Free Republic

MALCOLM Turnbull says he is confident the Coalition will form a majority government in the next parliament, despite huge losses for his party that have left the result on a knife-edge. ..... Australia is facing the prospect of a hung parliament or a narrow Coalition victory. .... The Coalition is sitting on 50.04 per cent of the two-party preferred vote, compared to 49.96 per cent for Labor. ..... The ABC is predicting the Coalition to win 67 seats, equal to 67 seats for Labor. The Greens are expected to retain one seat, the Nick Xenophon Team will pick up one...

In January an Aussie Islamist teen was arrested for planning an ISIS kangaroo bomb attack. The teen planned to paint a kangaroo with the ISIS flag, fill its pouch with bombs and let it loose on Aussie police on Anzac Day. On Thursday Sevdet Besim pleaded guilty to the kangaroo bomb plot. The Daily Star reported: An Australian teenager accused of discussing packing a kangaroo with explosives and setting it loose on police is facing life behind bars after pleading guilty Thursday to planning a terrorist act.Sevdet Besim was arrested in Melbourne last year when he was 18 and accused...

The Bramble Cay melomys has become more famous in extinction than it ever was in life. A mouse-like rodent, the melomys amazingly survived on a 3.6 hectare grass-covered cay (a low-lying island in a coral reef) in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef like a ratty Robinson Crusoe for thousands of years. There, it thrived off just a few plant species until human-caused climate change—in the form of rising sea levels and increasing inundations of sea water on the low-lying island—wiped it off the planet. But, while the extinction has been reported widely, articles have missed an important point: the scientists who...

A suspected car bomb was detonated outside a Perth mosque on Tuesday night as hundreds of worshippers attended a prayer service inside. No one inside the Thornlie Mosque was injured when the white 4WD exploded shortly after 8pm outside the Thornlie mosque, near the Australian Islamic College in Perth’s southern suburbs. Anti-Islamic graffiti was also sprayed on a fence.

Australia's republican movement says membership has surged in the wake of the Brexit vote, as Australians question the benefits of remaining part of “little Britain”. An “AusExit” campaign, including calls to remove the Union Jack from the flag and remove the British monarch as head of state, has gained momentum since Friday, when Britain voted to leave the European Union. Peter FitzSimons, the chairman of Australia’s republican movement, said Australia had belonged to the British empire but the historic ties between the nations had become less relevant because “Great Britain barely exists anymore”. “It’s one thing for the monarchists to...

WATCHING the unhinged and unrestrained hysteria of the Left has been a delightful side benefit of the Brexit poll. While the conservatives who campaigned for Great Britain to remain in the European Union have largely accepted the result with a measure of grace, elements of the Left have reacted with a level of hyperbole that is remarkable even by their shrill standards. There are even demands for a new poll from the Brexit losers who seem to think democracy is only a valid exercise if their side wins. But a referendum is not a game of rock, paper, scissors that...

The brutal cold snap has continued into the weekend as parts of New South Wales are blanketed by snow while Sydney braces for continuing chilly blasts. The heavy snowfall and ice buildup has caused widespread congestion on roads in country NSW, forcing the closure of stretches of highway. ...

I have considered a trip to New Zealand, or to Australia.  Australia makes it very difficult to bring in hunting guns.  Not quite impossible, but you must apply for a permit to possess guns in Australia. It is fairly involved, including such things as sending them a letter from your local police chief months in advance of your trip.  New Zealand requires that you obtain a temporary firearms license, but it appears much easier to obtain, mostly done online. You are not required to pay any fees until you arrive in New Zealand, and the temporary license is good...

The conspiracy theories began well before a single frame of the story went to air. A Current Affair on Nauru? What a hatchet job! The Australian government must be behind this pre-election stunt! They’d only be shown the pretty stuff! ..... After spending years calling for media outlets to be allowed on the Pacific island to see what’s really going on in offshore detention centres, the Left press and refugee activists couldn’t have been more incensed one finally made it on. Why? Because it wasn’t one of their own. .....we had no conditions imposed and were able to wander freely...

Z Special Unit, Australia's secret commando unit during World War II, will be recognised by the Australian War Memorial. The special military unit, the existence of which was kept secret for decades, was made up of ordinary Australians who ended up being responsible for some of the most heroic acts in World War II. They were not allowed to discuss their activities with anyone, until now, when they will be recognised in the public ceremony. John Connor, a historian from the University of New South Wales, said the men in the unit were not necessarily professional soldiers before the war....

Police found and destroyed a suspected pipe bomb in Geelong on Friday morning. Streets were closed after police recovered what they suspected was a pipe bomb from a residence in Norlane, reported 7News. The device was found inside a car on the corner of Robin Avenue and Swallow Crescent, where police were carrying out a search warrant at about 10am this morning.

SYDNEY, Australia - Australian researchers say rising sea levels have wiped out a rodent that lived on a tiny outcrop in the Great Barrier Reef, in what they say is the first documented extinction of a mammal species due to human-caused climate change. The rodent was known to have lived only on Bramble Cay, a minuscule atoll in the northeast Torres Strait, between the Cape York Peninsula in the Australian state of Queensland and the southern shores of Papua New Guinea. The long-tailed, whiskered creature, called the Bramble Cay melomys, was considered the only mammal endemic to the Great Barrier...

An Australian university recently censured marine scientist Paul Ridd for “failing to act in a collegial way and in the academic spirit of the institution,” because he questioned popular claims among environmentalists about coral reefs and global warming. What was Ridd’s crime? He found out two of the world’s leading organizations studying coral reefs were using misleading photographs to make the case that global warming was causing a mass reef die-off. Ridd wasn’t rewarded for checking the facts and blowing the whistle on misleading science. Instead, James Cook University censured Ridd and threatened to fire him for questioning global warming...

Why is America so alarmed by Brexit? Lest the reader be in doubt, remind yourself of this. Never before has a sitting US president visited a fellow democracy in a bid to sway an election. Nor, until now, have 13 former US secretaries of state and defence risked addressing a letter to a foreign electorate with the same motive. Ditto eight former Treasury secretaries and five former supreme commanders of NATO. Not only has the US establishment broken its non-interference rule over Brexit, it is stamping on its smithereens. If we did not know better, it might seem the UK...

Services have been held in Townsville, Sydney and Perth to mark the 20th anniversary of a Black Hawk crash which claimed the lives of 18 soldiers. In June 1996, two helicopters collided mid-air near Townsville, while the troops were carrying out a counter-terrorism training exercise. In Townsville, the Chief of Army Lieutenant Angus Campbell said the lives of the men were lost "for the sake of others". Crash survivor Gary Proctor also delivered an emotional prayer and the service ended with a Black Hawk flyover and the playing of the Last Post. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Opposition Leader Bill...

Like tens of thousands of other Australians, I am a volunteer firefighter - bush fire is a constant threat in Australia, especially during the summer months, and the nation's sheer size and relatively low population means volunteer fire fighters are critical to public safety - the professionals do a fine job in the big cities but on the edges of those cities and out of them, it's the volunteers that are most critical. As a Victorian, I am a volunteer with the CFA - the Country Fire Authority - which has about 60,000 volunteers and about 1,000 professional employed firefighters...

The vast majority of Australian Defence Force personnel believes the Muslim religion promotes ­violence and terrorism, despite “cultural sensitivity training” by the ADF to have its soldiers take the view that Islam is a religion of peace. The bombshell new study sponsored by the army finds that such “anti-Muslim sentiments” are “probably quite widespread” among Australian frontline troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the military’s efforts to reverse this trend are counter-productive. ..... “The best estimate … for the proportion of soldiers who have received cultural sensitivity training and who believe that the Muslim religion promotes violence and terrorism...

FOUR people have been injured in a shooting outside a shopping centre in Sydney’s northwest after police opened fire on a 23-year-old man carrying a knife. The man, who went missing from a psychiatric hospital yesterday, was seen brandishing a kitchen knife as he wandered around the mall “babbling incoherently”, before he was shot three times by officers. The man reportedly lunged at a female officer after he was told to drop the knife, before she and a male officer opened fire, leaving him with injuries to his arm, thigh and abdomen. Fragments from police gunfire also injured three female...

People are spending less time on social media apps, in some cases substantially less, a new study from marketing intelligence firm SimilarWeb found. The company compared Android users' daily time spent on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat from January to March 2016 with the same period in 2015. The firm looked at data from the U.S, UK, Germany, Spain, Australia, India, South Africa, Brazil and Spain. Facebook's Instagram saw the biggest year-over-year drop — usage was down 23.7 percent this year, closely followed by Twitter (down 23.4 percent), Snapchat (down 15.7 percent) and Facebook (down 8 percent), the study found.

NOTICED how the unelected Left is seizing control? Let me give just the latest examples of this putsch. In Victoria, Roz Ward, a Marxist who calls our flag “racist”, is a university lecturer running a government-funded program teaching children to be more “gender fluid”. In NSW, Mark Scott, who as ABC boss did not let any conservatives present his main current affairs shows, has now been hired by the Liberal NSW Government to run its Education Department. Back in Victoria, Fair Work Commissioner Julius Roe, a former Left-wing union official, last week ruled that the far-Left firefighters’ union be given...