23 January 2019

We’re excited to launch the latest podcast from the IPA – The IPA’s Looking Forward Podcast. Each week Dr Chris Berg and Scott Hargreaves will take a deeper look at the week in politics than you’ll hear elsewhere, and discuss the big ideas that are driving us. Listen to the first episode with Renee Gorman and Richard Allsop through the

1 December 2018

Analysis of books circulating in 19th century Australia suggests a deep engagement with the ‘conservative enlightenment’, argues Chris Berg. How can we know how 19th century Australians thought about liberalism, economics and political economy? The question is of more than esoteric interest. Australians have long searched for their national character or identity in the ideological milieu of the first decades

19 June 2018

It is appalling that a sitting government should have to complain that the ABC is repeating Labor lies as facts. The ABC itself should be ashamed to have received such a complaint. Yet that is precisely why the Labor Party supported the establishment of the ABC – to provide a forum for pro-ALP news and opinion. This points to questioning

14 June 2018

The difference between the ABC and Fairfax and News Ltd is that the ABC is a $1 billion government program that provides media services to Australians. Fairfax and News Ltd are private entities that do so at their own expense and hope to earn a profit. Those small details were missing from Laura Tingle’s defence of the ABC published inWeekend AFR.

31 May 2018

A new book by RMIT scholars Dr Darcy Allen and Dr Christopher Berg, ‘Australia’s Red Tape Crisis’ brings together contributions from economists, philosophers, politicians and legal experts to explore the economics, politics and culture of over-regulation, and defines a path for overcoming Australia’s red tape crisis. The book is being launched by the Institute of Public Affairs in Canberra today

26 May 2018

A new book by Professor Sinclair Davidson and Dr Chris Berg ‘Against Public Broadcasting: Why We Should Privatise the ABC and How to Do It’ was launched last night at an Institute of Public Affairs event in Sydney. RMIT Postdoctoral Fellow and IPA Senior Fellow Chris Berg said, “The ABC is a 1 billion dollar public policy initiative that is

11 May 2018

Howls of outrage from the ABC and its fans on social media over the most mild of cuts to the broadcaster’s budget ignore the fact of an institution that has drifted far away from its charter’s demands for objectivity. Judging by the howls of outrage echoing through twitter it seems that the Turnbull government has destroyed our democracy, if not

1 December 2017

Economists explain the far-reaching implications of blockchain technology on society and on how we are governed. A blockchain is a digital, decentralised, distributed ledger. This year saw a meteoric rise in interest in cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technologies that power them. Even the government is now interested. There’s now a Commonwealth Parliamentary Friends of Blockchain group, and one blockchain energy

12 October 2017

Economists have spent the last 240 years – ever since Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations – trying to understand how decentralised economies work. In that time they have established that the price mechanism does a pretty good job of coordinating economic activity, and that profits provide excellent incentives to stimulate human action. In the course of understanding how economies operate,

21 August 2017

It is widely agreed that a free and independent press is an essential part of a democratic order. This submission addresses itself to the implications of the words free and independent. Government Intervention in the market for journalism risks undermining the reason we value publicly interested journalism in the first place – its role in providing a check on government