Australia

Saturday

Alex Massie

The Ashes: This Really Is As Good As It Gets

All across the country this afternoon struggling club sides could cheer themselves with the thought that once their batsmen had survived for 112 deliveries they were doing better than Australia managed in their first innings in Nottingham this week. Australia’s capitulation in 18.3 overs – a Nelson of deliveries – might just be the most extraordinary thing any of us have ever seen on a cricket field. Even now, 48 hours later, it still seems shocking. And when England motored to 274/4 by the end of that first, astonishing, day it occurred to me that this might well have been the single best day of English test cricket in my

Thursday

Roger Alton

Australia’s comeback kids

I have never met an Aussie I didn’t like, but, crikey, their sporting indefatigability is exhausting. Don’t they ever give up? In the past few days, they have pulled one out of the bag against the Springboks in the southern hemisphere Rugby Championship when they looked buried; trailing 20—17 with time up, they turned down a penalty kick and went for the win with an 82nd-minute try. Their Davis Cup tennis boys came from 2—0 down to beat Kazakhstan, with Lleyton Hewitt hauling his weary muscles through the motions once more. Afterwards Hewitt said, ‘I love the back-against-the-wall situation. This is what dreams are made of.’ Now they face Britain,

Thursday

Robert Collins

A triumphant failure

I must be an idiot for pointing out the failings of a novel that’s so screamingly, self-denouncingly about failure. Steve Toltz’s Quicksand is a nutty, occasionally hilarious, flaccid carrier bag of a comic romp, all dazzling one-liners and no comic paydirt. Like his debut novel, A Fraction of the Whole (about a misfit philosopher and his troubled son), it is narrated by a pair of human catastrophes: a New South Wales police constable, Liam Wilder, who’s a failed novelist; and his best friend, Aldo Benjamin, who’s a failed husband, entrepreneur, everything. Toltz probably intended this novel to be a failure. It’s that difficult beast, his second book, after all (his

Saturday

Damian Thompson

The hounding of Cardinal Pell: things Australia's liberal media don't want you to know

The attempt to implicate Cardinal George Pell in the Ballarat child abuse scandal is a virtuoso display of score-settling by Australia’s left-leaning journalists, who have hated Pell for many years. This morning, however, The Australian broke ranks by publishing a column by Gerard Henderson that helps set the record straight. I’m simply going to quote extracts from it because you can be damn sure that they aren’t going to penetrate the liberal Aussie media’s firewall. On Pell’s record in tackling child abuse: On all the available evidence, Pell was among the first Catholic bishops in the world to address the issue of child sexual abuse by clergy. He was appointed archbishop of

Thursday

James Delingpole

Aussie rules | 30 April 2015

Some years ago I paid a visit to the site of the Gallipoli landings because I was mildly obsessed with the Peter Weir movie and wanted to gauge for myself how horrible it must have been. En route I met up with a young Australian who was training to be an actor (in my false memory it was the unknown Russell Crowe) and together we clambered up the near-cliff-like slopes in the blazing sun, imagining the Turks sniping and rolling grenades at us from the trenches on top. That anyone could have survived at all, we agreed, was a miracle. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was that the

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Will jailing Katie Hopkins save the lives of migrants? I have my doubts

More than a thousand migrants have died attempting to get into Europe over the past week, including 900 who perished horribly, trapped in the hold of a Tunisian ship near the Libyan coast. Many thousands have died before and many thousands will die in the near future attempting the same venture unless we in Europe change our policies. Everybody is agreed that something has to be done. For the liberal left, the answer is to sack Katie Hopkins, a fellow columnist of mine at the Sun. Not just sack her but also prosecute her and prosecute the editor of the Sun. More than 200,000 people have signed a petition got

Friday

Rj Stove

An anti-cricketer’s tribute to Richie Benaud, a cricketing great who radiated televisual decency

Cricket-captain-turned-cricket-commentator Richie Benaud died in Sydney this morning. He would have been 85 next October.  That last pair of sentences contains, believe it or not, two of the most crucial facts in modern Australian history. As of the last (2011) census, approximately 24 million people lived in Australia. It is a fair bet that (whatever the Fourth Estate supposes) fully two-thirds of them would struggle to remember – on the optimistic assumption of their ever having known – who Malcolm Fraser was, or who Gough Whitlam was. (From the mere fact that voting at Australian elections is compulsory, it need not follow that voting at Australian elections is literate.) But

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Plain cigarette packs will help Isis, says Tory MP. Somebody buy this man a tin-foil hat

A Tory MP called Brian Binley has written an article suggesting that plain cigarette packs – which the House of Commons voted for yesterday – will help Isis. His argument is superficially plausible but fundamentally bonkers. In other words, it’s a conspiracy theory. Here are the dots that Binley has joined. There’s truth in all of these points. • Terrorists have made money out of tobacco smuggling. Though Binley only gives us chapter and verse on the IRA, operating in the ‘bandit country’ of Northern Ireland. • ‘Gangs and terror groups’ who smuggle tobacco and alcohol also smuggle ‘drugs, arms and people’. True. Some detail would have been nice, though. • ‘Data

Thursday

Ed West

Never mind Ukip's immigration policy, Britain has an emigration problem

Ukip has unveiled its new Aussie-style immigration policy, just a week after the latest bad immigration news for the government. The news was bad only in a sense, as high immigration levels are a symptom of a healthy economy; after all, the Venezuelan government doesn’t break into a sweat every time the immigration figures come in, thanks to the genius of Chavenomics. But it’s all bad news for the Tories because most people would like restrictions on the rate of population growth, and of immigration-led social change, and the government made promises it clearly couldn’t keep. Yet the British economy is doing well and Ukip realise therefore that there is a

Louis Amis

A Father’s Day tragedy: what exactly happened when a car plunged into a reservoir in Australia in 2005?

When Helen Garner, an award-winning Australian author, first saw the TV news images of the car being dragged out of the water, she uttered a prayer: ‘Oh Lord, let this be an accident.’ A strange, pessimistic, almost paranoid prayer. A car had swerved off a dark highway outside her hometown of Geelong, Australia, and plunged into a reservoir.Why wouldn’t that be an accident? But Garner seems to have had a premonition. This House of Grief is her account of the murder trial, and ultimate conviction, of the car’s driver, Robert Farquharson, who had escaped and swum ashore while his three young sons drowned. One surprising absence from the book is

Sunday

Rowan Dean

Is Twitter about to claim its first prime ministerial scalp?

Within the next three hours, the seventeen-month reign of Australia’s conservative PM Tony Abbott may come to a crashing close, terminated not by policy differences but by populism and personality. Could Twitter be about to claim its first prime ministerial scalp? The contrasting characters of Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull could not have been more cunningly scripted had Jeffrey Archer invented them: one a staunch monarchist (whose act of awarding an Aussie knighthood to Prince Philip on Australia Day exactly two weeks ago led directly to this morning’s party room spill), the other the former frontman of the (failed) 1999 Republican referendum. One a fervent climate change sceptic (Mr Abbott

The Spectator

Removing Tony Abbott as Australian Prime Minister is pointless and reckless

In the latest issue of Spectator Australia, the leading article lambasts the Australian Liberal Party for trying to remove Prime Minister Tony Abbott: The determination by many in the media, even among conservatives, to hasten the demise of Tony Abbott’s prime ministership is as pointless as it is reckless. Pointless not because they will or they won’t succeed, but pointless because such an outcome would merely herald the beginning, rather than the end, of a long period of Coalition instability and in-fighting. Make no mistake: it is not Tony Abbott the man who is deeply unpopular (although his poll figures are, at present, nothing to write home about). It is the measures he

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Tony Abbott is no common sense speaking politician — just look at his comments on ISIL

Wow. Anyone who still harboured the idea that Australia was led by no-nonsense, common sense speaking politicians should look away now. Here is Tony Abbott, Prime Minister of Australia, talking about the motivations of the man who held a shop full of people hostage earlier this week and then murdered two of them: ‘The point I keep making is that the ISIL death cult has nothing to do with any religion, any real religion. It has nothing to do with any particular community. It is something to which sick individuals succumb.’ That is right, ladies and gentlemen. If you or I suffer from a seasonal cold this winter we must

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

From Sydney to Peshawar - Islamic extremists are civilisation's common enemy

Yesterday it was Sydney. Today it is Peshawar. Yesterday a coffee shop. Today a school. Yesterday a lone gunman. Today a gang of them. If anybody wondered about the global and diffuse nature of the challenge that Islamic fundamentalism poses, the last 24 hours have given another demonstration of the problem. Yet what is amazing, after all these years, is how unconcerned many people remain with working out what is going on. How could the Taliban have chosen to attack a school in Peshawar? Why did Boko Haram steal the Nigerian schoolgirls? Why did the Sydney attacker fly that flag? Why do Isis fly theirs?  The Western world in particular seems

Joseph Power

Australia finally feels the ripples of Islamist terrorism on its own shores

It was a scene that Australians are hitherto unfamiliar with. Terrified civilians forced at gunpoint to press a black flag, bearing the shahādah – the Islamic declaration of faith, most notably used as a battle banner by Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria – against the Lindt café window. The gunman, aside from a chat with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, requested a proper Islamic State flag, which, in fairness, would be hard to come by in Sydney these days. The perpetrator, Man Haron Monis, was well known to authorities. Facing more than 40 sexual and indecent assault charges, he had a conviction for sending offensive letters to families

Saturday

James Forsyth

In praise of Michael Clarke

The cricketing world has begun its slow trudge back to normality. Phillip Hughes has been buried and conversation has, half-heartedly, began to turn back to the game itself. Australia will take the field at Hughes’ adopted home ground of Adelaide on Tuesday for a Test match against India.   But it would be remiss to let this week pass without praise for Michael Clarke and the dignity that he has shown as he has led the game and Australia in mourning the death of a young man who was on the verge on fulfilling his great talent. As Alex said the other day, to anyone who has played cricket at

Thursday

Roger Alton

International cricket must return to Pakistan (and my team went first)

In a tiny courtyard just off the teeming alleys of Lahore’s old town, a young Pakistani boy in a gleaming white shalwar kameez picks up his Adidas cricket bat and proceeds to clout to all corners the plastic ball his pal is chucking down. Behind him on the wall the outline of three stumps is drawn, and the word Out! chalked there, more in hope you feel. In the corner a little schoolroom has emptied out and excited young boys and girls, books in hand, look on, giggling happily. Is this the new Imran? Almost certainly not, but we are in one of the holy places of Pakistan cricket, and

Thursday

Barry Humphries

Barry Humphries’s diary: The bookshop ruined by Harry Potter

Do fish have loins? Last Tuesday, in a pretentious restaurant, I ordered a ‘loin of sea trout’. It looked just like an ordinary piece of fish — a bit small, as is usual in pretentious restaurants — on a plate sprinkled and drizzled as though the chef had perhaps coughed over it rather violently or vigorously scratched his head before giving it to the waiter. In Australia, I was once offered a shoulder of some other fish, so I suppose one might even be able to enjoy a rump of whitebait or even a saddle of flounder. But generally speaking I don’t mind loin when applied to the loinless, and

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Kate Chisholm on what makes the BBC World Service so special

‘Don’t take it for granted,’ she warned. ‘It’s one of the few places where you can hear diverse voices, different points of view; where you can understand that the world is infinitely complex.’ Alana Valentine, an Australian writer, was talking about the BBC World Service with such passion it was inspiring. You might think she would say this, wouldn’t she. After all, Valentine was giving her acceptance speech having just won first prize in the World Service’s International Radio Playwriting Competition for her radio drama The Ravens. Yet what she said was striking because you could tell she really meant it. These were not just platitudes. She had prepared what

Monday

Nick De Bois

Ed Miliband's windfall tax on tobacco to fund the NHS is economically illiterate

The ‘windfall tax’, a concept introduced in the UK by the Blair government, is by definition a one-off seizure of revenue from a profitable industry, to fund an invariably unprofitable but popular project. It has been justified as putting ‘right a bad deal’ on the excesses of profits of unpopular industries. Between 1997 and 1998, Gordon Brown raised £5 billion from privatised utility companies to fund the Welfare-to-Work Programme. Today we have face another well-intentioned policy initiative, of ensuring every NHS patient is guaranteed a cancer test within 7 days, supposedly to be funded by a windfall tax on tobacco companies. Labour’s incoherent economic policy is enough to challenge whether