updated his enthusiasm.

Albo was the only person who thought coffee would get cheaper

Labor banned card surcharges so your coffee would be cheaper. Ooops!!!

In a classic case of not having a clue, Anthony Albanese has made himself out to be the goose we always knew him to be. Not only did he think that hiding the merchant fee applied to card transactions at the point of sale would reduce the price of a cup of coffee, but his own revenue collection department refused to foot the bill. In my opinion, this is what happens when people who have never been in business or worked a day in their lives get to be in government.

The ban on card surcharges came into effect on October 1. Albanese posted that the surcharge ban would save money ‘every time you tap’ and that ‘from tomorrow, your morning coffee could be cheaper’.

Angus Taylor called it a lie. (More of this, please, Mr Taylor.)

One Sydney roaster said about 98 per cent of her customers paid by card at a 1.3 per cent surcharge and that she would have to raise prices. A café in Perth increased the price of a coffee from $6 to $6.50. Including the old 1.8 per cent surcharge, a card customer had previously been paying about $6.11.

The banks still charge the café a fee every time someone taps. The ban only stops the café adding that fee as a separate line on the docket.

Pauline Hanson: The problem woman (for the left)

One Nation is the only major federal party in Australia with a female leader.

This week, David Shoebridge defeated Mehreen Faruqi and Sarah Hanson-Young to become the new leader of the radical Greens party. Pauline Hanson is now the only woman leading a federal party with more than one sitting member. Why does that not count as diversity?

Jacqui Lambie and Fatima Payman lead one-senator outfits, and the Greens now have a woman as deputy. That is not the same thing. The biggest issue is the double standard. Pauline Hanson is a woman, but the wrong kind of woman.

If we were to celebrate women in politics, as some universities do (and actively promote), why is Pauline Hanson not their shining light?

They’re not Menzies’ forgotten people, they’re One Nation’s fed-up people

They're not forgotten, they're fed up!

 

When Menzies spoke of the ‘forgotten people’, he meant the middle class – the engine room of the economy, neither rich enough to live off capital nor poor enough to live off the state.

Under Albanese, that class has been crowded out by a client class of grant recipients, public-sector dependants, and subsidised NGOs for whom government is not a last resort but a business model. To Menzies’ forgotten people that idea was sacrilege. To Labor’s clients it is an entitlement.

Somebody always has to pay.

The people paying, in money and in culture, are ordinary Australians.

When I read Barnaby Joyce’s statements, I cringe a little at the language and the repetition. His message is right, but the delivery is rough. Polish it and you would only sound like the Coalition. And people have stopped trusting the polish.

If Albanese is a ‘global citizen’, we should Section 44 him

The global village idiot gets a gong while at the UN in New York, the socialist capital of the world.

There’s always one… Albo is Australia’s (global) village idiot.

For proof of this, he received the Atlantic Council Global Citizen Award, handed to him at the Waldorf Astoria during UN General Assembly week. Apparently, it indicates Albo is one of the leading and influential they/them statespersons.

It didn’t come cheap. And I’m not talking about the $4,000-a-night ballroom on Park Avenue.

Papua New Guinea’s James Marape introduced our proud houso-boy-turned-Copacabana-PM as a ‘fair dinkum Aussie’.

As I watched Albo stand between Keanu Reeves and a Formula One executive, I could not help but think this is the same old vanguard of the dictatorship of the proletariat that has failed in every instance throughout history.

Once the communist-curious Labor politicians get a taste of wealth and power, they lean more toward entitled champagne socialism than the working-class.

Then the Internationale gives them a gong, and the ego trip sends them off with the fairies.

When it comes to this celebrated global influence, the trouble for Albo is that he isn’t leading a middle power. Which means he can’t lead the middle powers in some type of suicidal empathy. He has reduced Australia to a nothing power.

Vale Gary ‘Angry’ Anderson

My first vision of Rose Tattoo.

Two bands defined my youth – AC/DC and Rose Tattoo. This week we lost the lead singer of the latter. AC/DC ran like a business. Angry never did. This was reflected in the rawness of his voice and his music.

When I first saw Rose Tattoo’s album cover for Assault and Battery, I was in a friend’s house where his single mother was in the process of evicting her biker boyfriend. It was his poster. I’d had a glimpse into the hard life that Angry sang about, and by my mid-teens I was flirting with the lifestyle.

What struck me about Rose Tattoo’s music was the sound of the slide guitar. I’d seen AC/DC’s TNT on Countdown and almost every kid in my primary school was a fan. But not so many knew about Rose Tattoo.

My other primary school music, set against a backdrop of Bon Scott, was never quite loud, fast, or hard enough. I found what I was looking for in Rose Tattoo.

At the age of 11, I started listening to Assault and Battery. At the same time, I became fascinated by politics. As the records stacked up, I was conscious of the union bias and Angry’s penchant for the Eureka flag. Eureka and Ned Kelly are not lost on me as an important part of the larrikin, egalitarian Australian spirit, but I was a little too conservative to jump to the left.

In my late teens, I steered away from Rose Tattoo’s 1984 album, Southern Stars. The title track and another track from the album, ‘Death or Glory’, were a bit too revolutionary for someone who was surrounded by veteran Australian soldiers.

At the same time, I was working as a trolley boy in a major supermarket, a closed shop for the Australian Workers Union. I earnt $30 for my eight hours over Friday night and Saturday morning. My compulsory union fees were $90. I worked the first three weeks for nought. Not once did I see a union rep.

Rose Tattoo and Angry became like AC/DC to me. The classics, the olds and bolds got all the airtime in the ‘soundtrack to my life’. I ignored the rest.

Then Fred Pawle interviewed him during the Voice referendum.

In the interview, I noticed that Angry had a bookshelf full of classic books behind him. But what struck me most was what he said.

He had many union mates. But when he formed his own opinion about the Voice, it differed from the union view. I recall him talking about how many didn’t simply agree to disagree but instead decided they weren’t friends anymore. That brought Rose Tattoo’s later music into sharp relief. I started listening to the tracks I’d skipped in the late 1980s.

I’m still an avid fan. Spotify tells me I am in the top 1 per cent of Rose Tattoo listeners.

I can now listen to ‘Southern Stars’ with a patriotic glow, and when Angry sings of the ‘ghosts of Eureka’, I can appreciate how the young leader of the rebellion, Peter Lalor, became conservative in his politics in later life.

Angry told much of his story to Fred Pawle.

In addition to the music, I was also surprised to learn more about when Angry sings ‘technical school it was a waste of time making robots for some factory line…’ in ‘Scarred for Life’. He was not so much walking away – ‘I got my first tattoo when I was sixteen, the rebel had lost his teenage queen’. It was much more intellectual.

Angry Anderson recalled how he was meant to become a fitter and turner at tech school, but he admitted that he ‘loved English and reading books instead’.

He said he always took ‘two good books’ on tour. He kept returning to Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country and The Secret History of the World. Winnie Mandela’s story inspired a song on Beats From a Single Drum.

Rose Tattoo had an international impact. Guns N’ Roses were inspired by Rose Tattoo and covered one of Rose Tattoo’s songs, ‘Nice Boys Don’t Play Rock ’n’ Roll’. Anderson even appeared on stage to sing it with Axl Rose when Guns N’ Roses performed in Australia.

Rose Tattoo’s European tour confirmed the band’s reach. In Germany, on that farewell run, Angry suffered a cardiac arrest. He was brought home, and died in Australia on Monday 21 September, surrounded by his family. He was 79.

I feel like I have lost someone who guided me through my youth.

‘The Butcher and Fast Eddy’ taught me that a wild man could still have a code. ‘Sydney Girls’ still makes me think of Eliza. Scarred for Life is the greatest driving song I know. I ride because of it. ‘It’s Gonna Work Itself Out’ is stoicism in a four-minute can. And ‘Southern Stars’ is the vow I can finally hear without flinching – here I was born, and here I’ll die!

Thanks for sharing your life with me, Angry. I’m glad you made it home.

Rest in Peace, Mate.

Labor doesn’t give a toss about Australia

The Labor government has slashed visas for those who cannot vote Labor.

Labor are hell-scared of One Nation because, in my opinion, Labor don’t care about their traditional supporters, they only care about votes. Immigrants typically love Labor in the same way immigrants in the UK and the US love Labour and the Democrats, respectively. A percentage of this group move from their failing countries so they can take advantage of our generous safety-net offerings, then use these to recreate the situation they wished they could have at home. Well guess what? This is our home. Those who come here are our guests, not our new masters.

Tony Burke saw the writing on the wall for his position and was probably going to announce a reduction in immigration. But those to the left of Tony Burke (can you imagine such people exist?) weren’t happy. After weeks of suspense, Burke finally turned up. And surprise, surprise, his immigration policy has nothing to do with improving anybody’s position, except Labor’s.

Read the rest of my article, Labor doesn’t give a toss about Australia, in The Spectator Australia.

Please never explain

Pauline Hanson should take advice from the late Queen Elizabeth II ... never complain, never explain.

Ordinary Australians have had a gutful of our political class. They want the whole political-class structure burnt to the ground. Not our system, but the self-serving support our political class gives itself through the Uniparty and the traditional media.

Nowhere has this class been more active in defending itself than against the rise of One Nation.

Some time after Pauline Hanson uttered the infamous phrase ‘Please explain?’ to a journalist in response to a question about the meaning of the word ‘xenophobia’, she did the most Australian of things. She adopted it as a catchphrase.

It is such a useful phrase. See my full article in The Spectator Australia for some important ways it can be used: Please never explain.

Establishment attacks! Pauline explodes leftie brains

The forgotten people know that Pauline is being attacked because she is speaking truth to power.

Tim Burton’s 1996 black comedy Mars Attacks! used Slim Whitman’s song ‘Indian Love Call’ to blow out the brains of the Martian enemy. For those who enjoy Tim Burton’s movies, it will be no ‘surpreeeez!’ that Pauline Hanson is on the money with her roasting of Andrew Hastie and Anthony Albanese.

And then there is our money that is tied up in superannuation like the proverbial sword of Damocles hanging over our ability to own our own homes before we die.

A wise man once said to me, ‘You can’t know what you don’t know.’ The trouble with this truism is that the political elite think they know better than you. It’s a form of elite ‘you can’t know what I know’.

Well, guess what, your goose is cooked. Pauline’s ‘welcome to country love call’ is the reason your Martian brains are exploding.

My article in The Spectator Australia, Establishment attacks! Pauline explodes leftie brains.

Ben Roberts-Smith, Shah Wali Kot, honour, and the war Australians barely know

I wore my Blokes Advice Big Choky ‘I stand with BRS’ T-shirt to the local pub recently.

Aaron Patrick spoke at the Gallipoli Memorial Club’s inaugural Lone Pine Dinner. At the event, he signed copies of his book on Australia’s war in Afghanistan, and in particular, accounts of Ben Robert-Smith’s actions that earned him the Victoria Cross. The book is entitled The Last Battle. If you are a patriot like me, you’ll read it in one sitting. I wrote about it previously.

Aaron’s speech was not just about the book, but about the Battle of Shah Wali Kot in June 2010, and about what Australians do and do not know of the war in Afghanistan.

What follows is a written question-and-answer. The questions are as put to him. The answers are as he returned them.

The Last Battle: Australian SAS, Commandos and our Greatest Victory in our Longest War is published by Pan Macmillan. Patrick is chief writer at The Nightly and a former senior correspondent and deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review. He has written for the Washington Post and the New York Times.

You can read my article in The Spectator Australia, Ben Roberts-Smith, Shah Wali Kot, honour, and the war Australians barely know.

Classy, biased bigotry, brought to you by your ABC

Barnaby Joyce still speaks to the ABC, but they don’t deserve the privilege.

If you don’t know Vikki Campion, she is a journalist and former media staffer to Joyce. They are now married and have children together. She manages the family and the farm while he tries to fix a broken country. If she were a radical leftie, she would be upheld as a legend. The woman who left the Canberra bubble, raised children off the grid, and kept a household standing through public humiliation. Instead, she is target practice for everyone from former colleagues to the ABC’s running gallery of Joyce-hunters.

As Jesus put it, take the plank out of your own eye before pointing to the speck in your brother’s. Or, in this case, your sister’s.

My article in The Spectator Australia, Classy, biased bigotry, brought to you by your ABC.

Woke hasn’t killed Australia’s adventurer spirit

With Waren Brown at his book launch in Goulburn.

Brown brings back Boy’s Own Birtles and the Bean

I was brought up on Boy’s Own adventures. I remember pacing up and down with Sir Douglas Bader’s Reach for the Sky, at the scene where his grandmother crowns a would-be thief in the night. I read Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven to my kindergarten class in 1976. If you know Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners, that is the ilk.

The point is that Australian men and boys were raised on a diet of toughness. Not the street-fighting meanness of Fast Eddy. More the ethic of the other bloke in Rose Tattoo’s The Butcher and Fast Eddy. Sport did some of the same work. Football, hockey, and cricket were, among other things, training for a harder world. Try catching a cricket ball in the outfield now. With or without spectacles, the trajectory will bewilder you. You will probably shite yourself when it hits you, or when you miss it completely.

We have lost something. Mention Boy’s Own today and you will be branded – yes, see Rose Tattoo – a misogynist or a coloniser. It is that stupid.

A century ago, the real thing was still walking around. Francis Birtles set long-distance and speed records as a cyclist and a driver. In October 1927 he left Australia House in London in a 1924 Bean 14, later called Sundowner, and became the first man to drive from England to Australia. The run took nine months and some 26,000 kilometres through Europe, Egypt, Persia, India, the Naga Hills, with ships and a bamboo punt where the road ran out. When he reached Darwin in 1928, customs seized the car for import duty. It was released only at the insistence of Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce. Imagine that happening today? The Prime Minister intervening, I mean.

That car now sits in the National Museum of Australia. I thought the type of man who would take it any further was extinct.

Enter Daily Telegraph cartoonist Warren Brown.

Warren lives in the Southern Tablelands, draws some of the best political cartoons in the country, and is a decent bloke. He had already written Francis Birtles: Australian Adventurer in 2012. Then he bought a 1925 Bean 14 and, as far as roads, ferries, and officials would allow, ran Birtles’ route again. His co-driver was the Tele’s editor-at-large, Matthew Benns. Their mechanical saviour was Tony Jordan.

They left London in September 2024 and rolled into Melbourne on January 30, 2025, after some 130 days and 17 countries. With the same mad idea in an open car. Along the way they raised money for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. That is not nostalgia. That is useful.

I followed the trip as it happened. The book of it is called Chance It! Buy that for the yarn, the photographs, and the bits no column should steal. I am not going to attempt to recreate the Hindu Kush or the Top End here.

I did get the next best thing. Last week, at the Goulburn launch, Warren, Matthew, and Tony spoke about the journey with Ray Hadley as MC. Hadley started his career in Goulburn. The Southern Tablelands remains, on the available evidence, the centre of the universe. The event was first-class. They signed my copy. The house white was Lerida Estate’s 2024 Chardonnay. (Which is also my house white in Gunning. As it happens, my federation cottage ‘Keswick’ was built 100 years ago this month.)

There is also a Chance It Ale from a Goulburn brewery that people persist in calling Bean Beer. It is bloody good.

So, the record stands. Birtles did it in a Bean. Brown brought the Bean back. How very Australian. If the adventuring habit has thinned out, this is the cure. Get a car, get a bike, take the long way. Drive. Ride. Chance it.

Thanks to Warren, Matthew, Tony and the team for putting the thing back on the road. It was quite the adventure.

Our universities are captured and don’t even know it!

How education lost all sense of reality inside the identity politics echo chamber.

Universities Australia is the sector’s peak lobby. Evans is about to run one of the country’s most prestigious universities. That is why her answer mattered.

I asked her this:

Universities Australia has advanced identity politics across the sector. With taxpayers contributing over $21 billion annually, how does this partisan agenda represent value for money?

She deflected. She spoke about Indigenous participation and inclusiveness. She did not meet the question.

To be fair, the wider speech was not a sermon. She quoted John Curtin and Sir Robert Menzies. She warned against command and control from Canberra. On that point she is right. It is a poor way to run universities.

However, she also called for academic freedom and, in the same breath, for legal protection of university autonomy against ‘creeping regulation’ and Populist backlash.

But Populism is hardly the problem. Why aren’t universities setting themselves against identity politics? Evans can see capture when it wears a ministerial badge. She cannot see it when it wears an inclusion lanyard.

The gap is what she cannot see. Academic freedom is not only threatened by ministers and regulators. It is threatened when campus orthodoxy decides which questions are legitimate. Identity politics does not merely add new topics. It treats dissent as harm, converts contested moral claims into professional credentials, and makes career-minded people keep their heads down.

Most of what I heard today sounded like a brief for why conservative or classical-liberal objections get in the way of a progressive program.

That is now a national habit. Equal opportunity, the liberal promise that people should not be locked out by class, sex, race or religion, has been displaced by equity of outcome, the demand that institutions engineer matching results. The second is not a small adjustment to the first. It is a different theory of justice, and it has become the operating language of much of the sector.

Alexandra Marshall wrote in the Unfiltered newsletter:

And our Canberra Correspondent, Michael de Percy, waded back into Canberra for a National Press Club address by Professor Carolyn Evens, who is the Chair of Universities Australia and the incoming vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne. Something was going on. He expected the room to be empty – but it was packed…

Terry Barnes wrote in the Morning Double Shot newsletter:

Former academic and now fearless federal press gallery correspondent, Michael de Percy, has seen the university sector from inside and now out. From his personal experience, he is all too aware of the wokery, identity politics and DEI madness that has not just infiltrated our centres of higher learning, but devoured them. Having had to listen to the head of the universities’ lobby group and incoming vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, Carolyn Evans, he decries the success of the Left’s long march through our universities. Not just universities, we will add, but schools and even kinders. But I disagree with the article’s title. Universities, and their academics, very much know they have been captured by the Left’s follies, because they willingly welcomed them in. Oh, for the days when Enoch Powell taught at the University of Sydney!

My latest in The Spectator Australia, Our universities are captured and don’t even know it!

Angus Taylor: ‘The Labor government is f**kin’ sh*t…’

The optics of Pollie Pedal, despite being for a good cause, are out of touch with our lived reality.

Good intentions aside, Lycra-clad politicians riding their bicycles around being all fit and happy is at odds with how crappy life in Australia has become.

The rest of the country doesn’t have time to exercise, doesn’t have time for recreation, doesn’t have enough money left to take time off, and is looking for side-hustles just to make ends meet. And they’ve got nothing left for charity.

The annoying thing is that the Coalition isn’t hitting the mark against Labor while continuing to agree with them on legislation that does little to ease our economic pain.

All I want is for Angus Taylor to say what he really means.

On a hot mic the other day, maybe he did:

‘Alright, we’ve got to go and prep for this presser. We’re just going to say the Labor government is f**kin’ sh*t. You got your lines? Talking points? [inaudible dialogue] F**kin’ ABC will be.’

If only we’d continue to hear Gus talking straight. I don’t know anybody who is being all nice and polite about life under Labor.

My latest in The Spectator Australia, Angus Taylor: ‘The Labor government is f**kin’ sh*t…’

Give us back our beer, smokes, and super

A schooner of Resch’s is now over $8 at my local (despite the publican absorbing the excise).

Australia has a habit of creating senior-age crunch times. Previously, it was working men (in particular) who were broken by age 63 but couldn’t get the pension until age 65. They had to gut it out for a few years.

Nowadays, Gen X are frequently being made redundant in their late 50s and are unable to access their superannuation until they are 60. It’s criminal.

When One Nation starts talking about giving us access to our super, Gen X are all ears.

With mortgage repayments the single biggest expense for many Gen Xers, accessing superannuation before the arbitrary age of 60 would be a no-brainer. But no. You have to die in a ditch because your super isn’t yours – it’s a ‘national asset’.

So, you can’t smoke, you can’t drink, and you have to give more of your money to the banks for absolutely nothing.

In the Morning Double Shot newsletter, Terry Barnes wrote:

Pauline Hanson says it’s your money to do with as you wish, and Michael de Percy is certain the young are all ears to her message. But if the union-dominated super behemoth is to be cut down to size, we need a few policy ideas on how to do it, not just thought bubbles. Over to you, Pauline and Barnaby – not to mention Andrew Bragg and the leader he ignores cavalierly, Angus Taylor.

My latest in The Spectator Australia, Give us back our beer, smokes, and super.