Where I stand.

I am a commentator, not a career politician. I write because Australia faces a set of hard questions that career politics is structured to defer: how we vet the people who settle here, how we keep the lights on and the industrial base functioning, how we hold a country together when the institutions that do the holding are under strain.

My temperament is libertarian, and my politics is small-government by argument rather than by faith. Milton Friedman has a clean formulation: government has four real jobs – defence, protection from coercion, the provision of public goods that markets underbuild, and care for those who cannot care for themselves. Most of what Canberra spends its energy on is outside that list, and most of what it fails at sits squarely inside it.

I spent five years in China and came back convinced that we do not understand Beijing, even when we say we do. Beijing does not do stabilisation; it does leverage. Every raw material we export, every port we rent out, every technical standard we import, is a pressure point that Canberra has not mapped and the Australian public has not been shown.

On immigration, I am unashamedly pro-immigrant and unashamedly pro-vetting. Those two things are not in tension. Australia built the modern world we inherited by choosing who we let in, and by asking questions about values, capability, and contribution. We stopped asking. That is the problem, not the numbers.

On free speech, I hold the Popperian position. The open society stays open by arguing with itself in public. The alternative, which we are drifting towards, is a society that closes its own ranks out of the belief that disagreement is a risk to be managed. That is how immune systems fail.

This site is where the record lives. The Point is the weekly edition. The Bondi Brief will be the daily video when it launches. Anything I publish in long form will sit in an archive here once there are enough pieces to make one worth visiting.