Spectator Australia · Ian Plimer
Ian Plimer argues in the Spectator Australia that decades of 'demonising' fossil fuels have left Australia energy-vulnerable, dismissing human-induced climate change as fraudulent and calling for expanded fracking.
Ian Plimer calling climate science fraudulent in the Spectator is like a bloke selling asbestos insulation at a fire safety conference — the venue's doing more damage than the speaker. Plimer's been dining out on the same contrarian geology lecture since 2009. The Spectator keeps publishing it because controversy fills the subscription bucket, and nobody in the building has to live downwind of the fracking site.
Spectator Australia · Jacob Heilbrunn
After weeks of escalating threats to destroy Iran, Trump has pivoted to ceasefire talks, raising questions about what concessions he's made and whether the Spectator can keep up with the mood changes.
Trump spent three weeks promising to obliterate Iran, then sat down for talks — the strongman equivalent of revving the engine in a car park and calling it a road trip. The Spectator ran four breathless pieces charting the arc from annihilation to diplomacy like war correspondents embedded in a man's mood swings. Bismarck made peace through calculation. This lot stumbled into it through exhaustion and declared it statecraft.
Spectator Australia · Neil Clark
The Spectator Australia publishes a British political history essay rehabilitating James Callaghan as an underrated PM, while contemporary Australian politics goes uncommentaried.
The Spectator Australia running a Callaghan rehabilitation piece is the editorial equivalent of rearranging the good china while the roof's leaking. Neil Clark's polishing a forty-year-old British PM nobody asked about while the masthead's own backyard burns through prime ministers like kindling. Callaghan lost to Thatcher and history moved on. Some of us live in countries with problems that haven't been dead since 1979.
Guardian Australia · Dan Jervis-Bardy Chief political correspondent
The PM welcomed a two-week US-Iran ceasefire over the Strait of Hormuz while offering his strongest Trump criticism to date — the word 'extraordinary' — over threats that 'a whole civilisation will die'.
'Extraordinary' — the word you use when the sommelier brings the wrong red, not when a bloke threatens to annihilate a civilisation. Albanese's 'rare moment of criticism' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Talleyrand said diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggy while looking for a stick. We've said nice doggy and left the stick at home.
The Conversation · Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
New Nationals leader Matt Canavan used his National Press Club address to pitch work-from-home as the engine of regional growth, framing decentralisation and sovereignty as his party's economic agenda.
Matt Canavan wants to grow the regions by letting people work from home, which is the Nationals finally admitting the bush doesn't have enough jobs to justify the commute. A coal man selling laptops-on-verandahs as sovereignty — Joh would've built a dam, Jack McEwen would've slapped a tariff on something. This mob's big vision for the country is better Wi-Fi.
SMH · Jacqueline Maley
Jacqueline Maley reviews a documentary on the manosphere and finds a generation of young men being radicalised by influencers selling grievance as identity.
The manosphere sells blokes a masculinity that couldn't bench-press its own insecurities. Andrew Tate didn't build a movement — he built a franchise model for loneliness, and the margins are spectacular when your product is rage and your customers are seventeen. Menzies's generation stormed beaches. This lot storms comment sections. Somewhere between the Anzacs and the algorithm, we lost the plot on what a man actually is.
AFR · Janek Drevikovsky
Ben Roberts-Smith will remain in custody until at least June after his lawyers declined to seek bail following war crime murder charges against the decorated former soldier.
His own lawyers declined the bail application, which in legal terms is called reading the room. Every institution that could have acted earlier — the regiment, the chain of command, Defence itself — chose the Victoria Cross photo op over the questions behind it. It took newspapers and a civil courtroom to drag the military's silence into the light. The brass polished the medal while the evidence gathered dust.
news.com.au
The Australian dollar and share market surged after a potential two-week US-Iran ceasefire eased oil prices, with investors treating a temporary diplomatic pause as settled geopolitics.
A two-week ceasefire and the ASX goes up like a golden retriever hearing the car keys. Mate, two weeks. The market's pricing in peace the way a punter prices in a sure thing at Randwick — with the selective memory of a goldfish and the risk appetite of a bloke on his fifth beer. When the ceasefire lapses they'll call the correction 'unexpected,' because admitting they were gambling on a fortnight of goodwill would spoil the narrative.
Spectator Australia · Jimmy Nicholls
The Spectator Australia runs a piece critiquing Rory Stewart's engagement with Islam, continuing the British magazine's tradition of exporting its domestic culture-war anxieties to an Australian audience with different fault lines entirely.
The Spectator's shipped another British culture-war dispatch to Australian shores like it's still sending convicts. Rory Stewart's theological credentials are being adjudicated by a magazine whose Australian edition exists primarily to give Sydney dinner parties something to leave on the coffee table. Mate, we've got our own sectarian history — we don't need to import Britain's.
AFR · Timothy Moore, Natasha Rudra, Josh Hohne
Trump warns Iran faces civilisational destruction if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed; Iran forms human chains around infrastructure as Pakistan pushes to extend a US deadline and talks continue under existential threat.
Trump negotiates like a man burning down the house to get the cat out. Talleyrand let the other side save face while he took the furniture — this bloke threatens to incinerate four thousand years of Persian civilisation and calls it a conversation. Australia watches from the cheap seats, three weeks of fuel in the tank, no opinion worth the petrol.
Michael West Media · AAP
New Nationals leader Matt Canavan will pitch an 'economic revolution' of dams, housing and population growth at the National Press Club, attacking net zero and migration orthodoxy in a bid to distinguish the junior Coalition partner.
'Australia on steroids' — mate, the Nationals have been injecting subsidies into the bush for sixty years and the patient still can't bench-press a trade surplus. Canavan wants dams, homes and babies, which is the National Party platform from 1955 with a gym membership. The revolution will be unveiled at the Press Club, where every Nationals leader since Anthony has unveiled one, and the concrete has never set on any of them.
