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Culture remains one of the most widely discussed yet least defined concepts in Australian public life.

So, let’s start by defining it.

To put it plainly, a culture is the shared norms, myths, habits and festivities of a people, together with the institutions that grow out of them.

Cultures are rarely ever pure, and this fact is often mistaken for evidence that they don’t even exist.

Every culture ever practised by one community has been shaped by contact with members of other communities.

At times, through trade and the exchange of ideas.

At other times, through war and conquest.

Conquered people often take on the culture of their conquerors and often, within a generation, come to think of it as their own.

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When fifteen people were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach last December, the country was rightly horrified. The flowers piled up, and for a moment it felt as though Australia finally understood. But condemning a massacre was always going to be the easy part.

Mass murder clarifies. Almost nobody has to ask whether they would have pulled the trigger, so almost everybody gets to stand on the right side of the line without examining anything else. Atrocities have a weird way of flattering us like that, because next to a massacre, everything we’ve excused looks harmless.

But the harder question is what gets waved through when it doesn’t feel like an emergency.

Jewish Australians have been trying to warn us for three years. Long before Bondi they were telling us what was happening at their schools, outside their synagogues, on the way to work. Jewish author Dara Horn titled a 2021 book “People Love Dead Jews”, and she wasn’t joking. We can manage a minute’s silence when Jews are killed, but listening to them while they’re alive is apparently more difficult.

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In March 2025, a law professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia assigned a final oral examination that required students to give an “acknowledgment of country”. And not just any acknowledgment of country. It had to be a “thoughtful, exceptionally well-written, culturally respectful acknowledgement of country”.

For anyone who has missed the boat on this one, an acknowledgment of country is the practice of opening a ceremony, a meeting, or even a Zoom call by acknowledging the historical indigenous inhabitants of the land on which the speaker is talking, usually accompanied by a sanctimonious assertion that the land still belongs to its traditional “owners”.

The Macquarie law students weren’t allowed to just mumble through their acknowledgments. Instead, they were reportedly graded on how “heartfelt” their acknowledgments seemed. And the acknowledgment had to be done. Skipping it was an automatic fail.

Law students are a famously litigious bunch. But before going to court, this group went to the press, and the university quickly folded. The acknowledgment was made voluntary, and (for what it’s worth) the university assured students that their grades would not be “adversely affected” if they opted out.

Even as it withdrew the requirement, however, Macquarie University insisted that “an acknowledgment of country is an authentic, professional skill relevant to contemporary legal practice” that is “relevant both to this specific task and to the overall learning outcomes of the unit”. But if that was true, why was the assignment withdrawn?

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In a striking turn in Brazil, Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the former President now serving his 27-year prison sentence under house arrest for plotting a coup after his 2022 election defeat, has narrowly pulled ahead of incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – known universally as Lula. As is common in the largest country in Latin America, chaos surrounds the election: Flávio is under investigation over alleged corruption and money laundering, while the Supreme Court has postponed a decision on whether a Justice should himself be investigated. The fate of the country swings in the balance. I cannot help but think of Australia.

Years ago, Brazil’s major cities underwent a social, cultural and demographic shift not unlike what Australia is seeing today. Enormous numbers of migrants swept from the poorer northern states into the cities in search of jobs. As one writer put it, “Rio de Janeiro has always had slums, but the favelas popularized by movies like City of God and Elite Squad mushroomed in size in the mid–20th century”. What drove the mass migration was no mystery: “Local politicians and nabobs were in search of the famous $2-per-day wage favored by oligarchs worldwide, so they imported a population that would work twelve hours a day in the hot sun for next to no pay.” In one move, he wrote, “Rio’s oligarchs achieved both a decline in their labor costs and the political elimination of their traditional competitor, the middle class.” It also partly explains why Brazil is how it is today. It’s a story that should be taken as a warning for Australia.

There, the battle over immigration is just beginning. The national-populist One Nation party, headed by Pauline Hanson, has risen from 6.4 per cent to a high of 30 percent of the primary vote. In an attempt to win back votes, both Labor and the Liberal Party have committed to immigration cuts, but have yet to commit to anything drastic. A poll conducted by the Institute of Public Affairs shows that most Australians want immigration in the low tens of thousands, another in 2025 late shows the majority of Australians want a pause in immigration to let housing, infrastructure and social services catch up. And yet, all major parties have stuck to a net-overseas migration figure in the six figures.

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Our culture is teaching distressed women to avoid suffering at any cost—and children are increasingly being handed the bill.

A two-year-old boy was recently killed by his mother.

If you followed the news this summer, you may assume I am referring to one of Lindsay Clancy’s three children. I am not.

I mean Barrett Walsh, the Illinois toddler prosecutors say was hanged from his basement rafters. His mother, Corie Walsh, faces three first-degree murder charges. Authorities say she called him the devil and Antichrist. Her attorney says she was psychotic.

In the hours before Barrett’s death, Walsh had been following the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who strangled her three children in 2023. Clancy pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity; her trial ended with an 11–1 deadlock.

Prosecutors say Walsh was “very invested” in the Clancy case and discussed it with friends until about 12:30 p.m. Barrett was discovered less than four hours later.

We cannot prove the Clancy spectacle caused Walsh’s act. But we should not pretend the sequence is meaningless. What happens when women don’t just view, but ruminate on maternal violence and the attention and absolution that follow it? They may replicate it.

Human beings are mimetic. We become what we behold, especially when imitation appears to offer attention, sympathy, community, or release from responsibility. The public response to Clancy supplied all of those things.

Clancy’s medical history is complicated; I am not retrying her criminal responsibility. I am concerned with the response. Hundreds gathered outside the courthouse, with some shouting that the district attorney was “corrupt” after he named her children Cora, Dawson, and Callan as victims.

Again and again, the mother who killed her children became the central victim. The murdered children receded into the background.

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Sall Grover, Jillian Spencer and Jasmine Sussex are on the way to becoming household names as the excesses of the woke era are finally being arbitrated in Australia’s public square.

Even so, for every Aussie like them brave enough to speak out, hundreds of thousands more remain on the sidelines, still biting their tongues.

There’s no shortage of good reasons to stay quiet. As these women (and many others) have learned first hand, the price tag for dissent is high — up to and including the loss of careers and businesses, not to mention the eye-watering legal bills and untold reputational damage. And who, in she’ll-be-right Australia, wants to be accused of sounding too political?

Not all of us will wear the proverbial martyr’s crown. But it is within the power of every Australian to ease the burden on those who do by adding another voice to the rising chorus of sanity.

Many Australians troubled by the woke orthodoxy doubtless tell themselves that their moment to speak up will arrive at some point.

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John sits down with sociologist and author Frank Furedi to discuss why millions of people across the West are turning against the political establishment, the rise of populism, the collapse of trust in traditional institutions, and the growing divide between o…

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There’s a story in the Old Testament book of Kings in which Jehoash, king of Israel, beset by his enemies the Arameans, visits the dying prophet Elisha to mourn him, even though Elisha has been a constant thorn in the flesh to the wayward monarch.

Elisha tells Jehoash to take his arrows out of their quiver and strike them on the ground, which he duly does three times. Upon this Elisha declares angrily:

“You should have struck the ground five or six times; then you would have defeated Aram and completely destroyed it. But now you will defeat it only three times.”

Hey Elisha, what’s a king to do? And how would the king even know why he was doing this in the first place?

But you get the point. Jehoash will only partly complete the job. A couple more blows and the Arameans would be done and dusted.

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In this interview, sitting Danish politician Alex Vanopslagh explains how Denmark became a great and prosperous nation. Contrary to the platitudes from members of the left like Bernie Sanders, who have argued that Denmark is a socialist success story, Alex argue…

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The Social Cohesion Paradox?

After the horrific Bondi massacre that saw the murder of sixteen people, including a ten-year-old girl – Matilda – and the injury of 41 others, the Federal Parliament in response introduced special envoys to combat antisemitism and, strangely, Islamophobia.

I say strangely because the threats to Jews in Australia seem vastly different from the alleged threats to Muslims. Jews have been massacred and have had to suffer calls for “Intifada” on a regular basis since the Hamas massacre on October 7 2023, while Muslims face no such threats. This does raise the question as to why an envoy for Islamophobia was thought necessary, as though the threats to Muslims are as serious as the threats to Jews. Indeed, calling for Intifada even seems to help on one’s job resume at the taxpayer-funded ABC, with former Australian of the year Grace Tame being offered a job after her public calls to “globalise the Intifada”. Every honest person knows that calling for Intifada is the same as calling for violence against Israeli Jews, and to deny this would be like denying that calling for a “crusade” in the Middle Ages was anything other than calling for war against medieval Muslims.

Still, despite all this an envoy against Islamophobia was established. And yet now there are calls to abolish both envoys and to replace them with a “social cohesion commissioner”. I fear that establishing such a commissioner is quite misguided and almost certainly underestimates the complexity of the causes of social division and disharmony. I will explain why.

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Make way Nigel Farage. Move over Donald Trump. There is a new politician-provocateur on the world stage, and the lady’s not for turning.

When the insurgent populist Pauline Hanson told Australia’s National Press Club that:

We cannot be a multicultural society. We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural. Australians must live under the one cultural umbrella.

All Hell broke loose. One professor told the media that “monocultural” meant that “everyone followed a uniform set of norms and rules for behaviour [including] the foods they ate, the clothes they wore, the gods they worshipped, the language they spoke, and more”.

Another chimed in with comparisons to “Nazi Germany” and “North Korea”.

Hanson didn’t improve things by citing Japan as an example of a monoculture. She’s not wrong about Japan. But Japan certainly isn’t a cultural model for an immigrant society like Australia.

But Hanson was correct in her assertion that Australia “must be monocultural” in order to successfully absorb massive numbers of immigrants while maintaining social cohesion.

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“Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, Vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What advantage does man have in all his work which he does under the sun? A generation goes and a generation comes, But the earth remains forever.”

King Solomon, the presumed author of this text, was known to be fantastically rich and wise, yet he opens this book of wisdom with an incredibly dour refrain.

Like Solomon, Australia as a society has a tremendous amount of wealth yet is to a large extent beset by hopelessness and a lack of confidence in our national heritage.

One way this can be observed is by the rapid decline of trust Australians have in our major political parties. During the 2001 federal election 80 per cent of Australians voted for either the Coalition or Labor. At the last federal election for the first time, fewer than two-thirds of Australians – just 66.4 per cent – voted for a major party.

Australians have begun turning to new political solutions, feeling unheard by establishment forces. In the Newspoll dated 13-16 July 2026 One Nation was tied with Labor for the largest party at 30 per cent of the primary vote, certainly a historic result for our time.

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Machines waking up?

Last month an artificial intelligence broke out of a test environment, reached the open internet and hacked another company’s production systems. It did this to steal the answers to the exam it was sitting. Nine days later a rival lab disclosed that it had gone looking for the same problem in its own house, and found three cases of it.

Here’s what happened.

OpenAI was running two advanced models, GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable internal research model, through ExploitGym, a cybersecurity benchmark. To see what they could do at full stretch, the company loosened its usual safeguards and ran the test inside a sandbox. Instead of completing the benchmark, the models went looking for the answers. They found a previously unknown flaw in third-party software hosted inside OpenAI, used it to reach a machine with an internet connection, worked out that a company called Hugging Face might have the answers to the test, and broke in there to secure them.

Hugging Face detected and contained the intrusion, disclosing it on 16 July. Five days later OpenAI identified its own models as the source and called it an unprecedented cyber incident.

On 30 July, Anthropic disclosed that OpenAI’s report had prompted a review of its own records. Reviewing 141,006 test runs, it found three incidents in which Claude models had reached the open internet and compromised other organisations.

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Why did thousands of young university students—and many of their professors—take to celebrating the sadistic atrocity of Hamas’s attack on Israel of 7 October 2023? A leading candidate for the answer is the malign influence of the ideology of ‘settler colonialism’.

Of the earliest ideologues, the most influential was the Australian activist and anthropologist, Patrick Wolfe, whose 1999 book, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, and 2006 article, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native”, have been seminal. As Wolfe has it, the kind of colonialism imposed on Australia and North America, which aimed to replace native societies with new, European ones, was characterised by “the logic of elimination”.

As is typical of radical left-wing politics, the theory of ‘settler colonialism’ redefines words for political effect and erases normal, common-sense distinctions. Crucial to its view is the loosening of the definition of the morally laden concept of genocide and its expansion beyond massive physical killing to include policies of cultural assimilation and even equal citizenship. Indeed, in the hands of another Australian academic, Lorenzo Veracini, who co-founded the journal Settler Colonial Studies in 2010, physical killing becomes just one of twenty-six species of ‘transfer’. ‘Transfer’, or the replacement of one society by another, is the fundamental and gravest wrong; massive killing is merely one of many means—alongside the granting of equal voting rights.

This unilateral conceptual redefinition is completely at odds with international law, which takes the physical elimination of the Jewish people in the Nazi Holocaust as the paradigm of genocide. The proposal to include a cultural species in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was rejected. More basically, the redefinition turns the normal, Christianised, Western hierarchy of moral goods upside down: the survival of a society—no matter its quality—is made more important than the lives of its individual members. It is no coincidence that the proponents of ‘settler colonialism’ tend to be anthropologists, who have for some long time been wont to idealise indigenous societies and cultures.

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