Australia

The news that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has cancelled her speaking tour of Australia due to ‘security concerns’ should concern anyone who believes in freedom. It is a dark day when a woman who fled to the West to escape the Islamist suffocations of Somalia, and precisely so that she might think and speak freely, feels she cannot say certain things in certain places. That even a Western, liberal, democratic nation like Australia cannot guarantee Hirsi Ali the freedom to speak her mind without suffering censorship or harm is deeply worrying. It points to the mainstreaming of intolerance, to the adoption by certain people in the West of the illiberalism that makes

Any Australian who admits to not having convict ancestors loses caste. When granted a coat of arms, the smart ones always include fetters. It is the Oz equivalent of claiming that your ancestors came over with William the Conqueror. But it was not always thus. In the Adelaide of the 1890s, there was a family called Strangways Wigley, who had paid for their tickets and never stopped swanking about it. But they had a blot on the escutcheon in the form of young Robert. He was determined to rectify the lack of criminal blood. In those days, a pieman — as opposed to a swagman — used to sell his

We seem to be wilfully blind when it comes to nature. Right now, Australia is in the grip of an unprecedented environmental disaster. The largest living structure on Earth, the Great Barrier Reef, is mortally sick. Across hundreds of miles of ocean, from Papua New Guinea and all the way southwards along the east coast of Australia, the reef is dying. Famously, the GBR is the only living structure visible from space – almost two thousand miles long and about the size of Germany. It’s suffering what the scientists call ‘bleaching’, a process where corals eject the algae that give them their bright colours, and turn white. They do it

Well the sun is out, the sky is blue, and poor Boris Johnson is taking such a pounding from Matthew Parris and Petronella Wyatt that it makes the battle of Kursk look like an Easter Parade. Plenty to be cheerful about, then, and nowhere more so than in this blissful sporting spring. First, the T20 World Championship is producing cricket to make your hair stand on end. England’s men and women are racing through the tournament, and the men’s last- over win to beat Sri Lanka and reach the semis was spellbinding. England hadn’t reached three figures by the 15th over, but finished on 171. It was enough (just) after

Two great men have just bowed out from their chosen trades and it is bloody sad. The New Zealand cricket captain Brendon McCullum and the journalist Hugh McIlvanney might not seem to have much in common but they both made the world a better, more joyful place. I sat up until the small hours a few of weeks back watching McCullum: it was his last Test, in Christchurch, against the old enemy from across the Tasman Sea, and his side had been put in to bat. McCullum has redefined what it means to be a batsman and for his farewell he wasn’t going to leave anything in the pavilion. He

A few months ago, paramedics were on the brink of industrial action. They had legitimate grievances. Ambulance services were being run down, their staffing levels were dangerously thin — and the mismanagement (much of it exposed by Mary Wakefield in The Spectator) was horrendous. But in the end they stepped back from the brink — for good reason. It went against their nature to endanger lives, and in addition it would have been a tactical mistake. If a single patient died as a result of the strike, paramedics would have lost public sympathy. Should a nationalised health service really use the unwell as a bargaining chip? English doctors have not