As PM, I reluctantly accepted the official advice that efficient global markets meant that maintaining 90 days supply of liquid fuels onshore was no longer necessary. But the global scramble for masks, surgical gowns, and vaccines during the pandemic made it obvious that, in an emergency, it would be every country for itself. In its wake, the Morrison government asked the Productivity Commission to consider our supply chain vulnerability but—remarkably—its report hardly mentioned fuel security; even though no country on earth is as dependent on fuel imports.

The Prime Minister’s begging tour around Asia shows just how exposed we are to any disruption in global fuel supply. The month’s supply of petrol, diesel, avgas and jet fuel that we supposedly had at the start of the Iran war included only about three weeks’ worth that was actually onshore. The rest was cargoes at sea that, in extremis could be sunk, or possibly diverted to other destinations in the event of a major threat to shipping.

Iran’s denial of freedom of navigation through the Straits did not interfere with the actual delivery of refined products to Australia so much as the delivery of crude oil to the Asian refineries we buy from. Even so, the pump price of diesel in Australia almost doubled, about 10% of our servos ran out of some or all stock due to panic buying, airlines started to cancel flights, and ports, mines, and farms suddenly had to reconsider their operations. While the Albanese government gave assurances that supplies were guaranteed until May, there could be no assurances beyond that because friendly countries (like Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia) could not be sure of their own stock and unfriendly ones (like China) had already suspended deliveries.

The Prime Minister’s “fuel diplomacy coup” in securing two extra deliveries, each of 100 million litres, sounded impressive but actually constituted less than two days’ total Australian consumption. What’s more, it bordered on deranged for the government to insist that further electrification was the long-term solution to the fuel crisis, even while the PM was pleading for extra petrol and diesel.

Here’s the key point: a conflict in East Asia—such as Beijing attempting to coerce Taiwan—would not just close down deliveries of crude oil; it would close down the deliveries of refined products too.

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Plainly, these are disordered times.

People-who-should-know-better think that humans can change the planet’s temperature, much like Canute’s courtiers thought he could order the tides. Parliaments declare that gender is whatever someone says it is, even for minors. A couple of years back, world leaders, even the pope, took policy advice from a disturbed teenager. Perhaps the weirdest manifestation of this cognitive dissonance is “Queers for Palestine”, passionate in their support of a place where they’d be at risk of a push from tall buildings.

It was Chesterton who wrote, “the disintegration of rational society started in the drift from the hearth and the family”. The solution, he said, “must be a drift back”.

The modern world, tends to overlook that every person’s first source of nourishment and support, the first foundation for meaning amidst chaos, is the family.

Especially today, families come in all shapes and sizes, and unconventional families need be no less loving. But whatever their make up, they need to be strong, for society’s sake, because family is where the instincts of support and solidarity that nations need are first learnt. It’s the experience of family that feeds Burke’s key insight, of society, as a “partnership, between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born”.

In this chain of existence, it’s our children that are the culmination.

Yet if, indeed, the greatest act of faith in yourself, your family, your country, and your culture is to seek renewal through having children, every Western country is in the grip of existential crisis.

Consider current birth rates: France, the US, and Australia, roughly 1.6; and Britain, 1.39. Then there’s Italy at 1.2 and Spain at 1.1. Hungary’s birth rate, that was just 1.2 in 2011, rose to 1.6 after a decade of pro-natalist policy, such as exempting larger families from tax, but has now fallen back to just 1.3, suggesting that it’s societal morale, as much as economics, behind individuals’ instinct to reproduce themselves.

Throughout the West, receiving migrants has replaced having children.

Britain, for instance, had virtually no net migration prior to 1990. In the nineties it averaged about 100,000 a year; in the noughties about 200,000 a year; in the 2010s about 300,000 a year; and in 2022 and 2023 it exploded to almost a million a year, before falling back.

Migration to the US, much of it irregular, has averaged about a million a year since the 1990s, but exploded during the Biden presidency when perhaps 10 million people are thought to have entered the country, mostly illegally from Mexico.

Even Australia, that’s long-had a formal immigration programme, running at about 100,000 a year from the 1950s through to the early noughties, and about 200,000 a year till the pandemic, has since seen numbers explode to about 400,000 a year.

There are many good arguments for migration. Certainly, in all the settler societies, there’d be no nation but for migration. Migration can bring in new skills. It can open our minds to new ideas and ease our fear of difference. And by giving newcomers the chance to make a better life for themselves and their families, it can add a humanitarian dimension to a nation’s story.

The supreme patriotism of people from obvious migrant backgrounds, such as the two last British Conservative leaders Rishi Sunak and Kemi Badenoch, testifies to the gravitational pull of English-speaking civilisation.

But these days, the main justifications for immigration are that it’s needed to sustain an ageing population; and to fill the jobs that locals won’t do, or at least, not at current wage rates. Plus, in countries like Australia, Canada and Britain, that it builds multicultural diversity, even though this risks creating “a nation of tribes” and watering down national identity.

And there are two further factors in modern migration.

Cheap air travel and the internet mean that it’s possible more-or-less to live in two countries at once, mainly resident in the new country, but frequently in the old one too, to build a house for the extended family, or to maintain business contacts. Rather than joining Team Australia, for instance, some recent migrants are merely living in Hotel Australia and taking advantage of the facilities.

Then there’s Muslim migration.

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No one should have been unprepared for the blocking of the Straits of Hormuz because the Iranian theocracy has been threatening precisely this for nearly five decades. And no country should have been more alive to this peril than Australia—given that we run on diesel and have lately had scarcely 30 days supply of liquid fuels onshore.

With declining local oil production and the closure of local refineries ongoing since 2012, we’ve been in breach of our treaty obligation to hold stocks onshore sufficient for 90 days. The Gillard government concluded, back then, that large scale domestic storage was unnecessary thanks to efficient global markets. Although this worried me as PM, I did not buck the official advice. For a country that uses more diesel per person than any other, this was always risky, but it surely became negligent once the pandemic highlighted the fragility of global supply chains in any serious crisis.

So here we are, scarcely four weeks into the Iran war: with about 10% of our servos wholly or partially out of fuel; with about 30% of farmers worried they lack the diesel or the fertiliser to sow or harvest their crops; with flights starting to be cancelled; with miners and transport facilities fearful for their ongoing operations; with no Australian-flagged fleet of tankers that could be tasked with a fuel rescue mission; with no naval ships capable of helping to break any Iranian blockade; and with no Australian air power yet despatched to the Middle East to help the US-Israel campaign against an apocalyptic theocracy, even though the Straits will never be secure while it lasts.

There are even proposals for leveraging our gas exports to bludgeon fuel supplies from East Asian refineries (even though it’s hardly their fault that the Straits are impassable) rather than resolving to make the most of our potential as a fossil fuel superpower and reliable source of energy security for the wider world.

Let there be no doubt about the reasons for our current predicament. Successive governments, especially the current one, have convinced themselves that an “unstoppable green energy transition” meant that access to fossil fuels was neither necessary nor desirable. All this despite the fact that fossil fuels are still responsible for 90% of our energy needs. Moreover, they are the essential feedstock for the fertilisers that keep alive the 8 billion people on this planet, not to mention the steel, cement, and plastic without which modern life is impossible.

Even if it’s mankind’s emissions that are slowly warming the planet (which I doubt), what’s the point of Australia’s manic drive to decarbonise? Of putting two of our three biggest exports at risk? Of driving our heavy industry offshore because of the increased costs inherent in wind and solar power? No one seems to remember that China’s annual increase in emissions exceeds our total.

So what should Australia do?

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The whole point of an alliance, as opposed to a protectorate, is that allies are prepared to take risks on each other’s behalf. Allies put their armed forces into combat to support each other, as opposed to simply subcontracting their national security to someone else. It’s precisely because America’s European allies have treated NATO as a protectorate, requiring almost no responsibility from them, that the durability of the world’s greatest alliance in now in doubt. And by opting-out of the Iran war, even Britain and Australia, formerly America’s most reliable brothers-in-arms, have become strategic shirkers, leaving the US to do all the heavy lifting without us.

What’s not to support in the American-Israeli strike on Iran? The mullahs’ regime has routinely threatened to obliterate both America and Israel (the two “Satans”); has waged direct or proxy war against nearly all its neighbours; has sponsored terrorism around the globe (including the fire-bombing of Jewish premises in Australia and attacks on anti-regime campaigners in Britain); and has killed untold numbers of its own citizens, tens of thousands just two months ago. Even if the current air-assault does no more than utterly destroy the Iranian war machine and further set back its nuclear ambitions, Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu have done the whole world a massive favour.

Australia says it supports the US action but has not lifted a finger to help. Indeed, by requiring our personnel on the USS Charlotte Los Angeles class submarine to stand down, we may actually have hindered US operations (even if only in a minor way). Imagine the captain being told that three of his crew were now passengers; imagine the Australian personnel facing the humiliation of standing aside from their crew mates’ mission?

Everything the Albanese government does exposes the fact that its senior members see themselves as social justice activists rather than the national security warriors these times demand. Even though Labor ministers, from the PM down, admit that these are the most dangerous strategic circumstances since the late 1930s, not only does the Albanese government stubbornly refuse to lift defence spending, it’s cannibalising every other element of our armed forces in order to pay for AUKUS submarines sometime next decade. This is despite the acknowledged immediate and multiplying threats to a “rules based global order” that’s only existed while America and its allies have been able to intimidate predators from challenging it.

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There’s been a Raisina Dialogue in Delhi every March since 2016. It’s the brainchild of Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Narendra Modi’s long-serving foreign minister. Like other global gatherings, it brings together political leaders, senior military commanders, prominent business people, leading journalists, and think tank chiefs to discuss key issues; but it’s better than Davos because it’s not so dominated by politically correct plutocrats; and better than the longer-running Chinese Boao Forum, because it not essentially an exercise in homage to the host government.

I started attending virtually, during the pandemic, and have been there in person since 2022.

Because it’s India, there’s a lot of emphasis on the “global south”; but equally, because it’s India, there’s a recognition that fine sentiment shouldn’t be taken too seriously, especially if it’s masking grievance and rent-seeking; and that, in the end, noble aspirations have to take into account hard power and economic strength.

To his credit, Jaishankar invariably attends numerous sessions, sometimes simply sitting in the audience, sometimes as a key note speaker, and sometimes as one of up to a half-dozen discussants on any particular topic; politely agreeing or taking issue with his fellow panelists, as the debate goes. Remarkably for someone of such accomplishment (successively India’s ambassador to China, the United States, and head of the Ministry of External Affairs, before becoming the Foreign Minister) Jai doesn’t talk down, and is on “receive” far more often than “transmit”.

Indeed, at this conference, rank has no privileges; it might get you onto the stage as a speaker or panelist, but it’s the quality of the contribution that counts. After all, no one has a monopoly on knowledge or wisdom and everyone should be there to justify ideas and to learn from the discussion.

At every dialogue so far, Prime Minister Modi has set the example, attending the opening session, to hear the principal guest – last year the Prime Minister of New Zealand; this year the President of Finland – but not speaking himself. After the US and Chinese presidents, he’s probably the most immediately powerful person in the world, yet he’s not too proud to listen as well as to lead. Despite over a decade in office, perhaps because of his youth as a kind of Hindu monk, Modi has thusfar managed to resist the hubris of power.

And as for this notion that India, under the BJP, has somehow become an authoritarian state — that’s total BS. No country with free and fair elections, a riotously free media, and a robustly independent judiciary is in serious danger of dictatorship. And no dictatorship would host a global conference where nothing is off-limits and no one is shouted down. This year’s dialogue, after all, heard from both the Israeli foreign minister (virtually) and the Iranian deputy foreign minister.

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Australia was always there for America – in Korea, in Vietnam, in the first and second Gulf wars, and in Afghanistan. We are not America’s most important ally but we have been its most dependable one, because successive Australian governments realised that the leader of the free world had to be supported if freedom were to flourish.

Australia was there when Islamic State burst out of the Syrian desert in mid-2014 and reached the gates of Baghdad: air-dropping supplies to the Yazidis besieged on Mt Sinjar, running guns to the Kurds in Erbil, helping to coordinate the liberation of Mosul, rebuilding the Iraqi army at Taji, and flying strike missions across the Middle Eastern war zone. More recently, following America’s lead, Australia has made modest contributions to arming Ukraine.

Yet in all probability, a few tepid words will be Australia’s sole part in the current action against a regime so evil that it routinely slaughters tens of thousands of its own citizens, has manically sought the nuclear weapons needed to annihilate both Israel and America, and has even funded terrorist attacks on our own soil. The Albanese government’s first response to the joint Israeli-American preemptive strike was the Foreign Minister’s call for “de-escalation”; as if decapitating the Islamist tyranny and severely weakening its ability to export terrorism (even if full regime change might not be achieved) was not unambiguously good for the wider world.

Eventually, the Prime Minister said that Australia “supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon” but stressed that Australia had no notice of the attack and that “Washington has not requested Australian assistance” nor did he “anticipate such a request”. Compared to its studied even-handedness between the liberal democratic government of Israel and the Hamas death cult this was at least belated moral clarity; but it’s typical of the Albanese government that, while it eventually favours the right thing, it won’t lift a finger to bring it about.

It’s hardly surprising that Washington failed to consult Australia given the Albanese government’s ostentatious refusal to use our armed forces for anything other than disaster relief and its reluctance to call out Islamist extremism. In December 2023, the government’s refusal to send a frigate to help enforce freedom of navigation in the Red Sea was the first time since the ANZUS alliance was forged in 1951 that Australia has turned down an American request for military help. At the time, there were five frigates and destroyers docked at Sydney’s Garden Island naval base. Either they could not safely be deployed, lacked crew, or – more likely – the government did not want to upset the Islamist lobby here in Australia by deploying them against Iran’s Houthi allies.

That we were neither asked for help nor advised of what was coming speaks volumes for Australia’s shrinking stature in the wider world. This of the country that sent 330,000 men overseas in the Great War and then put almost a million into uniform 25 years on, in order to help preserve democratic freedoms.

Our government had enough inkling of what was about to happen to remove non-essential staff from our Middle Eastern embassies and to issue travel warnings – but not enough gumption to call the Americans to offer the assistance that a decent ally should have been ready to provide. The same command and control aircraft, aerial refuellers, and strike fighters that did so much to defeat Islamic State should have been volunteered again. Quite apart from the fact that they would have been engaged in making the world safer for free peoples everywhere, they would have been acquiring priceless operational experience, and cementing Australia’s value as a friend and ally.

Donald Trump’s scornful jibe at Britain’s PM that “he’s no Winston Churchill”, so far, might equally be deployed against our own, who’s no Billy Hughes. Let’s hope he might yet emulate John Curtin, the World War I pacifist who eventually mobilised the whole country to fight against Germany and Japan. And while Keir Starmer has shamefully run down Britain’s armed forces, at least Royal Air Force jets have now engaged Iranian drones in the Gulf, a RN ship is being deployed to the Mediterranean, and British bases are finally being made available to US forces.

Meanwhile, our contribution to global freedom is deploying consular officials to the Middle East to organise an exodus of frightened expats; plus reassuring assumed-to-be-terminally-timid voters that an Iranian strike on Dubai’s al-Minhad airbase caused no casualties among the Australian personnel there.

The Albanese government is fond of flagging defence initiatives but almost all of them are spending money in the far distant future or supposedly creating jobs in Australia rather than actually boosting our fighting strength now. Other than three air warfare destroyers we have neither any serious anti-missile defences nor any real drone or counter-drone capability, even though the Ukraine conflict has made it obvious how central this is to modern war-fighting. Everything is about political management rather than real national security.

It’s crystal clear where this is leading. When the US eventually asks us – as it inevitably will – to join in contingency planning against a communist Chinese assault on democratic Taiwan, the Albanese government wants to be able to say that we’d like to help but can’t. Or that we could and would but only in a decade’s time when, or if, we finally get the AUKUS subs. It’s pacifism disguised as forward planning. Even though becoming an economic colony of Beijing would be the ultimate fate of an Australia without solid alliances. Perhaps that’s what some in the Albanese government would actually prefer to any readiness to fight for ourselves and our like-minded partners.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s talk of “middle power diplomacy”, reiterated in our own parliament yesterday, is no more than a rhetorical cop out to cover the green left’s phobia against having, and if needs be, using the force that’s vital to support our national values and interests.

After all, any rule of law worthy of the name requires a democratic parliament to make it, impartial judges to administer it, and – most importantly – honest police to enforce it. The so-called “global rules-based order” only exists to the extent that America and its allies have successfully intimidated predator nations from challenging it. Notwithstanding his mockery of Canada as the 51^st state, and verbal bullying of Denmark over Greenland, Trump is actually doing far more to uphold it than any recent president. In an imperfect world, better a flawed man doing good things than better ones doing nothing.

The current attempt to destroy forever the Iranian theocracy’s nuclear cravings will make the world safer, fairer and better – yet the shameful, humiliating reality is that Australia is doing nothing practical to bring it about.

Yet while illegal migration to Australia has been under control since 2013, that’s far from true of legal migration. In the first three years of the Albanese government, legal migration was at an all time record, averaging some 400,000 a year. That’s a city the size of Canberra, every year. Net Overseas Migration (that’s the numbers coming for more than 12 months, less the numbers leaving), is not being run by the elected and accountable government. It’s largely determined by language schools and universities selling work rights and residency rather than education; and by businesses that prefer foreign workers to paying and training locals for the jobs Australians won’t do.

The numbers are huge. About 2.5 million people, or about 10% of our total population, are temporary residents. There’s nearly a million people on student visas. There’s over half a million on temporary work visas. And there’s well over 100,000 on bridging visas, appealing against deportation.

Now, I’m not saying they’re not making a contribution to Australia. Of course they are. They’re carers, waiters, cleaners, drivers, and pickers. But is that really what’s best for our country: an economy dependent on temporary residents, and a society where a significant minority have made no formal commitment to Australia? This is especially worrying when you add in the fact that every person coming here needs something to do, somewhere to live, and a way to get about. At current numbers, that means downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs, and severe strain on infrastructure.

Immigration, like energy, is the economy. If it’s well-targeted to genuine skills, it makes us stronger as a nation. If not, the overall economy might grow, but wealth per person actually declines. However, unlike energy, immigration is our society too. If immigrants share our values, and want to join Team Australia, our country grows stronger. But if they just want to live in Hotel Australia and take advantage of the facilities, our country becomes more fragmented and more divided.

For many years, migrants to Australia were expected to integrate from day one and to assimilate as soon as possible. But lately, under the doctrine of multiculturalism, migrants have been encouraged to keep their culture. Indeed, the old view, that migrants should be grateful for gaining a better life in Australia, has been replaced by the view that Australians should be grateful that migrants have given us a more diverse society. It’s no surprise that the Prime Minister issued a statement welcoming the start of Ramadan this week; but not one for the start of Lent. These days, official Australia celebrates every culture but our own.

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That’s why the election of a new and very different Liberal leader and alternative PM is so galvanising. Like all leaders, Angus Taylor will disappoint some and upset others, but his commitment to restoring Australians’ standard of living and protecting our way of life is exactly what this country needs.

The recent poll surge for One Nation shows millions of Australians are hungry for leaders who speak their mind on energy security, national security and unalloyed pride in our country. Much as I respect Pauline Hanson, and admire her courage and consistency, I doubt even she thinks that she’s an entirely credible alternative prime minister, hence her recent offer to join in coalition with the Liberal and National parties, and hence the urgent need for the Liberal and National parties to unite around a new leadership team that takes Hanson voters’ concerns seriously.

That’s why it’s so important the Liberal Party tackle the problems with immigration and multiculturalism that have been brewing for years, but have soared in the wake of the Bondi massacre. This has nothing to do with the racism that the left insists has always tainted modern Australia and everything to do with understandable anxiety that Australia is changing too fast and not always for the better. How could two individuals, one living here for nearly three decades and the other born here, think so little of Australia’s hitherto rock-solid commitment to respecting freedom of religion and the sanctity of human life, to turn a Hanukkah event into a shooting gallery?

Plainly, anyone who wants a caliphate or sharia law is not going to fit into a liberal pluralist democracy and really should not seek to live in Australia. Yet the current government thinks so little of social cohesion that it’s issued 3000 tourist visas to scarcely-vetted people from a terrorist controlled war zone where Jew hatred is central to the school curriculum.

Knowing Angus Taylor well, I’m sure he has the intellectual self-confidence, the organisational skill, the personal diplomacy, and the sheer inexhaustible energy needed to hold this deeply underwhelming government to account.

As a farmer near Goulburn, he knows how Labor’s renewables-only energy policy is desecrating our countryside. As a successful businessman, he knows it’s the private sector rather than government that creates the wealth of the nation. As a father and husband, he knows families are the bedrock of our community and need policy which doesn’t just industrialise the childcare, aged care and disability care that families can often do best.

Above all as a patriot, he believes in the nation state: one Australia, proudly standing under one national flag, making the most of our opportunities so that our best days as a nation remain ahead of us.

I think Sheridan is right. Just as the Reformation and counter-Reformation revitalised Christianity in early modern Europe, and just as Wesleyanism and the Oxford Movement revitalised Christianity in late 18th and early 19th century Britain, this generation can create the revival of faith that Western Civilisation sorely needs. And that may even be starting, in the nascent return to religious practice evident among young men in particular. But no one should pretend that it’s going to be effortless or without its own crop of modern martyrs.

“We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out”. Such was the encouragement that Hugh Latimer gave to his fellow Anglican bishop, Nicholas Ridley, as they were burnt at the stake in Oxford as part of Queen Mary’s attempted Catholic restoration. Although the penalties for individual Christian witness in the West are there days much less sanguinary, they’re hardly insignificant: public obloquy, cancellation, dismissal, and false accusation being by no means unknown. Think Israel Folau, Andrew Thorburn, and the disdain extended to some public figures who take their faith seriously, such as Scott Morrison. The persecution of the late Cardinal Pell doesn’t feature here – perhaps because Sheridan didn’t want the book to become part of the extensive and highly polarised Pell literature – but he’s the supreme contemporary example of someone targeted for being a serious Christian.

Sheridan’s intention is less to dwell on Christians’ contemporary trials, whether it be the social disdain experienced in the post-Christian-becoming-anti-Christian West, or the actual pogroms that Christians endure in other parts of the world, such as the Middle East, Burma, and sub-Saharan Africa. Rather, it’s to explore how Christian witness moved the Roman world and to highlight key exemplars of contemporary Christian witness in the hope that more might follow.

As Sheridan explains, “ancient culture was working overwhelmingly against Christian beliefs and values” with only a few exceptions such as “some elements of Greek philosophy …which reflected something of the natural law and some elements of paganism (that) contained the sense that there was wonder in the world”. To the Romans, he says, Christianity was “a pernicious superstition”; to the Greeks, “obvious foolishness”; to Jews, “heretical”. But because Christians tended to have more wholesome lives than their pagan neighbours, this novel and demanding faith spread person-by-person throughout the Roman world and beyond, despite intermittent savage persecution. For instance, rather than practise infanticide, the early Christians rescued abandoned babies; rather than enforce a rigid patriarchy, the early Church insisted that men and women had equal rights within the home; and rather than shunning plague victims, Christians strove to help them, courageous in the face of a death that they believed was more a transition than an extinction. By the time of Theodosius, who made Christianity the official religion, perhaps 60 per cent of the empire’s people were already Christian.

Of course, it’s easier to change the religion of someone who’s already religious (as the ancients were) than to argue in to faith the irreligious folk of today. It’s a series of pen portraits of heroic modern day Christians that forms this book’s luminous heart. Sheridan dubs these radiant individuals “contemporary early Christians” because he thinks they have a proven ability to persuade by inspirational example.

Some of them are well known: Mike Pence, for instance, Donald Trump’s vice-president, who did his duty on January 6 2021, in having the US senate ratify the election his boss said was “stolen”; Niall Ferguson, the best-selling historian, who’s thought himself back to faith; Marilynn Robinson, whose novel Gilead, Sheridan regards as one of the deepest modern explorations of personal faith; and Dallas Jenkins, whose TV series, The Chosen, dramatising incidents of the Gospel, has been a global phenomenon.

There’s Danny and Leila Abdallah, normal parents, three of whose children were killed by a drugged driver, who descended into a dark place before finding peace through forgiveness, and founding the i4Give Foundation. Danny visited the killer in prison, who has subsequently himself had a religious conversion, and says “forgiveness is a gift you give yourself…People look at us, even if they don’t believe, (and) their souls get pierced. It’s one per cent us, embracing God’s love, and it’s 99 per cent God”.

Another moving story is Jess Echeverry’s, who helps street people in Los Angeles. Jess was herself homeless for much of her teens, and only pulled herself out of prostitution, drugs and suicide attempts, when she was pregnant for the third time, and desperate to give her baby a better life. After marrying a faithful Catholic, she had a mystical experience of the presence of Jesus. Later, she heard his voice telling her to go back to the streets to serve the homeless. The service she and her husband now run is not explicitly Christian or outwardly religious but prayer keeps it going. As she says: “my work is inspired by the love of Jesus. Even if for a moment I help homeless people feel their dignity…These are his children. They direct their thanks to me but really it’s Jesus. They deserve to meet him and know what it means to be loved by him”.

Then there’s Mark Varughese, a Malaysian-Australian who left a successful legal career in Perth to found Kingdomcity, a Pentecostal church now active across 15 countries, after several personal encounters with God. This is how he explains one: “it was the most strange but life-giving experience…It was like someone turned the tap on…I was on the floor. I could feel this, like waves of liquid…I was mumbling. I didn’t want to be too loud because I didn’t want to be embarrassed. At the same time, it was so overwhelming. I didn’t want it to stop. If God chooses to make me look like a fool for a few minutes but I get him in exchange it’s worth it”.

There’d be few readers who wouldn’t find an individual to relate to amongst the personal stories that Sheridan gives us: all of them people whose contemporary lives have been transformed by faith and who have gone on to help and inspire numerous others. Who would have thought that a lay journalist would turn out to be one of Christianity’s best public advocates? Sheridan is becoming a Chesterton for our time.

This book review was also published in The Spectator.

Only a president who called a spade a “bloody shovel” could even begin to dispel the complacency that had Britain and Europe and Canada free riding on the US for their security.

As the world’s 14th largest economy, Australia can hardly be America’s most powerful or most important ally, but we have been its most reliable one.

Ever since US troops went into action for the first time on the Western Front, on 4 July 1918, at the battle of Le Hamel, under the command of Sir John Monash, Australians have served in every one of America’s wars. No other country has.

We were there in Korea, in Vietnam, in the Gulf, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. When Islamic State burst out of Syria to the gates of Baghdad, I told President Obama that we would be there in force. And we were: our special forces were in Mosul, our regular army was in Taji, and our strike fighters pounded Islamist positions across the war zone.

That’s why our refusal, in December 2023, to send a frigate to the Red Sea was so telling. It was the first time since the ANZUS alliance was sealed in 1951, that Australia had declined a US request for military assistance.

Ostensibly because our ships were all committed elsewhere, but really because our current government didn’t want to be in a fight against Islam – and if Australia was a reluctant ally under Biden, think how the reservations would have grown since.

The global situation has not been so fraught since the late 1930s.

A militarist dictatorship in Moscow aims to dominate Eastern Europe, recreating the Russia of Peter the Great.

An apocalyptic Islamist dictatorship in Tehran, though weakened, is still fanatically committed to a global caliphate and the destruction of the little and the great “Satans”: Israel and America.

And a communist dictatorship in Beijing has repeatedly declared its ambition to become the world’s top power by 2050; in the process, dominating East Asia and seizing Taiwan. Because this practically independent country of nearly 25 million people, a rich, free, fair, liberal democracy, is living, breathing proof there’s no totalitarian gene in the Chinese DNA.

All that links these revisionist powers is a hatred for the West. What makes them more dangerous is that many influential people in the West are hardly less jaundiced against their own countries, for their supposed crimes against climate and identity.

Should Ukraine fall, at the very least there will be a new iron curtain in Europe. Should Israel be in jeopardy, there will be convulsions way beyond the Middle East. And should Taiwan be attacked, the economic and strategic disruption will be many orders of magnitude greater than the impact of the Ukraine war.

Ukraine will only survive as an independent country with credible security guarantees from its neighbours; the Middle East will only have peace once the ayatollahs are toppled; and Taiwan will only flourish if protected by an alliance of democracies strong enough to make adventurism across the straits not worth the risk.

So the American alliance system has never been more necessary, yet it’s never been in such disarray.

Due partly to a president who says exactly what he thinks, at that moment, unscripted, and normally without diplomatic varnish. And partly to allies still wedded to mistakes the Trump administration is trying to correct: economic decline from bloated welfare budgets and fixing a non-existent climate crisis; societal fragmentation due to mass migration unconnected to nation building; and strategic weakness due to supply chain vulnerability and lack of military spending.

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Yes, Australia remains as free, fair and prosperous as any comparable country. Yes, it remains the case that to have the right to live in Australia is to have won the lottery of life. Yet we are changing fast and not always for the better. It should have been clear on the night an angry mob screamed “F—k the Jews” on the Sydney Opera House forecourt that something was seriously wrong. It should have not taken the subsequent widespread vandalism, the fire bombings of synagogues, and the routine mass protests demanding “death to the IDF” and “globalise the intifada” – let alone the worst terrorist attack in our history – to alert us to declining respect for Australian values.

If this is successful multiculturalism, what would failure look like?

Long before the doctrine of multiculturalism was imported from Canada, Australian Jews were the exemplars of how to reconcile maintenance of a distinct identity with wholehearted commitment to Australia. Only on a superficial level, was the post-October 7 explosion of anti-Semitic rage directed against Israel and against Jews. At a deeper level, it’s been a rejection of the fairness and decency that has always characterised Australia at its best, and to which Jews have made such an extraordinary contribution. Partly, it’s a vicious form of identity politics in which Jews are always to blame; and partly, it’s the advent into this country of people who, in the Prime Minister’s words, have not “left their hatreds in the customs hall”. As yesterday’s “invasion day” protest will doubtless show, there’s now a toxic alliance between the anti-Israel activists and the anti-Australian ones.

Multiculturalism was originally pitched as a way of making migrants from diverse backgrounds feel welcome but has become a mechanism for changing our country by stealth. At its best, multiculturalism has meant reassuring new migrants that they could become Australian in their own way and at their own pace. In its more strident forms, institutionalised through though a plethora of grants to ethnic community groups, as Geoffrey Blainey foresaw, it’s fostered a “nation of tribes”; or as Noel Pearson has just described it, “plural mono-culturalism”.

The vast majority of migrants don’t come to Australia to change us, but to join us. It’s hardly a favour to them, therefore, to change the country they’ve joined to make it more resemble the countries they’ve left. Unsurprisingly, the chief advocates of multiculturalism, other than activists on government grants, have rarely been the most recent migrants themselves, who have invariably been keen to become Australian as quickly as possible. Multiculturalism’s champions have mostly been left-wing academics with a grudge against our supposedly sterile Anglo-Celtic core culture and our supposedly oppressive Judaeo-Christian ethos.

The problem is not that we are in fact multi-ethnic, because that’s been the case since the beginning of modern Australia. The problem is the ideology of multiculturalism that so emphasises difference that there’s nothing left to bind Australians together other than carrying the same passport and vacuous slogans such as “our strength is our diversity”.

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Only if the government really has had a big ch…

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The shooting down of 15 people attending a Hanukkah celebration was an act of depraved evil, relieved only by the heroism of some of the bystanders, especially Ahmed el Ahmed, who heroically wrestled a gun off one of t…

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What’s generally regarded as his greatest failure, his loss of the 1968 leadership contest to John Gorton, might better be considered as a triumph of character. Unlike his rival, he refused to lobby his colleagues for votes, thinking that they should choose their leader based on what they knew of the candidates rather than any blandishments that might be offered to them.

Leadership ballots should not turn on flattery or the promises of promotion made to MPs; just as elections should not be won by the candidate offering voters the biggest bribe. For instance, had there been more than 12 hours or so between announcing my candidature and the actual ballot, I doubt I’d have become Liberal Party leader in December 2009, as it’s hard to respect colleagues who don’t know their own minds; or worse, who expect a job in return for their vote. Six years on, when I was myself challenged, I made the mistake of suggesting that Scott Morrison might replace Julie Bishop as deputy leader, only subsequently to be accused of throwing Joe Hockey under the bus – even though there’s no rule that the deputy leader has to be treasurer.

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“As a democracy under the rule of law, that’s well and truly assimilated the best of its heritage from Britain, India was always a more natural fit with the West than with the old Soviet Union.”

While there’s much to cheer in the second Trump presidency’s foreign policy, such as the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities and the freeing of the Israeli host…

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When Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher came into office, the Western world was at a low ebb. The 1973 oil crisis had created stagflation. The US had comprehensively lost the Vietnam War. There was a pervasive sense of malaise, embodied in the high-minded but ineffectual presidency of Jimmy Car…

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It's wonderful to be here in Brisbane!

It's wonderful to be with so many people who love our country and want it to be better. Like me, I am sure that you believe that this is the best country in the world. Our job is to keep it that way. The contemporary tragedy, as we all know, is that this country is drifting backwards.

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Just prior to my first trip to Washington as Prime Minister in 2014, President Obama had declared at West Point that America could not be the world’s policeman on its own. Believing that the world needed a policeman, to deter and defeat aggressors, and that America was the only country with the strength and the…

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“[F]ault lies squarely with governments that use immigration rather than reform to boost their economies and that fail to reinforce with newcomers how lucky they are to have joined the best countries on earth.”

Just because immigration is a sensitive subject doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be discussed. In settler societies, there’s often a particular reticenc…

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