IPA Review-December 2012

The Melbourne City Council just wants you to be happy. Really. Happy. That’s why in October they trumpeted a media release on their website with the heading emblazoned across the page, ‘More than $630,000 awarded to boost Melbourne’s health and happiness’. It seems these funds are to be spent on, ‘opportunities for our community to join in and enjoy city

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Associate Editor, Richard Lyons. The eminent Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey has produced yet another important work in his A Short History of Christianity. Blainey, who is well known for writing histories of movements and peoples that cover a long time period, has attempted to detail 2000 years

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Research Fellow at the IPA, Julie Novak. The welfare state in its existing form, dominated by government financing and provision of payments and services from cradle to grave, is irretrievably broken. The blossoming of welfare state programs deters private savings and reduces labour supply, and requires increasing

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Research Fellow at the IPA, Richard Allsop. The publication of this new biography of legendary antitariff campaigner, Bert Kelly, is particularly timely. For it was fifty years ago, in late 1962, that the Australian policy of ‘protection all round’, sometimes dubbed McEwenism, arguably reached its peak and

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Researcher at the IPA, James Bolt. Have you ever not ordered something at a restaurant because it had strange ingredients, and ordered the roast chicken instead? Ever tried a restaurant because the social vibe of the place made you think it would be a great night out?

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Director of the Deregulation Unit at the IPA, Alan Moran. The Chinese economic miracle is the latest and most comprehensive success story since the end of World War II. Veteran economists Ronald Coase and Ning Wang explain how in the space of three decades one of the

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by IPA Adjunct Fellow, Jason Potts and Director of Climate Change Policy and the Intellectual Property and Free Trade Unit at the IPA, Tim Wilson. A: Yes, it is– Jason Potts Like most justifications of state intervention, intellectual property purports to solve a problem of market failure. New ideas

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Lecturer at the International Graduate School of Business at the University of South Australia, Kesten Green. Since at least the 1960s, advocates have called for firms to be socially responsible. Governments have responded. But what does it mean for firms to be socially responsible? And do government

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Founder and president of the Human Capital Project, John Humphreys. There has never been a successful society that was not based on a system of private property rights. The reason is that private property encourages thrift, investment, sustainable management of resources and an incentive to use property

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Research Fellow at the IPA, Julie Novak. The Gillard government’s recently released statement on the final budget outcome for 2011-12 shows the level of federal government spending keeps growing and growing in an undisciplined fashion. There is not enough focus on the damage this increased spending is

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Director of the Legal Rights Project at the IPA, Simon Breheny. Australian barrister and international lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC once gave a speech entitled ‘no-one is above the law.’ Of course he’s right. But such a statement leaves Robertson in a peculiar position. Either our international political

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Director of the North Australia Project at the IPA, John Shipp. The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell is a well-argued book by a conservative American underappreciated by Australian audiences. Subtitled ‘Self-Congratulation as the Basis for Social Policy’, it explains how society’s ‘anointed’ manufacture perceptions of

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is written by President of Private Doctors Australia and author of ‘Problems in Health Care Delivery: Governmnet as Cause not Cure’, Brian Bedkober. Commencing with Otto von Bismarck (and some would say even earlier) the role of the state in protecting its subjects from various risks has been steadily

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Director of the Zionist Organisation of America’s Center for Middle East Policy, Daniel Mandel. In a sense, the so-called Arab Spring can be said to have begun on 26 December 2010 in the Tunisian hinterland township of Sidi Bouzid, where a 26-year-old impoverished vegetable seller and father

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Executive Director of the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance, Tim Andrews. Unintentional self-parody has long being a forte of governments around the world. Yet a movement in recent years to create multi-layered government and quasi-governmental agencies, each existing simply to lobby each other to in turn lobby other agencies has

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Nick Evans, a pseudonym for a London-based journalist. Like many sinister concepts, the idea of governments ‘nudging’ people may seem on first glance somewhat innocuous. Rather than relying on coercion such as using bans, fines and regulation to achieve social change, nudge employs a supposedly more subtle

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is written by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. Editor’s note: a public servant wrote this while being paid with your taxes! The National Broadband Network (NBN) —among the largest infrastructure projects ever undertaken in Australia —will play an increasingly important role in advancing gender equality. Australia’s

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is written by Editor James Paterson and Executive Director of the IPA, John Roskam. One of the most revealing stories in modern Australian politics comes from James Button—a speechwriter for Kevin Rudd for a short time in 2009. Button’s recent and fascinating book, Speechless: A year in my father’s

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is written by journalist with ‘The Australian’, Christian Kerr. ‘The rent seekers are always with us’ Ray Evans declared last month when he launched a new biography of Bert Kelly, the great Australian free trade advocate and parliamentarian. There was an echo of the Bible in his words. They

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Editor James Paterson. Attacks on individual freedom in Australia over the past few years have occurred in some unexpected places. Take, for instance, the unprecedented assault on civil liberties we have seen in Australia in recent years. Both the left and right of politics have in the

Peter Gregory investigates the introduction of school choice in the United Kingdom (this article first appeared in the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review.) For all the criticism it has received, the Cameron government in Britain has undertaken at least one transformative and visionary reform since its inception. That is, the introduction of free schools in the British education system