Australia

Thursday

Ed West

Never mind Ukip’s immigration policy, Britain has an emigration problem

Ukip has unveiled its new Aussie-style immigration policy, just a week after the latest bad immigration news for the government. The news was bad only in a sense, as high immigration levels are a symptom of a healthy economy; after all, the Venezuelan government doesn’t break into a sweat every time the immigration figures come in, thanks to the genius of Chavenomics. But it’s all bad news for the Tories because most people would like restrictions on the rate of population growth, and of immigration-led social change, and the government made promises it clearly couldn’t keep. Yet the British economy is doing well and Ukip realise therefore that there is a

Louis Amis

A Father’s Day tragedy: what exactly happened when a car plunged into a reservoir in Australia in 2005?

When Helen Garner, an award-winning Australian author, first saw the TV news images of the car being dragged out of the water, she uttered a prayer: ‘Oh Lord, let this be an accident.’ A strange, pessimistic, almost paranoid prayer. A car had swerved off a dark highway outside her hometown of Geelong, Australia, and plunged into a reservoir.Why wouldn’t that be an accident? But Garner seems to have had a premonition. This House of Grief is her account of the murder trial, and ultimate conviction, of the car’s driver, Robert Farquharson, who had escaped and swum ashore while his three young sons drowned. One surprising absence from the book is

Sunday

Rowan Dean

Is Twitter about to claim its first prime ministerial scalp?

Within the next three hours, the seventeen-month reign of Australia’s conservative PM Tony Abbott may come to a crashing close, terminated not by policy differences but by populism and personality. Could Twitter be about to claim its first prime ministerial scalp? The contrasting characters of Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull could not have been more cunningly scripted had Jeffrey Archer invented them: one a staunch monarchist (whose act of awarding an Aussie knighthood to Prince Philip on Australia Day exactly two weeks ago led directly to this morning’s party room spill), the other the former frontman of the (failed) 1999 Republican referendum. One a fervent climate change sceptic (Mr Abbott

The Spectator

Removing Tony Abbott as Australian Prime Minister is pointless and reckless

In the latest issue of Spectator Australia, the leading article lambasts the Australian Liberal Party for trying to remove Prime Minister Tony Abbott: The determination by many in the media, even among conservatives, to hasten the demise of Tony Abbott’s prime ministership is as pointless as it is reckless. Pointless not because they will or they won’t succeed, but pointless because such an outcome would merely herald the beginning, rather than the end, of a long period of Coalition instability and in-fighting. Make no mistake: it is not Tony Abbott the man who is deeply unpopular (although his poll figures are, at present, nothing to write home about). It is the measures he

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Tony Abbott is no common sense speaking politician — just look at his comments on ISIL

Wow. Anyone who still harboured the idea that Australia was led by no-nonsense, common sense speaking politicians should look away now. Here is Tony Abbott, Prime Minister of Australia, talking about the motivations of the man who held a shop full of people hostage earlier this week and then murdered two of them: ‘The point I keep making is that the ISIL death cult has nothing to do with any religion, any real religion. It has nothing to do with any particular community. It is something to which sick individuals succumb.’ That is right, ladies and gentlemen. If you or I suffer from a seasonal cold this winter we must

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

From Sydney to Peshawar – Islamic extremists are civilisation’s common enemy

Yesterday it was Sydney. Today it is Peshawar. Yesterday a coffee shop. Today a school. Yesterday a lone gunman. Today a gang of them. If anybody wondered about the global and diffuse nature of the challenge that Islamic fundamentalism poses, the last 24 hours have given another demonstration of the problem. Yet what is amazing, after all these years, is how unconcerned many people remain with working out what is going on. How could the Taliban have chosen to attack a school in Peshawar? Why did Boko Haram steal the Nigerian schoolgirls? Why did the Sydney attacker fly that flag? Why do Isis fly theirs?  The Western world in particular seems

Joseph Power

Australia finally feels the ripples of Islamist terrorism on its own shores

It was a scene that Australians are hitherto unfamiliar with. Terrified civilians forced at gunpoint to press a black flag, bearing the shahādah – the Islamic declaration of faith, most notably used as a battle banner by Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria – against the Lindt café window. The gunman, aside from a chat with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, requested a proper Islamic State flag, which, in fairness, would be hard to come by in Sydney these days. The perpetrator, Man Haron Monis, was well known to authorities. Facing more than 40 sexual and indecent assault charges, he had a conviction for sending offensive letters to families

Saturday

James Forsyth

In praise of Michael Clarke

The cricketing world has begun its slow trudge back to normality. Phillip Hughes has been buried and conversation has, half-heartedly, began to turn back to the game itself. Australia will take the field at Hughes’ adopted home ground of Adelaide on Tuesday for a Test match against India.   But it would be remiss to let this week pass without praise for Michael Clarke and the dignity that he has shown as he has led the game and Australia in mourning the death of a young man who was on the verge on fulfilling his great talent. As Alex said the other day, to anyone who has played cricket at

Thursday

Roger Alton

International cricket must return to Pakistan (and my team went first)

In a tiny courtyard just off the teeming alleys of Lahore’s old town, a young Pakistani boy in a gleaming white shalwar kameez picks up his Adidas cricket bat and proceeds to clout to all corners the plastic ball his pal is chucking down. Behind him on the wall the outline of three stumps is drawn, and the word Out! chalked there, more in hope you feel. In the corner a little schoolroom has emptied out and excited young boys and girls, books in hand, look on, giggling happily. Is this the new Imran? Almost certainly not, but we are in one of the holy places of Pakistan cricket, and

Thursday

Barry Humphries

Barry Humphries’s diary: The bookshop ruined by Harry Potter

Do fish have loins? Last Tuesday, in a pretentious restaurant, I ordered a ‘loin of sea trout’. It looked just like an ordinary piece of fish — a bit small, as is usual in pretentious restaurants — on a plate sprinkled and drizzled as though the chef had perhaps coughed over it rather violently or vigorously scratched his head before giving it to the waiter. In Australia, I was once offered a shoulder of some other fish, so I suppose one might even be able to enjoy a rump of whitebait or even a saddle of flounder. But generally speaking I don’t mind loin when applied to the loinless, and

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Kate Chisholm on what makes the BBC World Service so special

‘Don’t take it for granted,’ she warned. ‘It’s one of the few places where you can hear diverse voices, different points of view; where you can understand that the world is infinitely complex.’ Alana Valentine, an Australian writer, was talking about the BBC World Service with such passion it was inspiring. You might think she would say this, wouldn’t she. After all, Valentine was giving her acceptance speech having just won first prize in the World Service’s International Radio Playwriting Competition for her radio drama The Ravens. Yet what she said was striking because you could tell she really meant it. These were not just platitudes. She had prepared what

Monday

Nick De Bois

Ed Miliband’s windfall tax on tobacco to fund the NHS is economically illiterate

The ‘windfall tax’, a concept introduced in the UK by the Blair government, is by definition a one-off seizure of revenue from a profitable industry, to fund an invariably unprofitable but popular project. It has been justified as putting ‘right a bad deal’ on the excesses of profits of unpopular industries. Between 1997 and 1998, Gordon Brown raised £5 billion from privatised utility companies to fund the Welfare-to-Work Programme. Today we have face another well-intentioned policy initiative, of ensuring every NHS patient is guaranteed a cancer test within 7 days, supposedly to be funded by a windfall tax on tobacco companies. Labour’s incoherent economic policy is enough to challenge whether

Thursday

John Preston

The Etonian peer who became an assistant to a Mexican commie

The lefty hereditary peer has few equals as a figure of fun, in life or literature. The late Tony Benn comes inevitably to mind here, as does the Earl of Warminster — ‘Erry’ — in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. As his name would suggest, Francis John Clarence Westenra Plantagenet ‘Jack’ Hastings, the 16th Earl of Huntingdon, emerged into the world bedecked with promisingly absurd trappings. And for a time it looked as if his life would follow a predictably conventional path. But then everything changed. After some routine torturing by his nanny — she branded him with an iron — he went to Eton. There,

Monday

Alex Massie

The sad but inevitable downfall of Kevin Pietersen. A tragedy in two innings.

Kevin Pietersen’s autobiography is the saddest book of its type I’ve ever read. By its end you begin to think that KP and the ECB deserved each other and realise that, a) no-one deserves that and, b) there’s no way this marriage of convenience – for such it was – could ever have ended happily or with each side fondly wishing the other all the best in their future endeavours. And it was a contractual arrangement from the very start. Pietersen’s book is clear about that: KP “tried too hard” to fit in with England and Englishness. He now realises South Africa is his “real home” and he should never

Thursday

Deborah Ross

The Inbetweeners 2 is as filthy as a teenage boy – and it’s hilarious

The first Inbetweeners film made £45 million at the box office, and was such an unexpected smash there was always going to be a second one, which is fair enough. It is based on the TV sitcom (Channel 4, 2008–2010), which was a favourite in our house, not that I was ever allowed to watch it in the same room at the same time as my then teenage son. Why? I would want to know. Because you think I don’t know what ‘clunge’ is? Listen, I’ve had a clunge since before you were born. In fact, you wouldn’t have even been born had it not been for my clunge. But

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

The Down’s syndrome surrogacy story is horrible. But Britain has no right to sneer

To look on the heartwarming side, Australians have shown that they are rather more humane as a nation than the anonymous couple in the news for allegedly discarding one of the twins borne for them by a Thai surrogate six months ago. Scores of Australians have volunteered to adopt Gammy, the Down’s syndrome baby that was commissioned from Pattaramon Chanbua by an Australian couple only to be abandoned by his parents when they discovered his condition; they took  his healthy twin sister though (and the couple now deny knowledge of Gammy). The fund to pay for the baby’s medical treatment, generously funded by Australians, now stands at more than $180,000. The

Thursday

Tom Switzer

Australia’s Tony Abbott has made history by abolishing the hated carbon tax

A few years ago, the conventional wisdom down under held that Tony Abbott and his centre-right Liberal Party were crazy to oppose the notion of carbon pricing. The view was so commonplace among Canberra press gallery pundits that it seemed reckless to contradict it. Those were the days, remember, when global warming alarmism was all the rage around the western world. From Sydney to Southampton, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was a blockbuster. An Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, had declared that climate change was the world’s ‘greatest moral challenge.’ Nigel Lawson’s book, An Appeal to Reason, was rejected by every British publisher, to whom it was submitted. As one

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

Tony Abbott fights the good fight for aborigines’ rights

The status of aborigines in Australia has, to be frank, hardly crossed my radar until now. But that was before I met Tanya Hosch, a representative of the community who’s over here right now campaigning for them to get an honourable mention in the Australian constitution. ‘We just want to be acknowledged in the country’s foundational document,’ she says. ‘It really would make a difference to the way we feel that others see us.’ Australians, it seems, regard their constitution as a bit of a workhorse, clarifying various aspects of life without any of the grander aspirations of the US constitution. Most of them aren’t really aware that aborigines are

Thursday

James Mcnamara

The Australian literary icon who fooled her family

There aren’t many places you can get shouty about Proust without losing your job. The Lane Bookshop in Perth, Western Australia, is one of them. As an undergraduate, I’d pitch up there for work on Saturday mornings with as much song in the heart as a hangover allowed. Because for me the Lane wasn’t just a shop, it was a salon. The young staff, all writers, were encouraged (and fed, when cash was scarce) by the kind owners. Debates sparked between the shelves. And great Australian novelists came in to buy the books. The late Elizabeth Jolley was one of these. She must have been 80 when I last saw

Friday

Steerpike

Tony Abbott, the Prime ‘Nerd’ of Australia

There are two types of Australian male: the ‘julios’, a modern import who likes soft drinks and hair product, and the ‘nerds’, the traditional breed who like beer and Sheilas. Tony Abbott is a nerd. On his recent visit to America, Abbott could not have done less to counter national stereotypes. The customised surfboard he gave to ‘the dude-in-chief’, President Obama, could only have been bettered in the nerds’ catalogue by a crate of 4X and a cork hat. Mr S is looking forward to the White House releasing pictures of the board in action.