IPA Review – April 2016

On 19 January 2016, Professor Bob Carter, Emeritus Fellow of the IPA passed away following a heart attack suffered the week before. He died peacefully in the company of his family. We have lost a great scientist and a very fi ne person. I first met Bob soon after I started as Executive Director of the IPA in 2005. Bob

Daniel Chirot and Scott Montgomery from the School of International Studies at the University of Washington have telegraphed the Enlightenment into ‘four big ideas’ that they present through the writings of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and the constitutional debates between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. The modern world, both its enormous promise and its gravest troubles—from the existential

Decisions by international corporations to invest in Australian economic sectors, such as agriculture, housing, and energy no doubt affect employment and more importantly, the lifestyles and wellbeing of Australians to different degrees. You don’t have to look far to see the reactions by unions and other groups towards change and foreign ownership—which in a way reflects the psyche of Australians

A history of mateship could be a history of Australia. In fact, in the years when the Old Left view of the Australian story dominated the history books, it often was. In these tales, quintessential Australians such as the shearers demonstrated their mateship by reading Henry Lawson’s poems in The Bulletin, forming a union and founding the Labor Party. The

It’s impossible to understand Australia’s political history of the 1950s and 1960s without understanding the Labor Party Split. And it’s impossible to understand the Split without understanding the role of Bartholomew Augustine (B.A) Santamaria in it. Now, it can be said that that it’s impossible to try to understand Santamaria without having read this magnificent biography of him by Gerard

In recent years, there seems to have been an ever-increasing number of public controversies around some aspect of causing offence. From the Andrew Bolt case in Australia to the use of trigger warnings on United States campuses, there seems to be an inexorably growing trend towards prohibiting speech on the grounds that it may cause offence. What is striking about

In the 176 page report into smoking produced by the Preventative Health Taskforce—which Labor used as a blueprint for plain packaging— cigars are mentioned just twice. Once, buried in a footnote to a graph showing declining smoking rates across blue and white collar groups; and once in a piece of draft legislation written not for Australia, but for the United

The Australian of the Year is meant to go to citizens who ‘shape our nation, inspire us and are role models for us all’. However, the last few years have shown that the award is now strictly given to activists who endorse trendy, progressive causes. With the announcement of the 2016 Australian of the Year award going to Lieutenant General

A ‘black swan event’ refers to the unprecedented— something that changes how we previously perceived reality. The Murray-Darling Basin is a place replete with black swans (both figuratively and literally), particularly the Lower Lakes, Coorong and the Murray Mouth. Over 4,000 black swans were counted in a bird census of the Lower Lakes in January 2011, and there are oft

To fulfil its role as a public broadcaster the Australian Broadcasting Corporation no longer requires government funding. Notwithstanding the Essential public opinion polls in 2013 and 2014 indicating widespread support for the ABC, debate rightfully continues over government funding to the public broadcaster, with the Abbott government cutting its budget by around 4.6 per cent over the next five years.