Australia

Since Australia’s general election was called by Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese at the end of March, the contest for the 3 May poll has been an uninspiring one. Voters must choose between a mediocre Labor government that overpromised and woefully underdelivered since coming to office in 2022, and an underprepared and underpowered conservative opposition. Just two months ago, it seemed the electorate’s anger with Labor was going to do what has not happened in Australia since the height of the Great Depression: turf out a first-term federal government. Liberal opposition leader, Peter Dutton, effectively had set the national agenda since Dutton opposed Albanese’s 2023 divisive referendum to give Aboriginal

Early this morning, even before dawn broke, Australia’s Labor party prime minister, Anthony Albanese, asked the country’s governor-general to call a general election for Saturday 3 May. Albanese’s short drive to Government House in Canberra capped a week when his government brought down a budget, in response to which Liberal opposition leader Peter Dutton set out his stall as prime minister in waiting. Effectively, both leaders gave their critiques of each other, and outlined their policy manifestos. It’s only day one, but the signs so far are it will be a bare-knuckle, five-week election campaign This will be one of the closest and most unpredictable elections for years. All indications

James Harrison, who died in his sleep at a care home in Australia last month at the age of 88, possibly did more good and saved more lives, pound for pound, than almost anyone else born in the last century. His blood plasma contained a rare antibody, Rho(D) immune globulin (called Anti-D), which can be used to prevent the blood of some pregnant women from doing damage to their unborn babies. But that is under-selling it. Anti-D is extremely rare (fewer than 200 people produce enough of it to donate their plasma in Australia) and the conditions which it helps with are common. Anti-D injections protect unborn babies from Rh

Just when it seemed Australia’s anti-Semitism crisis couldn’t worsen, it has. This week, it was disclosed that a caravan loaded with plastic explosive was found in Sydney’s rural fringe. The explosives are of a type commonly used in mining operations and, along with the explosives, papers were discovered that named a Sydney synagogue – reportedly the Great Synagogue in central Sydney – presumably as an identified target. Police estimated that, if detonated, the caravan’s deadly cargo would have created a 40-metre blast wave: if parked outside the synagogue, the explosion would have destroyed it and surrounding buildings, likely with very heavy human casualties and loss of life. The owners of

As the hot Australia summer rolls on, so too do the summer silly season stories. The latest is a Sydney council imposing bans on G-string bathing costumes at its public swimming pools.  When it comes to swimwear, Australia has had a long tradition of community standards conflicting with personal freedom. In the early years of the 20th century, anything not neck-to-knee got you ejected from Sydney beaches. In the fifties, as bikinis became popular, patrolling beach inspectors actually measured women’s bikini tops and bottoms to ensure they retained the requisite degree of modesty. Whatever happened to good taste and decorum? This summer, Blue Mountains City Council, in the eponymous hills

Another Australian Open tennis tournament, another Novak Djokovic media sensation. As play gets under way at Melbourne Park, Djokovic the showman has been working the Australian media, as well as doing a glossy spread for the upmarket US magazine, GQ. The common thread of his media commentary is his experience coming to the 2022 Australian Open when, as the Covid-19 pandemic still raged, the unvaccinated Djokovic was detained and deported after seeking to enter Melbourne, the city oppressed by arguably the most draconian lockdown and vaccination mandates in the world, let alone Australia. The Serbian star’s 2022 experience clearly gnaws at him Having initially been given an exemption to enter

At a time when Donald Trump threatens to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal, China is flexing its military and economic muscles, Britain is in a state of seemingly permanent political crisis, Los Angeles tragically burns, and murderous conflicts still ravage Ukraine and the Middle East, here in Australia just one issue dominates public debate this week: whether a true Australian has the right to reserve beach space by setting up an American-style beach shelter – a cabana – to stake a claim, whether or not it’s occupied. Even the country’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has waded in on the subject – and finally found popularity by condemning the canvas

As Christmas comes around again, we will discover that Australia is no longer a Christian country. According to the most recent census in 2021, Christianity is not a majority faith here and, of its denominations, none has declined more rapidly than Anglicanism – which has lost more than a third of its declared adherents since the turn of this century. Meanwhile, steadily growing non-Christian faiths are headed by Islam, which claimed over 3 per cent of Australians in 2021. Muslims in Australia now outnumber Jews by more than eight to one. Furthermore, the main Anglican and Catholic denominations are more C and E – Christmas and Easter – than C

It’s hard to make head or tail of where Australia stands on the gender debate that has divided the West. The issue boils down to a simple question: should men be allowed in women’s spaces? But the answer is far from simple. And a court ruling by a Tasmanian court ruling may have just added to the confusion. Tasmania’s avant garde Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) is not everyone’s cup of artistic tea. Its curator, American-born artist and wife of Mona’s very wealthy founder, David Walsh, Kirsha Kaechele, is certainly no stranger to controversy. ‘The men are a little hysterical, I’m a bit concerned’, Kaechele said In July,

A young mother, picnicking with friends in a Brisbane park, is now praying for the recovery of her nine-month-old baby son from a random act of violence so pointless, so inexplicable, that it’s made headlines in Australia and around the world. A fortnight ago, out of nowhere, a stranger tipped a Thermos flask of scalding coffee over the head of the infant, a boy known publicly only as Luka. Despite quick first aid, including an off-duty nurse dousing the boy’s burns with cold water, Luka suffered major burns to his chin, neck, chest and back. He has already undergone multiple surgeries, and faces still more operations and skin grafts. Even

Giggle v Tickle. The name of this Australian court case sounds like an A.P. Herbert legal parody. Except that it is no parody. It is an action brought by a transgender person and activist Roxanne Tickle against a woman-only website, Giggle for Girls, founded and run by a feminist businesswoman Sall Grover. Tickle, born male but who underwent a surgical sex change in 2019, claimed she was discriminated against by Giggle and Grover on the basis of her being a transgender rather than biological woman, principally on the basis of a selfie submitted to the website and Grover for review as part of her application. Grover, on the other hand,

The Great Barrier Reef is, of course, dying – a victim of humans’ hubris and callousness towards the natural world. We know this because we keep being told this is the case. This week, the New York Times carried the headline: ‘Heat Raises Fears of Demise for Great Barrier Reef Within a Generation’. This story, echoed elsewhere, was based on a paper in Nature claiming that the seas around the reef, off the eastern coast of Queensland, are at their warmest in at least 400 years. ‘Highest ocean heat in four centuries places Great Barrier Reef in danger,’ asserted the authors of the study, led by the University of Wollongong

During the cold months of July and August, many southern Australians head north to warmer climes. A favourite destination is north Queensland, with its jungles, rainforests, mangrove swamps and rivers. And saltwater crocodiles. David Hogbin, a 40-year-old father-of-three and GP from New South Wales, was one such sun-seeking tourists. He travelled north with his family on holiday, but will never return home. After falling into a river when a path he was walking on gave way, he was eaten by a crocodile. Crocodile attacks in Australia are big news because they’re so rare Hogbin’s death is tragic, not least because he leaves behind a young family, but because this incident

Jack Karlson, whose death this week aged 82 has been reported in Britain and around the world, was an Australian small-time crook, prison escaper and colourful character who had a tough and difficult life. He was also, however, the reluctant star of a 1991 TV news report that later became an internet sensation. Back then, Karlson was having a bite to eat in a local Chinese café in suburban Brisbane, when, like Monty Python’s Spanish inquisition, a posse of Queensland police suddenly and unexpectedly swooped to arrest him. Thanks to a tip-off to a journalist, it was all captured on camera. Imagine a stubbled Brian Blessed in a half-buttoned polyester

Convicted spy Julian Assange has come home to Australia. Assange’s chartered private jet touched down in Australia’s capital, Canberra, early in the evening local time to a hero’s reception. That the plea-bargaining deal ensuring his freedom was executed in a remote courthouse on the American territorial island of Saipan, in the isolated western Pacific but satisfying American demand that Assange be convicted on American territory, added a bizarre touch of the exotic to the whole tawdry business. It was a rubber stamp stopover en route from London to Canberra. Assange is a figure of whom we are ashamed to call our own It’s appropriate the deed was done on Saipan.

A government-sanctioned programme to cull the brumby mobs of wild horses in Australia’s High Country has become a hot political issue in New South Wales and Victoria, the two states whose border is straddled by the Snowy Mountains. Immortalised in Australian literature through the famous 1890 bush ballad ‘The Man from Snowy River’, by the poet and journalist Andrew ‘Banjo’ Paterson, to many, these wild horses represent a living part of the Australian national legend.  Set in the Snowy Mountains, the poem tells the story of a posse of riders who chase down a mob of wild horses – brumbies – to recapture an escaped racehorse colt who has joined them. It’s a story that triggers

Whatever one thinks of all that happened in the Covid years, and how the experience scarified so many and even compelled us to question the solidity of democratic institutions and values throughout the West, most of us simply want to forget. The Covid time is like a relationship gone bad: it’s easier to cope by burying it it and moving on. In Australia this week, however, unpleasant reminders of the dark Covid time resurfaced in an unexpected place: the national King’s Birthday honours list. What a face-slapping insult Andrews’s gong is to Victorians Since dispensing with imperial honours several decades ago, the highest civilian honour here is to be appointed

In the unedifying clash of heads between billionaire Twitter/X owner, Elon Musk, and Australia’s e-safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant, there could only be one rightful winner. Elon Musk. On Monday, Musk’s X succeeded in having a temporary injunction thrown out by Australia’s Federal Court preventing it and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta from posting images of last month’s Sydney stabbing. An Armenian Orthodox bishop, Mar Mari Emmanuel, was attacked in his church, allegedly by a religiously radicalised youth, in April. The incident was captured by the church’s own livestream of the event and beamed across the internet: the footage is disturbing but already there for the world to see, if anyone chose

Cambridge has made a mistake in returning to the tribe that made them some spears collected by Captain Cook’s men in 1770. It is always dispiriting to write something and then discover that no one with the power to act has paid any attention. Last year, I complained on Coffee House that Trinity College, Cambridge and the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology were about to make an ill-conceived mistake by repatriating these spears. It seems no one was listening. The truth is that these spears – which were presented to Trinity in 1771 – would not have survived had they not been kept safe in Cambridge. These were