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.

The Census is no place for politics

Unwelcome, personal, and political questions were in the Census this year... [Deposit Photos/@olly18]

Why am I not surprised the 2026 Census feels a bit … politicised?

The last time a national census was held under a Labor government was in 2011. What a coincidence that those are the only two occasions I have felt the process turned into a political exercise. That is my opinion, at least.

This year the battleground is obvious.

For the first time, Australians aged 16 and over were asked optional questions about sexual orientation and gender identity. At the same time, secular campaigners ran a coordinated push to mark ‘No Religion’. Religious groups counter-campaigned, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) was reduced to pleading with the public to ignore online crusades.

It is my opinion that the Census has become another front in the identity wars. And Labor, after initially baulking at the ‘divisive’ new questions, eventually waved them through.

In the Morning Double Shot newsletter, Terry Barnes wrote:

Did you think more than a few Census questions were unduly personal and intrusive, and others designed to pander to the identity politics agenda? Your scribe did, and so did Michael de Percy. Michael also relates a disturbing first-hand experience of the Blob’s unquenched desire for all manner of personal information from all manner of people. The Census is now a political document, not a simple number-gathering exercise, and both sides of politics are to blame.

In the Unfiltered newsletter, Alexandra Marshall wrote:

For those in the Coalition upper-ranks who like to snoop on my nightly writings, I urge you to read this article from Michael de Percy in a sober and calm fashion. Political parties must try to understand the political reality of their voters before it is too late. As I said to Michael when he filed this submission, it seems as if the ‘party’ and the ‘people’ have different native languages. They understand the words – but the jokes never hit because the proper context is missing.

My latest in The Spectator Australia, The Census is no place for politics.

Identity politics is modern communism

Communism failed to smash the state, so identity politics tries to smash the society.

How progressive politics unpicked Western Enlightenment one dangerous idea at a time

Every aspect of post-pandemic policy has become dominated by identity politics. The question is where this leads.

Key to identity politics is the right of individuals to identify however they choose, even if that means grammatically incorrect pronouns or irreversible medical interventions on minors. What is missing is any serious concept of the common good.

Ordinarily, if A identifies in a way that B rejects, B can still accept A’s right to choose. But when refusal to affirm that identity becomes a social, professional, or criminal offence, the purpose is no longer liberty. It is the enforced subordination of shared reality to private will.

Identity politics does not merely expand freedom. It systematically dismantles the shared understandings that make a free society possible.

Identity politics represents the acceleration of contradiction and therefore the manifestation of modern communism. It is destroying our liberal democratic traditions, and it is undoing the very fabric of Enlightenment thinking. Not only is it destroying the West from within, but it is making excuses for otherwise abhorrent human rights abuses elsewhere. It is hypocrisy in the extreme.

My latest in The Spectator Australia, Identity politics is modern communism.