3 January 2025 Published in the National Post —— The current turmoil inside the Trudeau government makes a future Conservative win even more likely. Naturally enough, shrewd politician that he is, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre will be taking nothing for granted and will be trying to win every possible vote. Still, after almost a decade…
23 December 2024 St Patrick’s Cathedral, MelbourneE&OE —— It’s an honour to be giving this address, on behalf of the Andrews family; because for all his achievements on the national stage, it’s the family that Kevin and Margaret have built, inside their home – with five wonderful children and their spouses, and seven adored grandchildren…
11 December 2024 Published in The Wall Street Journal —— JD Vance is tired of Washington lawmakers who believe they can “remake the entire world in America’s image.” So he said in an October podcast with Joe Rogan, adding that the Iraq war was America’s “biggest world-historical catastrophe.” This came after insights into issues as…
11 December 2024 Published in The Australian. Based on remarks given to Danube Institute-Heritage Foundation Forum in Washington DC —— John Howard was right when he famously declared, in the run-up to the 2001 Australian election: “we shall decide who comes to this country and the circumstances under which they come”. Immigration has such ramification…
7 December 2024 Published in The Daily Telegraph —— Just because a horror is hard to eradicate, or has been around a long time, doesn’t make it any less vile. Nor should any prime minister use that as an excuse to be feeble in the face of it. Ever since the October 7 atrocity, the…
7 November 2024 Published in The Australian. —— Rightly or wrongly, for better or for worse, the president of the US is the leader of the free world and therefore our president too. That’s why it’s the job of the Australian prime minister to work as closely as possible with the president of the day…
5 November 2024 Published in The Daily Telegraph. —— When I gave the first Bradfield lecture ten years back, Sydney was a city choking on its own traffic thanks to inadequate expressways that didn’t join up. Thanks largely to the initiatives of the Abbott federal government, embraced by the O’Farrell and Baird NSW governments and…
Originally delivered to the Alliance of Responsible Citizenship at the International Convention Center, Sydney Revised version published in The Australian. E&OE —— It’s good that ARC is here in Australia telling a better story, because we sure need a better story told, and we sure have a better story to tell. Australia is one of…
26 September 2024 Originally published in the Hungarian Conservative — A land-locked country of under ten million people would not normally figure very much in the global order, other than as a member of a larger alliance or a network of nations. But under Viktor Orban, one of the world’s most politically successful and culturally…
Published in The Australian — It says something about the mindset of the modern Labor Party that not a single federal Labor MP turned up at the weekend’s 70th anniversary celebration of our largest gas exporter. Gas is our second-largest export earner, the essential feedstock for the fertiliser and chemical industries absolutely needed for modern…