Australia

Are Jews not allowed even one day of commemoration? Can’t they have just one sombre moment where they might remember their dead without mobs of wild-eyed Israelophobes frothing at the mouth for yet more ‘intifada’? Judging by the obscene events here in Sydney last night, the answer to that question is a firm No. It seems a Jew’s right to grieve counts for nothing in the face of the mob’s right to wail and rage about Israel. I’m tired of tiptoeing around this. Intifada means violence against Jews Even by the standards of the Israel-hating left, what happened in Sydney yesterday was despicable. The president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, was

In broad daylight, two monuments were smashed in Melbourne’s Flagstaff Gardens last week. One of them was an 1871 memorial to the city’s earliest British settlers; the other commemorated Victoria’s separation from New South Wales in 1850. These monuments not only were sledgehammered, but daubed with the ugly words ‘death to Australia’ and the provocative, hateful triangle symbol of Hamas. It wouldn’t be Australia’s national day without such acts of vandalism It wouldn’t be Australia’s national day without such acts of vandalism, meant to deface the anniversary of the day a British convict settlement was proclaimed at Sydney. Last year, it was statues of James Cook, the man who, until

At a time when technology has invaded our lives, Australia is now running the world’s biggest real-life experiment that seeks to mitigate its effects on our children. What could possibly go wrong? It’s now just over a month since the world’s first social media ban for children launched in Australia. Age-restricted social media platforms (like Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube) must take ‘reasonable steps’ to prevent under 16s creating or keeping an account. Just a few weeks into the ban, Aussie teens are skirting the rules with ease: two phones, fake birthdays, borrowed accounts Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in his 2024 book The Anxious Generation, argued that smartphones and social media are ‘rewiring’ our children and

England’s most successful Ashes series Down Under for 15 years has somehow come to be seen as its most calamitous. England won a Test match, and competed for large periods in three of the other four. Yet many England fans are left wondering what might have been. Defeat in this manner is much more devastating than the repeated, predictable failures of earlier tours. After England’s loss at Adelaide confirmed the Ashes would stay in Australia, Phil Tufnell turned to me and said ‘I really believed we had a chance this time. Were we deluded Dan?’ Before the Ashes, there were high hopes that a young, dynamic England side playing certainly

As many predicted, England has yet again lost the Ashes in Australia. But listen closely to the criticism of the defeat and a curious vocabulary emerges. The problem, we are told, was not simply misjudgement but recklessness; not failure but irresponsibility. England did not merely lose – they behaved wrongly. This is striking language to attach to a sporting approach. It suggests that something more than tactics or results is at stake: a sense that England should not play like this at all, even if it sometimes works. That British instinct – to recoil from assertiveness when it produces visible risk – runs far beyond cricket. Australia’s series win has

I knew two of the people murdered at Bondi Beach. That beach has always felt like Australia distilled: sun-bleached, open, and unserious in the best way. It is where the country goes to exhale. You don’t brace yourself at Bondi Beach. You assume the day will end the way it began. My late father once thought that too. A Holocaust survivor, he arrived in Australia after the war with just a suitcase in his hand and a number on his arm. Australia took him in without interrogation of his past loyalties or beliefs, expecting only that whatever horrors he had fled would not be imported here. He honoured that bargain,

It’s hard to disagree with the verdict of former Australian cabinet minister Josh Frydenberg on the Bondi Beach attack. ‘Guns may have stolen the life of 15 innocent civilians,’ he said, ‘but it was radical Islamist ideology that pulled the trigger’. Despite that furious denunciation of Australian government inertia on antisemitism since 7 October – and ex-prime minister John Howard labelling gun control a ‘distraction’ – Anthony Albanese is determined to focus on cracking down on firearms. But is he ignoring the Islamist elephant in the room? Cracking down on guns is sensible, but it won’t defeat the Islamist and antisemitic hate pulling the trigger The Australian leader has announced

After four days of looking like a rabbit in the headlights, embattled Australian prime minister, Labor’s Anthony Albanese, finally started to act like a national leader willing to do what’s right. Yesterday, Albanese announced his government’s response to a plan to combat anti-Semitism proposed by his hand-picked special envoy on anti-Semitism, Jewish community leader Jillian Segal. Albanese has had Segal’s report since July. His response yesterday, which effectively accepted the envoy’s 13 recommendations, was tardy but substantial. Most importantly, the Australian government accepted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism – a definition that boils down simply to hatred towards Jews, without qualification – as the basis of

It’s been three days since the jihad against innocent Jews at Sydney’s Bondi beach. A nation’s grief is swiftly turning to anger and Australia’s prime minister is floundering. As more is learned about the father-and-son killers who took 15 lives and wounded many more, questions are piling up. How did the father enter the country? How did security agencies lose track of the son, who not only imbibed his father’s Jew hate, but may have been further radicalised by reportedly studying with one of Sydney’s most notorious Islamist hate preachers? How did they manage to go to a militant area of the Philippines as recently as a month ago? How

Jews are big on candles. We light two candles every Friday night to welcome the Sabbath and we do the same again on the eve of every Jewish high holy day. Then there is the memorial candle, called a ‘yahrzheit candle’, these are the ones we light when a loved one passes away, and then in memorial every year after. We light them too for those that we didn’t know but mourn nonetheless. Jews around the world light yahrzheit candles annually on Yom H’Shoah (the Jewish Holocaust remembrance day), and since 7 October it feels like we have had to keep on lighting those candles far too frequently. Hanukkah candles

It’s all too easy to get hooked by the online world, to fall headlong into it, to spend hour upon hour immersed in it. Cyberspace has its good, but also much bad. Staying in control of their social media lives is difficult enough for many adults, but for children it can be an especially dangerous world in which to dwell. Too often children are glued to their phones and devices, staring, scrolling, disengaged from the world around them. Too many children are exposed to online harm, including bullying, grooming and shaming. Appallingly, too many children are emotionally and psychologically damaged from social media exposure. Terribly, and tragically, some have taken

Thursday dawned bright and warm over the beaches of northern New South Wales. It was a perfect morning to enjoy sun, surf and sand. One young couple, tourists escaping the Swiss alpine autumn, couldn’t resist the temptation of a 6 a.m. swim at the remote Kylies Beach in Crowdy Bay National Park, a beautiful and rugged natural coastal haven, accessible only by dirt track. The holidaymakers expected a refreshing dip in sun-dappled waves, and it now appears they took to the water to film dolphins with their underwater camera. Instead, death and tragedy found them. Without warning, the pair were attacked by a three-metre bull shark and savaged brutally before

When it comes to major decisions certain to anger Donald Trump and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, seeking safety in numbers is a wise idea. For that’s what the joint decision by Britain, Australia and Canada to recognise a state of Palestine actually is. It isn’t a bloc of Anglosphere nations showing a united front to Trump and Netanyahu; rather, it is their huddling together in an attempt to deflect the wrath of the Israelis and Americans. Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese foreshadowed the possibility of Palestinian recognition several weeks ago, giving him something to announce today in New York as the UN General Assembly yet again deliberates on the

Australia and Israel are – were – traditional allies. A former leader of Australia’s Labor party and then president of the United Nations General Assembly, Herbert Evatt, played a significant role in the establishment of Israel in 1948. In recent decades, Labor prime minister Bob Hawke was one of Israel’s staunchest international supporters, once observing ‘if the bell tolls for Israel, it tolls for all of us’. That was then. Now, Australia’s Labor government, headed by left-wing prime minister Anthony Albanese, and his factional ally, foreign minister Penny Wong, are clear that their sympathies are no longer with Israel almost two years after the 7 October atrocities. Last week’s decision

Notoriously, the Australian state of New South Wales was founded as a penal colony. Since it was granted responsible government by Britain nearly 200 years ago, more than a few of the state’s MPs have gone from parliament to prison. Not all that long ago, the New South Wales corrective services minister was convicted of taking bribes to grant certain prisoners early release, and saw the inside of prisons he once administered. An honourable person would have taken the hint and resigned, but Ward was not honourable and refused to quit But that former minister’s disgrace is almost nothing compared to the case of the former minister and serving MP

After an eight-week trial followed avidly around Australia and the world, and a week’s jury deliberation, Australia’s answer to Lucrezia Borgia today has been found guilty of murdering three of her dinner party guests and attempting to murder the fourth. The jury of five women and seven men decided, beyond reasonable doubt, that the presence of fatal death cap mushrooms in the beef wellington that Erin Patterson, 56, cooked for her parents-in-law, Don and Gail Patterson, her sister-in-law Heather Wilkinson, and Heather’s husband Ian, was no tragic accident. The jury was satisfied that, coolly and deliberately, Patterson’s toxic beef wellington killed three of them and almost killed Ian Wilkinson too.

America’s policy undersecretary of defence, Elbridge Colby, is one of the brightest brains in Donald Trump’s administration. Having served in the first Trump presidency, Colby has an outstanding reputation as a defence and strategic thinker. He is also, however, very much aligned with Trump’s America First thinking in respect of foreign policy, and the United States’ relationship with her allies. That would be a strategic disaster for Australia and Britain In tasking Colby on Wednesday with reviewing the Aukus nuclear submarine-centred strategic partnership between the US, the UK and Australia, the president sends a clear message to Britain and Australia: Aukus is part of his inheritance from Joe Biden, and its