Terry Barnes is a Melbourne-based contributor for The Spectator and The Spectator Australia.
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
In late January, Australians were convulsed out of their summer holiday torpor by what appeared to be an elaborate anti-Semitic terror plot. Following a series of vandalism and firebomb attacks on synagogues, and cars and private property in suburbs with significant Jewish populations, details of the New South Wales police’s discovery of a caravan laden
Imagine Screaming Lord Sutch with hundreds of millions of pounds to spend. That probably best sums up the flamboyant Australian mining billionaire and serial election candidate, Clive Palmer. Palmer is best known internationally as the entrepreneur who promised to build the ‘Titanic II’– a full-scale replica of the original Titanic. That project was launched ten years
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
Australia’s national day, which falls today, has two purposes. It is an opportunity for Australians to celebrate who they are and how fortunate we are to live in a stable democracy, thousands of miles from terror, strife and conflict. But it also marks the end of Australia’s languid summer when it’s time to get back
Australia is supposed to be a nation of tolerance and acceptance – the one place in a troubled world where people of different ethnicities, cultures and faiths can get along. That no longer feels like the case. Since the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023, and the conflict in Gaza and Israel, Australia has been exposed
On his record, Novak Djokovic deserves to be rated as the greatest singles tennis player of the last 50 years. Twenty-four Grand Slam titles. An Olympic gold medal. Ninety-nine tournament wins overall. Goodness knows how many finals appearances. Some say he’s the greatest of all time: the Goat. Contrast that with Tony Jones. A veteran
I was a late starter at everything. After drifting through my youth, and numerous false starts in life and work, I only found a committed relationship in my thirties and married in my forties. Even my second career as a writer waited until my fifties. So, too, did my unexpected third career, as a parent.
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
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
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
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 celebrity cook Jamie Oliver has a sideline as an author. Not all his books are about cooking and food: Oliver has written two children’s books as well, Billy and the Great Giant Adventure and its sequel, Billy and the Epic Escape. Oliver’s books sell very well, thank you, and have presumably made a fortune for him and
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
King Charles and Queen Camilla flew to Samoa for the Commonwealth leaders’ meeting early on Wednesday, after completing their visit to Australia the previous day. Not, however, without again being confronted by the historic grievances of Aboriginal community leaders. It was a disgraceful display of look-at-me exhibitionism, but Monday’s one-woman disruption of the King and
If King Charles and Queen Camilla were feeling a tad apprehensive about their reception in Australia, they needn’t have worried. Already half-way into their visit to Australia, the reception for the royal couple has been as warm and sunny as the Sydney weather over the weekend and, so far, all has gone very well. The
Australia, where King Charles will return to on Friday, is where the monarch became a man. In 1966, Charles had a memorable half-year at the Timbertop bush campus of Victoria’s Geelong grammar school, where, he once said, he ‘had the Pommy (metaphorically) bits bashed off me’. The following year, his first major adult engagement was
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
I was born in the final years of the baby boom. To my generation of children, a social network was our mothers gossiping over the back fence or at the shops. Parents cannot contract out their responsibilities to government But, thanks to a miracle of nature and science, I’m also a father later in life,
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
