Australia

Australia’s Jews are living in fear

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

Sydney’s G-string swimwear row is nothing but hot air

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

Djokovic must forgive and forget his shoddy Covid experience in Australia

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

Beach turf wars are dividing Australia

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

Australia’s godless Christmas

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

Could Kevin Rudd’s Trump tweets cost him his career?

If British Labour ministers and officials find dealing with President Donald Trump 2.0 a formidable challenge, their Australian Labor cousins may find the task of working with a president with an elephantine memory for slights even more daunting. As ministers – including Foreign Secretary David Lammy – are rediscovering to their chagrin, you can delete embarrassing social media posts, but they never disappear. That’s something that may cost former Australian prime minister, and now Australia’s ambassador to the United States, Kevin Rudd, his diplomatic career. Rudd has been posted to Washington for the best part of two years as current Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese’s envoy to the Biden administration.

A Tasmanian court has widened Australia’s gender divide

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,

Australia is reeling after a man threw hot coffee over a baby

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

Australia’s legal battle to define a ‘woman’ is not over yet

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,

Ross Clark

Is the Great Barrier Reef really dying?

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

Does Australia have a crocodile problem?

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

The everyman immortality of Jack Karlson

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

Many Australians are revolted by Julian Assange’s return

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.

Why is Australia culling wild horses?

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

Australia’s Covid honours farce

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

Elon Musk has won a victory for free speech in Australia

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

Trinity College Cambridge has rushed to judgement on Captain Cook

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

The truth about Australia’s controversial crocodile cull

The Northern Territory News, Darwin’s daily paper, is known worldwide for its front pages with headlines so cleverly lurid that they outshine the efforts of the Sun’s Kelvin McKenzie in his editorial heyday. Over the years, the newspaper has run front pages highlighting everything from UFO and mythical beast sightings to the bizarre behaviour of Territorians, who, if you go by the NT News, are no strangers to acting oddly. But there’s one hot topic always guaranteed a NT News front page when it comes up: crocodiles. ‘I love crocodiles and anytime we have a good one we put it on the front page,’ a former NT News editor, Matt

Australia is in danger of tearing itself apart

In her new book, Liz Truss says she likes Australia and Australians. The country is, she says, ‘like Britain without the hand-wringing and declinism’. But had Truss cared to scratch beneath the surface on her visits Down Under, she might have realised that Australians today are anything but the laid-back, easygoing, and ‘she’ll be right’ society of our national mythology. Following the Hamas atrocities of 7 October, things have only got worse Far from it. Australians are struggling to keep a lid on social, political, ethnic and religious tensions reflected in their society. Far from being a united nation, Australia is increasingly a nation of tribes, each sticking with their

The Sydney church terror attack is a wake-up call for Australians

Sydney has been rocked by another stabbing rampage – just days after six people were murdered in a knife attack in the city’s Bondi Junction. A bishop of the Assyrian Orthodox Church, Mar Mari Emmanuel, was knifed at the altar during the incident yesterday afternoon in the working-class suburb of Wakeley. Several other parishioners were also injured as they sought to disarm the attacker. Police have arrested a teenager and are treating it as a terrorist attack. The horror was broadcast on the livestream of the Assyrian Christ The Good Shepherd Church, meaning that thousands of followers witnessed the attack. News of the stabbings spread fast among the local Assyrian