The Spectator Australia

Australia has already acknowledged the undeniable truth about the Islamic regime occupying Iran. In November last year, the Albanese government formally listed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a state sponsor of terrorism. It did so after Australian intelligence concluded that Iran had orchestrated at least two antisemitic attacks on Australian soil. These attacks were designed to instil fear, divide Australian society, and challenge Australian sovereignty.

We have all been stuck behind that car. Right-hand lane, twenty under the limit, no indicator, eyes down on the GPS. Not a care. Not even rudeness. The driver simply does not know what he is doing and he is holding a license that says he does. And we have all sat in front of the GP who never looks up. Five minutes, no eye contact, no hands, no examination – just typing while you talk, eyes on the screen and then a script. He has more letters after his name than anyone you know. He examined nothing.

The attacks keep coming for One Nation from both sides of politics and the media. Yet amid last week’s claims that One Nation had peaked, Auspoll’s recent results beg to differ. One Nation is polling at 30 per cent in the primaries. Based on these results, Auspoll predicts if an election were held today, One Nation would win 36 seats, the Coalition 19, and Labor still a whopping 82 seats.

Paul Kelly’s imminent book The Twilight of Exceptionalism clarifies the dominant role that what President Trump labels ‘the climate con’ has played (and continues to play) in Australian politics. Prior to the 2022 Glasgow climate conference, Prime Minister Morrison decided Australia had to accept the position being promoted by the EU, UK, and Biden’s US presidency that Net Zero and its concomitant replacement of coal and gas by wind and solar for electricity supply was essential.

In this time of political and social instability, there are two things I know for certain. Football is not coming home, perpetuating 60 years of hurt and the death of the restoration of English sporting glory. People are also witnessing the ascension of Labour’s Messiah, Andy Burnham. After months of speculation and plotting, the self-styled ‘King of the North’ has finally won his crown on the promise of creating a ‘new politics’.

Federal Liberal Party president Tony Abbott has emerged to back the disendorsement of Moira Deeming. The Victorian Liberal Party made the decision on Friday, leaving a question mark over who will replace Deeming at the state election in November.

Tomorrow, Andy Burnham will become Britain’s 59th Prime Minister. The team around him has been strikingly circumspect when it comes to setting out his plans. But this weekend we are starting to get some smoke signals via the Sunday papers. The new PM will back licences for drilling at the Rosebank and Jackdaw gas fields. Thames Water, Britain’s largest water supplier, is likely to be placed in special measures over £18bn owed to creditors.

When I moved into Paris’s seventh arrondissement, I was not expecting to find myself living in one of the city’s dreaded no-go zones. My neighbourhood, admittedly, is not one of the notorious districts on lists of forbidding no-go zones in the French capital’s bleak north end, plagued with crack houses and criminal gangs. I live in one of Paris’s poshest areas. The seventh arrondissement is known for its burnished boulevards and grand monuments.

Anthropic and OpenAI have spent the past few years laying the groundwork for public listings, but the path to a public market debut is growing more fraught by the day. Recent breakthroughs by Chinese AI models on benchmark tests have sparked new concern about the affordability of American-made models and sent AI stocks reeling. For years, investors assumed the biggest AI companies would be protected by an insurmountable technological lead. That assumption is now being challenged.

Andy Burnham, the incoming prime minister, thinks English devolution will be the great stroke against Reform UK. On one level this is hard to fathom. Do voters flirting with populism really have any love for local authorities, or the kind of people who run them? All of the villains in the TV show Clarkson’s Farm are from local government.