I’m always fascinated by people who love a bit of AI slop. I have a brother who sends me AI-generated Pokémon Reels on Instagram. I have a mate who can’t get enough of the low-quality AI-generated videos of JD Vance dancing. But it doesn’t quite hit the mark for me. They know it’s garbage. They […]

Americans have a long and impressive tradition of philanthropy, which is just as well, given the United States’ social safety net is far thinner than Australia’s. Australia is now looking in a similar direction. With the economy facing serious headwinds and governments juggling competing funding priorities, the Albanese Government has set a target of doubling […]

Your base won’t save you Conventional wisdom on the center-right goes like this: the Coalition lost the 2025 Federal Election because it wasn’t conservative enough, so the fix is to move further right and rally the base. The evidence from Australia and the United States says otherwise. Australia: the voters who walked away The most […]

This week, the Reserve Bank lifted the cash rate to an 18-year high and told Australians to brace for harder times. Inflation is forecast to hit 4.5 per cent by December and stay above the target band until the end of 2027. Real wages are expected to go backwards by one per cent this year, […]

Anthony Albanese has the sort of parliamentary majority most prime ministers can only dream of. The trouble is, everyone else still gets a say. As George Washington reminds Alexander Hamilton in the musical, “Winning is easy, young man. Governing’s harder.” Having steered Labor to two consecutive election victories, the second delivering a parliamentary majority of […]

Voters expect political leaders to remain connected to the realities of daily life. Perhaps that’s why the price of milk is the go-to question for political candidates. When elected representatives lose sight of these everyday struggles, electoral consequences tend to follow, regardless of party or ideology. On Wednesday afternoon, a sitting president suffered a deafening […]

They say it’s the hope that kills you, but I think we have it backwards. It isn’t hope that does the damage; it’s the absence of it. When I moved to Australia as a seven-year-old Sinhala-speaking kid, division was all around me – my parents and I were different from everyone in Gladstone. That division […]

The key to winning government in a Westminster democracy, such as Australia, can be described with a cricket analogy – it’s a game of Test cricket, not a Twenty20 slog-a-thon. Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the UK Conservatives (the Tories), is illustrating that point best and provides a model for Angus Taylor to follow. The […]

I’ve just been to the LNP State Council in the Western Downs, home to the proposed $32 billion data centre where Anthropic, the maker of Claude, has signed on as the first tenant. Everyone’s talking about AI at the moment, and Queensland is chasing the data centres to power it. So, halfway through Premier Crisafulli’s […]