People & associates
Chris Berg
The Dark Mind of the Copywriter
Chris Berg reviews Novels in Three Lines by Felix Fénéon (NYRB Classics, 2007,176 pages) Ernest Hemingway once said that his best story was his shortest story, deliberately limited to just six words - ‘For sale: baby...
Editorial, November 2008
One could be forgiven for believing that the era of small government is over, if only we could remember when it had started. Isn't it great when events confirm your political prejudices? If Kevin Rudd's widely reported speech in early October is...
Editorial, September 2008
Free-marketeers cannot refuse to engage and critique the emissions trading scheme just because they are not happy with the science. This edition of the IPA Review focuses on the federal government's new emissions trading scheme (ETS). It does not,...
Emissions Trading: Towards the biggest economic change in Australian history
‘Placing a limit and a price on emissions will change the things we produce, the way we produce them, and the things we buy', states the Federal Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper, which compares the economic impact...
Alexander Solzhenitsyns challenging legacy
It would not be possible to stare down the Soviet Union for as long as Alexander Solzhenitsyn had without deep personal courage. When he died in August this year, he had out-lived the regime that imprisoned him by nearly two decades. For nearly...
Editorial, July 2008
Last year, the IPA Review had its sixtieth birthday, making it the oldest continuously published political magazine in the country since the demise of The Bulletin. And this year we were awarded the Sir Anthony Fisher International Memorial Award...
The Politics of the Olympics
On the March 26 1938, six months after he died, Pierre de Coubertin's corpse was exhumed from its grave in Lausanne, Switzerland. His heart was cut out and transported to Olympia in Greece. The heart of the founder of the modern Olympics was then...
Have bad movies edged out good?
Chris Berg reviews Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics. It may not come as a surprise that Hostel: Part II, the 2007 movie which depicts nearly an hour and a half of brutal, explicit and uninterrupted torture, is...
Editorial and Table of Contents, May 2008
It's always interesting to see how newly elected leaders respond to stimuli. And Kevin Rudd gave a clear indication of his tolerance for criticism at the beginning of April. The Prime Minister's trip abroad had a peculiar schedule. He was to visit...
The Growth of Australia's Regulatory State: Ideology, accountability and the mega-regulators
Regulation is a political activity. It sets the framework for the market economy by defining the boundaries between private action and government action. Yet those boundaries are not fixed. Australian governments are growing the body of regulation...