For the last two weeks, I’ve had the great pleasure of travelling around Australia and speaking at various events in Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Newcastle and Canberra. While a terrific honour for me, this is undoubtedly a bad sign for Australia: the tragedy of my career is that I say obvious things that everyone knows and am lavished with entirely unmerited praise in response. It pains me to point this out but if Konstantin Kisin has been invited to give a series of talks in your country, all is not well.

This is the bad news for Australia: it appears to have been infected with the same