IPA Review Articles

9 May 2019

Universality is a key tenet of Christianity which has led to human rights as we know it today, the abolition of slavery, the idea of the individual, feminism, equality before the law, and democratic secular politics. Christianity bequeathed us these great institutions of Western Civilisation. Christianity’s influence is overwhelmingly positive not only for those of faith, but also for those

9 May 2019

The futility of attempting to measure the immeasurable is familiar to many government workers. Before coming to the IPA, I had a small role in a Victorian Education Department team implementing Gonski school reforms. The department developed school performance targets and a reforms package that would, among other things, help schools identify their strengths and weaknesses. To what extent would

29 April 2019

An excellent biography finally provides an opportunity to fairly evaluate Billy McMahon’s legacy, argues IPA Senior Fellow Richard Allsop. An argument can be made for Saturday, 2 December, 1972, being the highpoint of Billy McMahon’s Prime Ministership. That may seem a strange thing to say about the day McMahon led the Coalition to defeat after 23 years in government, but

1 December 2018

Hans Rosling’s posthumous book Factfulness proves Louis Armstrong and Paul McCartney were right: it’s a wonderful world and getting better all the time, writes reformed pessimist Richard Conrad. The world is a much better place today than most of us realise and continues to improve every day. That’s a key message most readers will take away from Factfulness—a remarkable work

1 December 2018

The quiet majority perturbed by the rise of victimhood culture need to speak out more often, writes sociologist Tiffany Jenkins. Shortly after midnight on Monday, 4 March 2013, a female student reported seeing someone dressed in a Ku Klux Klan outfit on the campus of the private liberal arts college, Oberlin, Ohio. Campus security officers and the Police Department sent

29 November 2018

Historian Alex Ryrie expounds Martin Luther’s profound influence on the modern world but also explains Protestantism can’t take all the credit for the rise of tolerance and freedom, writes Richard Allsop. Without Protestants, the story of Western Civilisation in the past 500 years would have been very different. That is not to say that if Martin Luther had not nailed

20 November 2018

In this review of “Skin in the Game; Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life”, Scott Hargreaves argues that Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s writings on the benefits of a stake in risks—‘skin in the game’—are helpful at policy and personal levels alike. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is one of the most interesting thinkers to have emerged in the 21st century, both for what he

25 October 2018

Three recent books describe a crisis of liberal democracy. But we can’t resolve our problems simply by retreating into localism—we also need a renewed confidence in our civilisation, and a new conservative story to tell, writes Andrew Bushnell. In a famous essay, the economist FA Hayek disassociated himself from conservatism. Despite admiring figures like Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, both

1 August 2018

Tribalism is splitting the United States down cultural and political lines, and Matthew Lesh fears Australia is heading in the same direction. As the infamous author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua was typecast as a Chinese American mum with a forceful parenting style, but she’s also a law professor at Yale University with expertise in human

1 August 2018

A new Richard Nixon biography uncovers more murky behaviour by the controversial president, writes Richard Allsop. Richard Nixon has already been the subject of plenty of biographies, but his controversial career and complex character continue to appeal to new biographers. The latest is John A Farrell whose biography of Nixon has at least one striking new piece of evidence about