IPA Review- October 2012

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Researcher at the IPA, Peter Gregory. A wise man once said, ‘If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.’ Actually, it was Noam Chomsky. Wait…really? Whatever. He’s right. Freedom means freedom for everyone. Even people who

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Development Coordinator at the IPA, Lydia Bevege. Tolstoy famously wrote that while happy families are all alike, unhappy families are uniquely unhappy in their own way. In their latest book, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist James Robinson have found the Russian novelist’s adage holds

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Executive Director of the IPA, John Roskam. Australians don’t normally do satire. We’re not quite serious enough. That indispensable The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory helpfully points out that Samuel Johnson defined ‘satire’ as a poem ‘in which wickedness or folly is censured’. John

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Research Fellow at the IPA, Richard Allsop. John Bright’s fame was so high in the middle of the 19th century that early settlers in the village of Morse’s Creek in north eastern Victoria decided to rename the place, Bright. One imagines that few of the town’s current population

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Director of the North Australia Project at the IPA, John Shipp. The false dichotomy offered in the title of Ian Lowe’s book Bigger or Better: Australia’s population debate hints at the one-sided polemic contained within. Lowe puts a forthright case for ‘stabilising’ Australia’s population at or near current

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Senator for Victoria and Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business and Fair Competition, Scott Ryan. There is almost a cult amongst readers of political history and biography: those who count down the years until the release of the next volume of Robert Caro’s totemic biography of Lyndon

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Director of Education Standards Institute and author of ‘Educating your child: It’snot rocket science’, Dr Kevin Donnelly. School funding and the best way to manage Australia’s tripartite education system, involving Catholic, independent and government schools, have been at the centre of public debate over the last two

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Anaesthetist and Adjunct Associate Professor at Swinburne University’s Centre for Human Psychopharmacology, Dr Michael Keane. The war on drugs has been raging for decades. Tens of millions of lives have been lost or ruined. Because both the effect of the drugs and the effect of criminalisation have

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Research Associate at the British TaxPayers’ Alliance and lead researcher to the 2020 Tax Commission, Rory Meakin. Australia’s tax system has its problems. Too complicated, too many special allowances and specific taxes, and too much money drained out of the pockets of working Australians. But things could

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Director of the Work Reform and Productivity Unit at the IPA, John Lloyd. The lax governance of Australian trade unions has come into sharp focus over recent months. Allegations about financial mismanagement and poor governance concerning a number of trade unions have been reported. The affairs of

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Director of the Rule of Law project at the IPA, Simon Breheny. In July this year, the AttorneyGeneral’s Department released a discussion paper to guide the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security in its consideration of potential national security reforms. It was entitled ‘Equipping Australia Against

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Researcher at the IPA, Dom Talimanidis. No one doubts that Australian farmers often do it tough. But their number one enemy is not supermarkets, it is big government. In 2010, many agricultural businesses and households were in a precarious position. The drought saw years of financial reserves

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Research Fellow at the IPA, Julie Novak. The Western world’s post global financial crisis stagnation has shaken faith in the idea that central banking and monetary policy activism can resuscitate sick economies back to life. This has been reinforced by the fact that controversial policies initiated by

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Associate Editor Richard Lyons. If Tony Abbott is to win office at the next federal election in 2013 he has a massive savings task ahead of him. Despite Wayne Swan’s insistence that a ‘wafer-thin’ surplus will be achieved in the 2013-2014 budget, Australia will still be in

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Director of Policy at the IPA, Chris Berg. Each year the glossy business magazine FastCompany releases a list of what it considers to be the ‘World’s 50 most innovative companies’. This list is populated much as you would expect. In 2012, the leader is Apple, followed by Facebook, Google,

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Journalist with ‘The Australian’, Christian Kerr. Ted Baillieu and revolution aren’t words that you normally see together, but that’s how the report read: ‘A secret audit commission report calls for a revolution in the way government services are delivered, with charities and private businesses taking responsibility from

This article from the October 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by Editor James Paterson. One of the most common complaints about Australian politics today is that it is too obsessed with the trivial. Instead of focusing on policy, it gets bogged down by personality. Instead of featuring inspiring vision, it is loaded with attacks on individuals. Instead of