Newsletter

Newsletter 365
Monday, April 12th, 2021 Newsletter,This week’s lead story isn’t a review but a profile, looking at Guy Warren who is turning 100. It’s not something that happens every day among artists, who tend to become victims of the Bohemian lifestyle or inhale too many dangerous fumes in the studio. Guy has managed to limit himself to a whiskey every […]

Newsletter 384
Monday, April 5th, 2021 Newsletter,Of all the dumb things ever said by our Dear Leader it’s hard to go past his claim that Marise Payne might now be called “The Prime Minister for Women”. No sooner had he made this declaration, as part of his new ‘Libs Heart Women’ campaign, than some irritating journo asked if that meant he […]

Newsletter 383
Monday, March 29th, 2021 Newsletter,It’s been quite a week, what with Sydney virtually afloat after multiple days of rain. It didn’t make a huge difference chez nous because the soil around the house is so sandy that water disappears almost as soon as it hits the ground but it caused a predictable uproar in Parramatta where the proposed site […]

Newsletter 382
Thursday, March 25th, 2021 Newsletter,I’m writing this on the way back from Perth, which is now officially a one-party state after Mark McGowan’s scorched earth election victory last week. Yet even while Labor was savouring its success in the West, the NSW Labor Party was receiving polls that suggested it would be thrashed were an election to be held […]

Newsletter 381
Thursday, March 25th, 2021 Newsletter,It’s been another of those non-stop weeks for me but there seems to be only one big international story, namely the Meghan and Harry intervew with Oprah. I wasn’t going to watch it but found myself sucked in by the spectacle. The aftermath has left the Royal Family with some tricky questions to answer, Piers […]

Newsletter 380
Monday, March 8th, 2021 Newsletter,First of all, apologies for the late delivery of this newsletter. Please address all correspondence to the NBN, which went into a day-long meltdown when I needed to work on the mailout. This morning normal service has been resumed. And they’ll never, ever do it again… not until the next time, as Morrisey sang. After […]

Newsletter 379
Monday, March 1st, 2021 Newsletter,At last the border restrictions appear to be lifting. This newsletter is being written on a plane, en route to Adelaide. It’s my third attempt to get to South Australia in the past few months, but the first time I’ve actually managed lift off. I know, of course, how fragile this return to travel can […]

Newsletter 378
Monday, February 22nd, 2021 Newsletter,What’s the biggest news of the week? I suppose it has to be the story about a Liberal Party staffer being raped in Parliament House two whole years ago. The fact that it took so long for this incident to make headlines raises the obvious question: What sort of culture sweeps a sexual assault under […]

Newsletter 377
Monday, February 15th, 2021 Newsletter,As the US Senate goes through the motions of a second Trump impeachment I finally got around to reading the “New York Times # 1 Bestseller”, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. It reinforces the impression that America today is just as crazy on the left […]

Newsletter 376
Monday, February 8th, 2021 Newsletter,Marjorie Taylor Greene was elected to the US House of Representatives despite her unconditional belief in every conspiracy theory, no matter how crazy. The Californian fires were started by Jewish space lasers? Nothing funny about that. The high school massacres either didn’t happen, or were orchestrated by Nancy Pelosi and the Clintons as a way […]