UK

27 July 2023

It’s difficult to spot the difference between what Coutts did to the Brexit leader and what the Commonwealth Bank does to coal miners. What NatWest bank in the UK and its boss Alison Rose did to Nigel Farage has proved a headline from Time magazine a few years ago to be absolutely wrong. According to Time, “Cancel culture is not real – at least

2 November 2020

Victoria has become famous for using lockdowns to ‘defeat coronavirus.’ Dr Anthony Fauci mentioned Australia as a country that did “quite well”. We haven’t defeated the virus. The virus is at bay but the only thing truly defeated is Victoria and Victorians. The state last week got out of its second lockdown of the year. Just like you were told

19 December 2019

Boris Johnson’s landslide election victory provides Australia with a unique opportunity to strengthen ties with our oldest and one of our closest allies. To take full advantage of this once in a generation opportunity, the Morrison government must aim for much more than a bare-bones FTA. It should use the existing Australia-New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement (CER) as

5 October 2017

Watching the Conservatives fall apart over leadership gives me uncanny déjà vu after Australian politics. In the last eight years, Australia has had four Prime Ministers. So far, Britain has had three – and everyone can’t stop talking about the fourth. Theresa May’s closing speech at the party conference this week was supposed to reboot her prime ministership. It was disastrous in presentation but, more importantly,

17 August 2017

This week the government released a new paper calling for the “freest and most frictionless trade possible” with the EU. Ideally, Britain wants no customs border, which, the paper admits, would be “unprecedented” and “could be challenging to implement”. In just hours, the European Parliament’s Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt dismissively labelled “invisible borders” a “fantasy”. The good news is that

31 July 2017

Britain’s chattering classes have reached a new consensus: liberal free market economics is unpopular and a failure. This is an extraordinary shift. Just 20 years ago, as the Soviet Union collapsed, the prevailing view – brought to the fore by Francis Fukuyama – was that liberal market ideas would dominate from then on. Most of Asia was adopting the market model; Margaret Thatcher

15 June 2017

One statistic is essential to understanding the shock British election result: the turnout by people aged 18 to 24. Since 1992 only around four-in-10 young people have shown up to vote. In 2017, that number surged to six-in-10. This turnout was crucial to Labour’s high vote and why many polls, which try to predict turnout from past experience, were off. It’s easy to

8 June 2017

The growing influence of the state throughout the western world, buttressed by technological development and a crisis of confidence in the capitalist system is shaping up as a major threat to personal freedom. The genius of capitalism is that through the system of risk and reward, within a framework of secure borders, an independent legal system, and respect for personal

24 May 2017

Malcolm Turnbull must be staring at UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s poll numbers with vaulting envy. The Britain Elects polling average puts the Conservatives at 47 per cent primary vote at the time of writing, giving her a potential majority of up to 130 seats – up from David Cameron’s working majority of just 12. In stark contrast, Turnbull’s latest

23 May 2017

There has already been much debate about British Labour’s election manifesto commitment to re-nationalise the UK’s energy, rail, water and postage networks as well as Conservative promises to increase the minimum wage, introduce new protections for workers in the ‘gig economy’ and support the domestic shale gas industry. Are Labor’s plans a retreat to the 1970’s or a preview of