Terry Barnes is a Melbourne-based contributor for The Spectator and The Spectator Australia.
Before dawn today, a Qantas jet touched down in Melbourne from the United States. Aboard, flying commercial first class but hardly incognito, were world-famous philanthropists and former working royals, Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The couple are in Australia for a week of ‘engagements’ in Melbourne, Sydney and
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Australia’s most decorated war hero, Ben Roberts-Smith VC, is a mountain of a man. But today, he has been cut down to size. Arriving at Sydney airport this morning on a flight from Queensland, Roberts-Smith was met by Australian Federal police officers, who escorted him to a car waiting on the tarmac. He was arrested, handcuffed
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Ever since the Hamas atrocities of October 2023, it’s not been easy being Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese. Following the infamy of 7 October, Albanese’s government presided over a surge in anti-Semitism that is a huge and indelible stain on Australia’s international reputation and moral character. The government’s policies on the Israel-Gaza conflict were designed
In a suburban Melbourne industrial estate, hidden in a clutter of brutalist buildings and parked trucks, tomorrow’s world is taking shape. Here, an Australian tech start-up called Cortical Labs has caused an internet sensation. More than 40 million people have watched a clip of disembodied human brain cells playing the 1990s video game Doom. These
In 1989, as tanks rolled into central Beijing to crush the pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square, Australia’s then prime minister, Bob Hawke, spontaneously offered asylum to all Chinese citizens who happened to be in Australia. Thousands took up his offer and made lasting contributions to the country that gave them shelter. Last Tuesday, the women
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‘Australians don’t want a bar of this bloke, frankly.’ That’s what Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said today after calling for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to be banished from the line of succession to the throne. It’s not just in Britain that there’s public and media pressure for parliamentary action to remove Andrew’s succession rights It’s no
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‘From Gadigal to Gaza, globalise the intifada!’ This cry rang out on Monday night at an angry protest in central Sydney (trendily-named Gadigal by radical Aboriginal activists). But it wasn’t simply the chant of an angry pro-Palestine mob. The firebrand demagogue who spat out this invective, which proceeded a violent protest against the visit to Sydney of Israel’s
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Australia has been global news for all the wrong reasons. So it was a relief to hear a story of a boy’s courage and heroism in south-western Australia which has won admiration from all around the world. The coastal waters of Australia are a playground. Swimming, boating, kayaking and fishing are the summer pastimes for
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Australian and British politics have one thing in common: in both countries the right of politics is shattered. Australia’s Liberal party, in coalition with the regional Nationals, was walloped at the most recent general election by the Australian Labor party. Its then leader, Peter Dutton, lost his seat, leaving behind a centre-right leaderless, rudderless, and
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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,
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This is a summer that Australians want to forget. Australia was shocked and outraged by last month’s Bondi massacre of the innocents by Islamist fanatics. Its government and parliament have descended into angry chaos in Bondi’s wake. Massive bushfires devastated much of the states of Victoria and New South Wales this month, and a tropical
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This has been a week when Australia could no longer deny the dark stain of anti-Semitism on our national soul. When our Prime Minister, faced with the horror of Bondi and Islamic jihadist fanatics, failed to rise to the crying need for genuine national leadership. When all Australians, not just our Jewish brothers and sisters,
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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 –
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
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?
Ahmed’s cousin, Mustafa, said Ahmed saw an opportunity to tackle the shooter
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As the appalling story of Sunday’s anti-Jewish mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach continue to unfold, and 16 people are now dead, there have been few glimmers of light in the darkness. Ahmed’s cousin, Mustafa, said Ahmed saw an opportunity to tackle the shooter The men identified as the shooters are a father and son,
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It breaks my heart to write this piece. Today, the resurgence of anti-Semitism that has percolated and festered in Australia for the last two years has come to a murderous, horrific climax. In a balmy early summer evening a few hours ago, Sydney’s Bondi beach was the scene of appalling carnage, At least 11 people
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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
The online world is dangerous for under-16s, but barring them could be unwise and unworkable