The Spectator Australia

The Spectator Australia is Australia's favourite weekly politics and culture magazine. Subscribe now; only $10 for 10 issues.
Editor: Rowan Dean @rowandean

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

Why does the government require so much revenue?

You cannot have a serious conversation about tax until you have had one about spending. The size of the tax system follows from what the state does.

There is a perfectly sound case for taxation. A functioning country requires courts, police, infrastructure and, in Australia’s strategic circumstances, serious defence. Civilisation is not free, and anarcho-libertarian slogans do not patrol sea lanes.

But this is not where the current argument sits. The modern Australian state has moved well beyond raising sufficient revenue to perform a defined set of functions with spending now treated as irreducible and private income and capital treated as adjustable variables.

Article | https://t.co/0HAdSbVW9z

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

It seems that good intentions do not just pave the road to hell, but the path to foolishness.

The SNP has announced that, from August 2027, every child starting P1 in Scotland (the equivalent of Reception in England Wales) will be given a free school backpack, which will contain essentials such as a pencil case, water bottle and a notebook.

This may seem like a generous gesture, but the SNP have been rather reluctant to disclose how much this ‘small’ gift will actually cost (the bags are still apparently in the ‘pre-contract stage’ and a ‘budget will be confirmed once procurement is complete’, although we do know that the materials used to make the rucksacks will be sourced from overseas).

The problem with these free goodie bags is that, well, who actually wants them?

Article | https://t.co/eV2mo66iLG

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

BOOK REVIEW | There is a delightful moment at the end of this book when Frank Ashwood is out looking for soil-dwelling invertebrates in his adopted New Zealand home. Suddenly he proclaims:

‘I notice something and my heart skips a beat. A velvet worm.’

He goes on to tell us that the discovery of two of these rare organisms in one day is ‘a thing of dreams’.

Article | https://t.co/lacOSHGo5K

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

I’m not saying Albo’s a fruit loop, or a fruit cake – just that his crass and tiresome housing commission humour has come off like a culturally inappropriate cameo in a world that’s moved on.

I’m not offended by his melon gestures – I’m offended by his off-leash Treasurer mauling taxpayers with politely named reforms that claw around in the grit and fluff between the seams of our pockets.

I’m offended by the Prime Minister’s machete-surrender-bin-esque ‘gun buyback’ scheme and the ‘Royal Commission into Everything Except Islamic Terror’ which will rid us of precisely zero zealots.

And I’m offended by Acknowledgement of Country performances morphing into a vicious and totalitarian religious mantra that must be respected, recited, and reverently clicked through on pain of reputational death.

What offends me most is that it’s very likely our democracy will be voted into destruction by a generation of indoctrinated kids who think freedom is fascism and communism is a comfy ‘Netflix & Chill’ lifestyle.

The sort of children who are lured from school and out onto the streets to cry about the weather, or Palestine, or Pauline.

Children who quite literally cannot define the cause that has brought them to the point of chanting for political violence and the incarceration of other Australians who vote differently to them.

Article | https://t.co/YkAqjLWbDY

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

Didn't you hear? It's the best time to be a first-time home buyer in Australia.

How do we know? Tanya Plibersek said so, therefore it MUST be true. 🤨

"I think there's a generation of young Australians who are feeling this enormous sense of relief because they thought they were going to be renting forever."

Oh dear, Tayna. The stats don't seem to back you up on that one.

Article | https://t.co/oCUXXJhKoH

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

How's Albanese going, eh?

If you were to rate the progress of Labor's term in office, what sort of review would you be giving them...

Article | https://t.co/XEjPJOHXpd

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

‘There are no safe Labor seats in this state, or in this country any more…’ declared Luke Herdegen, the freshly elected One Nation MP for Secret Harbour.

He has done something no one thought possible and stolen a safe Labor seat from Roger Cook’s nest.

Article | https://t.co/8uvsEx7XR0

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

Ben Carroll is trying to save the world – or at least his government.

We already have the campaign origin-story: Ben used to work at K-Mart, which is a great place to buy cheap products that break three days after you buy them.

They’re pushing that K-Mart mythology hard, making it Carroll’s version of Albo’s ‘I grew up in public housing,’ Tony Abbott’s, ‘I used to be Peter Fitzsimon’s rugby coach’, and Malcolm Turnbull’s ’first ten million is the hardest’ struggle street narrative.

Article | https://t.co/IlUWDgbmo5

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

A month later - over 8,000 illegal migrants remain in #Ceuta.

Instead of spending a fortune 'accommodating' the question remains - why can't they be evicted and pushed back over the border?

Former conservative Prime Minister José María Aznar said: ‘No one who breaches our border can remain on national territory. Spain’s territorial integrity has been violated and order and security must be restored.’

Article | https://t.co/ScqWGCLbme

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

The fight for France is underway. The 2027 presidential campaign began last night as the leading candidates clashed in a live debate on the centre court of Roland Garros.

Jean-Luc Melenchon arrived at Roland Garros as the pantomime villain.

He and his party make no secret of their anti-capitalism. At an LFI rally last weekend, one of the party’s prominent figures, Manon Aubry, told a cheering audience:

"We must not only tax the rich, but ban billionaires. If there are no more billionaires, then there will be no one left who owns the media, no one left who is destroying the planet."

Article | https://t.co/ASemaTSVBP

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

"The limitations of Tehran’s capacities for disruption have been exposed."

The volume of oil passing through the Strait this way is disputed. Many observers consider that the US claim of 8 to 10 million barrels per day is exaggerated (and even this figure would represent less than half of the amount transiting the Strait prior to the war). But even the more modest and generally accepted figure of 5 to 6 million barrels per day represents a major and growing dent in Iranian claims of control over the Strait.

Article | https://t.co/rLx9rVZIzo

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

"We call on all residents of the United Kingdom to consider the inevitable catastrophic consequences of their own government’s hostile actions. We urge the British leadership to once again thoroughly analyse the situation and immediately and decisively abandon its hostile, aggressive policy, which can only prolong the agony of the Kyiv neo-N-i regime and create the risk of escalating the conflict to a fundamentally new level… We have repeatedly warned that the response to Ukrainian strikes using British weapons on Russian territory could be against any British military facilities and equipment in Ukraine and beyond."

- Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Article | https://t.co/HkiKXnxiex

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

How much is AI actually to blame for job losses among young people?

Is it cover for the government’s obsession with pulling fiscal levers which drive up employment costs?

Article | https://t.co/3NLHNHmTDS

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

When the Cold War ended and the main rationale for enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons largely disappeared, it seemed natural that their spread would become a thing of the past.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 upended that Whiggish march of history.

Article | https://t.co/ZozELj385h

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

Last night revealed another set of outstanding results from Nvidia. Its quarterly revenues were up by 105% year-on-year, comfortably ahead of expectations. Its earnings per share doubled. Its gross margin remained at an impressive 75%.

The chip manufacturer’s founder Jensen Huang bullishly declared that the Artificial Intelligence industry had reached its ‘golden age’ without risking ridicule.

Article | https://t.co/OPWZFRa6oO

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

Most of you will recognise the Curley Effect, even if you haven’t heard of it.

James Curley, also known as the ‘Rascal King’ was a four-time mayor of Boston from 1914 to 1950.

He used wasteful redistribution and electoral largesse directed to his poor Irish constituents and populist rhetoric to cause wealthy establishment Bostonians to leave the city, thereby shaping the electorate in his favour so he would be re-elected.

Australians will have seen this before... 🤨

Article | https://t.co/oOX9tzymzy

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

Washington’s total debt has passed the unimaginable milepost of $40 trillion for the first time, while its fiscal deficit heads towards 6 per cent of GDP against a 50-year average of 3.8 per cent.

American companies are also piling on debt to fund huge investment in AI, making them ultra-sensitive to the higher interest rates which reflect rising bond yields.

All a bit technical and all very American, you’re thinking: but let me explain why it’s also a threat to you and me. 🤔

Article | https://t.co/XcXbPmP6OH

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

The Chancellor of the University of Cambridge has said the university has ‘lessons to learn from the Jason Arday tragedy’.

Well, you can make words mean what you want – the ancient Greeks invented the word tragôidia and it meant ‘goat-song’ – but is ‘tragic’ really the word for Arday?

Article | https://t.co/sryWUl0iA6

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

One route into the thorny question of J.R.R. Tolkien’s politics comes courtesy of Giorgia Meloni.

Scarcely a profile of the Italian Prime Minister hits the newsstands these days without the Tolkien references piling up like so many windfall apples:

The Hobbit plays put on with fellow-members of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) youth group back in the 1990s; the fixation on the Ringbearer’s sidekick Sam Gamgee (‘Much more useful than Frodo’); the annual birthday tribute to a man who ‘brought up so many of us with his stories’.

Here, clearly is a Middle-earth obsessive, Tolkien’s work a direct prompt for political action.

Article | https://t.co/aRGdnhPdlU

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

‘How long have they been here?’ ‘Three generations.’ ‘Ah, just grockles, then.’

Exchanges such as this must have taken place in countless Devon villages.

A ‘grockle’ is a Devonshire term for a tourist or incomer. I suppose it could be offensive. But being called a grockle is not usually a term of abuse and in general the word is spoken with a half-smile rather than a grimace.

Article | https://t.co/7VcZfiBVrV

[The Spectator Australia @SpectatorOz]

Is the young, well-educated middle-class being pulled toward radicalisation?

While there was a degree of sympathy for the IRA during the Troubles, it was mostly contained.

Today, a major housing crisis coupled with anti-Establishment sentiment is causing a new movement to erupt - 'Radical Chic'.

This weird creation has seen Ireland's past troubles romanticised and linked to #Palestine's present causes.

For example, the Belfast rap group #Kneecap has been drawing parallels between Northern Ireland and Gaza.

Article | https://t.co/ak57FjfWTv