Australia

Tuesday

Julie Bindel

Why are trans activists and a bookstore trying to cancel me?

Imagine my surprise to wake up this morning to be told that Readings book store in Melbourne had posted an abject apology on its blog yesterday about hosting an event with me back in 2018: ‘Readings prides itself on ensuring everyone in our community feels safe, respected and considered. We apologise for any hurt caused by highlighting the work of an author whose current stance is to divide our community. To that end, Readings regrets programming Julie Bindel in 2018 and thank our community for opening the dialogue with us. Readings is committed to considering the work of all authors to ensure our future program of events, reviews and discussions

James Chater

Isolation nation: how Australia is dealing with its pandemic

At 6.20 p.m. on Friday evening, Scarborough Beach, an oceanside suburb of Perth, looked like it always does: families picnicked on grassy dunes overlooking the Indian Ocean, queues were forming outside bars lining the shore, and inside restaurants, groups chatted casually over cold beers. Given the bustle, it’s hard to believe a city-wide lockdown ended only 20 minutes earlier, triggered on the Sunday before after Western Australia recorded its first domestically transmitted case of coronavirus in ten months. The country’s pandemic strategy would look alien to many in Europe, which has been more akin to New Zealand’s or Asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan. The country shut its borders

Thursday

Terry Barnes

Australian border closures could work for Britain. Here’s why

Melbourne Australia has been a rare success story during the pandemic. There have been around 29,000 cases of Covid, 908 of which have proved fatal. There are currently just 125 active cases in the entire country, a mere 25 of which have required hospitalisation. For a population of 25 million, this is a vastly different experience to that of Covid-beleaguered Europe and North America. No wonder the British government is considering whether it might be time to copy Australia’s approach, to help save an economy and society battered to a degree Australians can scarcely comprehend. Australia benefits from being a remote island continent with no international land borders. When it

Tuesday

Sophia Gaston

The price of an ‘Australian-style’ quarantine system

Richard Curtis’s iconic Love Actually airport scenes may fall on the wrong side of saccharine, but they capture something of the human story at the centre of the travel experience. As the government pursues an ‘Australian-style’ hotel quarantine scheme for the UK’s borders, we should not lose sight of these human moments. With the UK’s hospitals stretched to the limit and the population’s patience wearing thin, it is tempting to envy Australia, where images of seaside holidays and packed summer festivals filter out from the antipodes, shimmering like a desert mirage. Like many of its counterparts in the Asia-Pacific, Australia moved swiftly in the early phases of the pandemic to

Thursday

James Forsyth

Could Britain close its borders once lockdown ends?

The government’s most important economic policy is its vaccination programme, I say in the magazine this week. The speed at which people are immunised will determine when — and how quickly — the economy can reopen. ‘The advantage the vaccine has given us is so huge that we have to protect that’ But even when the so-called ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions’ are lifted domestically, there will likely continue to be restrictions on those entering from abroad. The view is that testing and tighter procedures at the border will be needed to protect the UK from the danger of any vaccine-resistant strain. Priti Patel’s admission this week that the government should have shut

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Could the Australian approach to Covid work in Britain?

The government’s most important economic policy is its vaccination programme. The speed at which people are immunised will determine when — and how quickly — the economy can reopen. If all goes to plan, Britain will be the first country in Europe to get rid of restrictions and start the job of social repair. Three factors give grounds for hope. First, there is remarkably little ‘anti-vax’ sentiment in the UK. More than 70 per cent of the population ‘would definitely get’ a Covid vaccine if it were made available to them this week. In Germany, it’s just 41 per cent; in France, 30 per cent. The willingness of the British

Thursday

Amanda Craig

The burden of guilt: The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by Richard Flanagan, reviewed

Thanks to the Booker Prize, Richard Flanagan is probably the only Tasmanian novelist British readers are likely to have heard of. His reworking of the life of the Australian hero ‘Weary’ Dunlop, a doctor who became a prisoner of war on the notorious Burma Death Railway, in The Narrow Road to the Deep North was a winner of a traditional kind of literary storyteller that has recently become extinct. It seems appropriate that his eighth novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, is also about extinction, both personal and environmental. Tasmania is burning, and as its cornucopia of flora and fauna is wiped out, three children gather to decide whether

Thursday

Hallie Rubenhold

Transport to Australia was the saving of Carmen Callil’s family

If 2020 has given us something to talk about other than Covid, it’s been history — and, more precisely, to whom history belongs and how we’ve chosen to define it. Well into the modern era, the philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s definition of the subject as ‘the biography of great men’, seems to endure. Most remember their school history lessons as a force-fed diet of monarchs’ names, battles and key dates, or as a narrative about palace-dwelling elites whose experiences seemed utterly removed from reality. It is undoubtedly why the subject in its most uncut Victorian form can seem so unpalatable to the general public. Conversely, it also goes a long way

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The case for Chinese reparations

It is time we started to talk about reparations. I am not of course referring to the demands made by certain communities to be given vast cash payouts for things that happened before they were born, to people they never knew, by people they never met. I am talking about the need of the citizens of the world to be given reparations by China for what it did to us all this year. Before proceeding further, perhaps it is worth putting a few things in perspective. Delivering his spending review before the House of Commons last week, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak cited figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility explaining

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The trouble with a ‘decolonised’ curriculum

I always felt sorry for my father, then president of a chronically strapped educational institution, for having ceaselessly to approach wealthy prospective donors with a begging bowl. How much more delicious, I imagined during his tenure, to instead be the widely welcomed party that doles out the dosh. But as the administrators of Australia’s Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation have discovered since 2017, it isn’t always easy to give money away. Funded by a $3 billion bequest from the late healthcare magnate Paul Ramsay, the centre was established in order to revive the flagging humanities at Australian universities. It aspires to found and finance equivalents of the ‘great books’ courses

Thursday

A. N. Wilson

Forlorn Plorn: The Dickens Boy, by Thomas Keneally, reviewed

Parents are always terrified of bad family history repeating itself. Prince Albert dreaded his son Bertie turning into a roué like his own father, and this of course happened. Charles Dickens had fantasised in David Copperfield that the jokey version of his own father — Mr Micawber — would become a success in life by going to Australia. In real life, Dickens’s parents had been ‘hopeless’, and as he watched his own family growing up, he had a heartless fear that his dud children would be versions of parents who were sent to the Marshalsea. Sure enough, Dickens sent two of his least promising sons to Australia, hoping something would

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Hugging China hasn’t done us any favours

Like nearly everything named a ‘scandal’, ‘affair’ or given the suffix ‘gate’, almost nobody now remembers the Dalai Lama affair. But back in 2012, flush with recently acquired power and optimism, David Cameron and a man called Nick Clegg went to see the Dalai Lama while he was on a trip to London. Whether Cameron and Clegg knew what they were getting into wasn’t clear. The pair had a short meeting with the Lama at St Paul’s Cathedral — or at least in one of those bland conference ante-rooms English cathedrals constructed in the last century to atone for the splendours next door. Looking like a couple of travelling salesmen

James Walton

Not merely funny but somehow also joyous: Sky One’s Brassic reviewed

Danny Brocklehurst, the scriptwriter for Sky One’s Brassic, used to work for Shameless in its glory days — although if you didn’t know that already you could probably guess. For a start, the central characters are another close-knit group of ducking-and-diving working-class northerners not overburdened with a social conscience. But there’s also the fact that, no matter what they get up to, they’re clearly supposed to be lovable — coupled with the rather more mysterious fact that they are. However dark the storylines theoretically become, the programme presents them with such an infectious swagger, and such a thorough blurring of realism and wild imagination, that the result is not merely

Thursday

James Delingpole

The Amazon Prime doc that will convert anyone to cricket

Imagine rooting for the Australian cricket team. If you’re Scottish, Welsh or Irish — or Australian obviously — it might not be such a stretch. But for an Englishman, I suspect, it’s nigh on impossible. It would be like supporting Germany in the (football) World Cup. Or yearning for the All Blacks to win the rugby. We invented cricket, after all. And in that particular sphere, Australia is our natural enemy. They burned our bails in 1882 — ‘the Ashes of English cricket’ — and quite properly we have never forgiven them. But if that’s how you feel — and I really don’t blame you — then you should treat

Sunday

Katy Balls

Why Australia-style deal is the new Brexit buzzword in government

As the second round of Brexit negotiations loom with the EU, there’s already talk of an early bust-up coming up the track. James reports in his Sun column that the UK and the EU are currently very far apart when it comes to expectations for the trade talks. Figures on the Brussels side believe that they can get the UK to sign up to things – such as a continued role for the European Court of Justice – when Boris Johnson is seeking a much looser arrangement. This distance between the two sides means that figures in government have already begun work on a Plan B in the event Johnson

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Crisis in Iran, fires in Australia and Manchester rapist jailed

Home Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, who had not been told in advance of America’s killing in Iraq of Qassem Soleimani, the leading Iranian military leader, said that America ‘had a right to exercise self-defence’. British troops were put on standby to be sent to the region, and the frigate Montrose and the destroyer Defender sent to the Strait of Hormuz. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, returning from holiday in Mustique, said: ‘Given the leading role he has played in actions that have led to the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians and western personnel, we will not lament his death.’ England secured a 189-run victory over South Africa on

Tim Blair

Fight fire with fire: controlled burning could have protected Australia

 Sydney By modern standards, my grandfather would probably be considered an environmental criminal. To clear land for his farmhouse in north-eastern Victoria — and for his milking sheds, pig pens, chicken sheds, blacksmith shop and other outbuildings — he cleared hundreds of trees. And he cleared thousands more for his wheat fields, cattle paddocks and shearing sheds. Old man Hobbs would probably be found guilty of cultural appropriation, too, because he adopted the Aboriginal method of land-clearing. He burned all of those trees. He also established fire-delaying dirt paths through surrounding bushland. This was once standard practice throughout rural Australia, where the pre-settlement indigenous population had long conducted controlled burns

Thursday

James Walton

Is the patriarchy as all-powerful as it’s cracked up to be? The Baby Has Landed reviewed

Anybody who watched the opening episode of The Baby Has Landed (BBC2, Wednesday) might have found themselves wondering if the patriarchy is quite as all-powerful as it’s cracked up to be. The programme follows ‘six families over six life-changing weeks’ as they welcome a new member — and on the whole features women who radiate authority and men who do what they’re told. The most experienced parents are Nigel and Helen Pierce, first seen embarking on a lengthy quest for shoes as they tried to get their four children under five out of the house so that Helen could go to hospital and have a fifth. As old hands, they

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Farage’s climbdown, Yorkshire’s floods and Australia’s fires

Home Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit party, climbed down from his resolution to field 600 candidates in the general election, promising not to contest the 317 seats won by the Conservatives in 2017. The Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats said they would spend large sums of taxpayers’ money on things that might please voters (such as the NHS or, from the Lib Dems, a ‘skills wallet’ of £10,000 for every adult). The Conservatives claimed that Labour’s promises would cost £1,200 billion, which Labour denied. A review commissioned by the government into the HS2 railway said it should be built, despite the cost. Asked by the BBC if

Thursday

Taki

The most uplifting film ever made

New York   Should art mirror the world as it is, or does an artist fail the public if the work looks back to a time before the grotesqueries of the present? Back, back, I say, but that’s to be expected. I’m such a fan of the past that if I could have one wish granted by The Spectator it would be for a review by Deborah Ross of the most uplifting movie ever, Ladies in Black, directed by the great Australian Bruce Beresford. My, my, what memories of Australians and Oz it brought back. The great Lew Hoad, Mervyn Rose, Roy Emerson, Neale Fraser, Ken Fletcher, all great tennis