The Spectator Australia

Aussies of a certain vintage will remember this classic ad from the 1980s, my favourite decade. Yes, following the success of that brilliant campaign, it was inevitable that a new disparaging slang word entered the Aussie vernacular – Clayton’s. It means a ‘fake’, a ‘phony’, or more specifically, ersatz. A ‘Clayton’s holiday’ was the holiday was a working holiday. A ‘Clayton’s pay-rise’ was the one that never materialised.

Australia’s nuclear future is not blocked by physics, engineering, or economics. It is blocked by statute. A handful of deliberate prohibitions, written into Commonwealth and state law decades ago, still make it unlawful to license, assess, or construct a nuclear power station in any Australian jurisdiction. The objective is not further debate. It is the systematic neutralisation of every one of those statutory bars. The path forward is sequential, disciplined, and timed.

With the by-election over and the countless corflutes that once blanketed the quiet streets and roadsides of Secret Harbour like the banners of warring tribes have come down, attention turned from rhetoric to reality. Unlike war, where all sides often emerge diminished, the winner of any political contest is clear. There are no second prizes. For all others, the spoils consist only of varying degrees of loss. As a Liberal, the result brought with it mixed emotions.

With parliament back after the summer break, the debate around increasing Britain’s defence spending – so febrile just two months ago – is rearing its head again. On Wednesday, a voice no one knew the country needed chimed into the discussion. Taking to X, the Labour MP Diane Abbott intoned: ‘The imminent threat from Russia is a Nato fiction to justify their complete capitulation to Trump’s demands for more military spending.

John Galliano’s reign at Dior was before my time. But he was the first Brit to put his mark on a great French couture house and, in any way you care to look at it, he has been one of the most consequential figures in fashion for the past four decades. Which is why it felt right that the Metropolitan Museum in New York should announce it would be holding a show of his work, and why it felt wrong when they pulled the show earlier this week.

On Tuesday, Andy Burnham returned to the House of Commons after almost ten years in the wilderness, bringing with him ‘a clear diagnosis of what has gone wrong’ in the country. Burnham’s claims about how the country has been governed since the 1980s do not stand up to scrutiny According to Burnham, the problems started in the 1980s when a ‘series of wrong turns’ were made.

Zack Polanski exaggerates a great many things. He said that he could enlarge a woman’s breasts through hypnosis, that he had served as a spokesperson for the British Red Cross, that he had previously worked for the Ministry of Justice. All are falsehoods which make him wholly unsuitable to ever becoming prime minister. Perhaps the most spurious claim of them all, however, is that the Green party is the party that will replace the Labour party.

In July, in Zaporizhzhia, in the southeast of Ukraine, a small Russian drone attacked a petrol station. Human operators had sent it there, but the Nvidia chip onboard chose its final target, apparently propane tanks. It exploded, killing three civilians. No human made the final targeting decision. AI did that. AI-wise, London now feels to me like London in February 2020. Everything is ordinary.

The Australian housing market overall peaked in March. By the time you read this, it will have been falling for five if not six, consecutive months. August’s decline was the sharpest since December 2022 – 1.2 per cent month-on-month across the five capitals, 3 per cent for the quarter overall; 4 per cent off the peak. Auction clearances are down from their peak in the low 70s to around 50 per cent now; and only because auction volumes have dried up. Sales are off 16 per cent in a year.

Eleven years ago, on a cold midnight in Los Angeles, I lay on a chaise lounge at the pool of the (now abandoned) Standard Hotel, made famous in Sex and the City.