Dr James Allan: Just Repeal and Undo

How many readers have noticed this huge failing in so many longstanding, establishment conservative political parties around the democratic world? To start, the Left side of politics when in power will seed or remake some institution. Or it will enact some big-ticket legislative reform. Maybe it’s bringing into being a beefed-up, more potent and renamed Australian Human Rights Commission. Maybe it’s enacting a statutory bill of rights in Victoria, in Queensland, in New Zealand, in Britain.

Dr James Allan: No, Trump Hasn’t “Undermined the Rule of Law”

In two recent articles in the pages of Quadrant (March 2026 issue ‘The Temptations of Unfreedom Revisited’ and May 2026 issue ‘Nasty, Brutish and Short-Sighted’), Oliver Hartwich has spent considerable time attacking US President Donald Trump. In the first of these, Hartwich alleged that Trump has systematically violated the rule of law. And that he has undermined the institutional integrity of the courts, law enforcement and the civil service. And that he has weaponised the Justice Department against his political foes. The listed vices go on.

Dr James Allan: What Do You Most Despise?

The great and recently deceased playwright Tom Stoppard was once asked what he most despised. This, by the way, is a terrific question. Stoppard is reputed to have paused and then answered: “What I most despise are conservatives who don’t conserve.” The sting is more acute when you realise that Stoppard was one of a very few conservatively-inclined writers in today’s world. Nor did he live off public grant-giving bodies that uniformly shun anyone on the political Right. Nope, his plays actually made money – a lot of money – because they were so good.

But think about Stoppard’s point. Today’s Right-of-centre political class is so lacking in cultural confidence that it rarely can summon up the will to conserve anything that just 30 or 40 years ago most all of us would have considered to be of great value and importance. An education system that instils a sense of the West’s greatness, and not just its flaws? Nope. Too hard. A university system which didn’t let its standards plummet over the past three decades, drive out any academics with views to the Right of your average Lib Dem MP, become a factory for race grievance politics graduates and didn’t also become a ponzi scheme, visa-granting machine dressed up as an ‘export industry’? Again, nope. In fact, as I have noted more than once in the past, our unis here in Australia got worse every single year of the nine years of Coalition governments before Anthony Albanese came in and supercharged the descent.

Dr James Allan: What’s So Great About Diversity?

‘Diversity is our strength.’ One hears this, or myriad variants of the same idea, unrelentingly. Certainly I work in an Australian university where the extent of higher-ups pushing this notion does indeed qualify as unrelenting, even matching totalitarian state levels of propaganda. But even outside the hallowed halls of impartial, politically balanced academia (did I write that with a straight face?) the mantra or cliché that diversity somehow delivers a stronger balance sheet or a more cohesive society or just better outcomes is pervasive in today’s democracies that have committed themselves to multiculturalism and to the various neo-Marxist versions of feminism. Sure, those spouting these ‘diversity is a panacea’ nostrums never cash out the claim. They never tell us precisely how ‘diversity’ is making society better or wealthier or more unified. We are all just supposed to take it on faith, as it were. We’re just to believe the bureaucratic, political and various professional bodies’ elites who push this line, and believe it simply because they are the ones telling us it’s so.

Dr James Allan: Israel’s Judiciary is Out of Control

I confess to being one of Australia’s most pro-Israel law professors. Actually, change that to I proudly confess to being one of Australia’s most pro-Israel law professors. I admire how this tiny country is the only democracy in the entire Middle East. Surrounded by countries that want to wipe it from the face of the earth this minute Jewish homeland has defended itself from invasions and attacks that comfortably coddled Western countries haven’t experienced in 80 years. And be clear that Israel has restrained itself in doing this by orders of magnitude more than the Allies did when fighting Germany and Japan in WWII.

Dr James Allan: The Marvellous Miseries of Multiculturalism

I start this first column of the new year with the heavy heart that I am sure all our readers have for the families of the victims of the horrific mass-murders on Bondi Beach just before Christmas. And let us not deal in the usual Labour Party euphemisms, misdirecting abstractions and Kumbaya platitudes. This was the deliberate attempt to murder Jews, by Islamic extremists, done solely because they wanted to kill Jews. And they did, with the odd non-Jewish bystander thrown in. That makes Australia, outside of Israel itself, the country where the most Jews have been murdered in a single incident since the Second World War.

Dr James Allan: The Outgoing Tide of Freedom

John Mortimer’s memorable fictional creation Rumpole of the Bailey loved to quote the great lines of English poetry. One of Rumpole’s favourite recited retellings was Wordsworth’s poem that begins “It is not to be thought of that the flood of British freedom, which, to the open sea of the world’s praise, from dark antiquity hath flowed ‘with pomp of waters, unwithstood’… should perish.” And that claim was still true when Mortimer was writing about Rumpole in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Alas, it is not true today.

Dr James Allan: Vance is Right - The West is Stagnating Due to Mass Immigration

Last week US Vice President J.D. Vance pointed out a home truth about the politicians who have run Canada and Britain this last decade or so. They’ve made some terrible calls, especially as regards mass inwards immigration. To start, Vance pointed to my native Canada and noted that it now has the highest foreign-born share of the population of the entire G7. And its living standards have flatlined.

Dr James Allan: Trump’s First Year Has Been Outstanding

It’s been just over a year since President Trump capped off the most remarkable comeback in US political history (okay, we can argue about Andrew Jackson) to win a non-consecutive second term as President. He was only the second man ever to do that. Now the US Constitution requires the election winner to wait over two months before taking power in the new year. That meant lots of time for the Biden autopen to issue pardons, spray money everywhere and allow myriad Third World people to keep pouring into the US. So any assessment around now is not of Trump’s first year of his second term, but rather more like a 10-month gauging or evaluation. But hey, for all those lovers of the metric system, let’s go ahead now and see how The Donald is doing.

Dr James Allan: The Trudeau Disaster

In 1931 the British Parliament passed the Statute of Westminster. For all practical purposes this statute granted legislative independence to the self-governing Dominions of the British Empire, which at the time basically meant Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Irish Free State and Newfoundland. The gist of this very famous statute was that the UK Parliament could no longer legislate for a Dominion without its consent. They were of equal status to the UK.

Dr James Allan: In Defence of Cancelling the Left

This past fortnight has seen an explosion of interest in free speech in the United States. First there was the political assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA. Then there was the decision by Disney (owner of the ABC TV broadcasting network in the US) to remove late night host Jimmy Kimmel from the air. A lot is going on in the name of ‘free speech’ so let me start with some facts.

Dr James Allan: And the Legacy Media Wonder Why Nobody Trusts Them

Last year when I was asked to write a chapter for a US book on the incredible inroads and attacks on our civil liberties during the thuggish Covid lockdown years I decided, in part, to rank the worst offending groups. The lawyerly and doctorly castes were bad. They were woeful in fact. But the politicians as a class, the ones who ultimately made the calls, were worse – and there were very few exceptions to that generalised claim, as any Australian knows who looks for politicians who, say, resigned from Cabinet on principle (nada, zero) or who spoke up publicly and loudly against the massive authoritarian over-reach and aping of the policies of the Chinese Communist Politburo (a mere handful at most). So I gave the silver medal for thuggish lockdown commitment and stalwart thuggery to the political class. However, in terms of letting all of us citizens down I reserved the gold medal for the journalists of the legacy media.

Dr James Allan: Annoyances

Here are a few things that get my goat. They really annoy me. Start with the strange coalition between open borders Left-wing progressives and chamber of commerce types (some, but fewer these days, nominally conservative) about how ‘there are jobs locals won’t do’. A mere moment’s thought tells you that’s wrong. Such claims aren’t that far off the ante-bellum, pre-US Civil War queries from some in the south about ‘who will pick the cotton if we end slavery?’ It’s simple. In market economies all jobs will be filled if you offer to pay enough. All of them without exception. It’s just supply and demand.

Dr James Allan: Trump’s Lesson in Remedial Education

I have hesitated to respond article-by-article to Roger Partridge’s continuing attacks on the Trump administration beyond my initial response and rebuttal in these pages to his first anti-Trump piece. That was where I argued that Roger’s comparisons of Trump to Hitler, Mussolini and Hugo Chavez were, shall we say, a tad overdone. My general view is that more than a few people on the political Right side of politics (and near on everyone on the Left side) have been infected with a strong dose of TDS, or ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’. All of us can agree or disagree with this or that policy of a US President, including those of President Trump.

Dr James Allan: Australia’s Conservatives Are Paying the Price of Kowtowing to the Left

When the so-called ‘moderate’ MPs in a Westminster conservative political party remove a sitting Prime Minister from their own party, one who has delivered a majority government but is to the right of these moderates, the long-term effects are not good. Back in 1990, and after delivering 11 years of majority governments, Maggie Thatcher was knifed by the wets or moderates in the British Tory party. It is arguable that the party has never recovered.

Roger Partridge: Trump’s Authoritarian Arrogance

Jim Allan’s spirited response to my Quadrant Online column, Trump’s war on constitutional democracy, misses what makes this moment so dangerous for America. While Jim and I share deep concerns about judicial activism and bureaucratic overreach, his attempt to normalise Trump’s recent actions ignores their unprecedented assault on constitutional government.

Dr James Allan: Mandates matter

I’ve asked this question before, and I’ll ask it again: why do right-of-centre politicians want to go into politics? If the answer is nothing more than ‘to win elections’, then notice what follows from that value-free vacuum. You can get an Angela Merkel, who won election after election, all while opening up the country’s borders to young, single men from Afghanistan and the Middle East, who overall lacked any obvious sympathy or liking for the whole array of Western values. How has that worked out for Germany?

Dr James Allan: Dictator Trump? That’s Just Silly

In Saturday’s edition of Quadrant, Roger Partridge lambasted Donald Trump as an enemy of America’s constitutional democracy. On Sunday, James Allan, Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland and the author of Democracy in Decline, took his friend and colleague to task.

Let me start this reply to Roger Partridge’s column (‘Trump’s War on Constitutional Democracy‘) by laying my cards on the table. I know Roger Partridge. He is one of the best lawyers in New Zealand. He, like me, has grave worries about the sort of judicial activism or judicial usurpation of the role of Parliament that he sees over across the Tasman (and which, in enervated form, is on clear display here in Australia too).

Dr James Allan: Climate Change Giving Meaning to Life

The religious mindset embraces the belief that there is more to life than the material world of the senses. There are truths that transcend the here and now. Things that give a non-contingent meaning to human existence. This is obvious with the monotheistic religions, and a little less obvious with Buddhism and polytheistic beliefs. Still, the appeal of this sort of belief in transcendent truths is pretty obvious. That means that not all that many people who reject established religions will move over to some sort of David Hume or Bertrand Russell-type sceptical view that what you see is what you get – we are here because of the fortuitous collisions of trillions of atoms, lots of time and even more luck. As Hume famously said, “the life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster”.