| Given what’s happening in Canberra at the moment it’s a great time to get back to some fundamentals and talk about Democracy, Freedom, and Faith – which the IPA will be doing when we talk with Greg Sheridan next month about his new book God is Good for You. Here’s Tony Abbott’s review of the book from The Spectator Australia a few weeks ago. Who knows? By the time you’re reading this he could be PM again! Book here for Brisbane on 13 September and Melbourne on 18 September. |
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| No matter how the leadership question is settled, the existential crisis of the Liberal party will not be resolved anytime soon. As John Roskam wrote in the Australian Financial Review on Wednesday, “the reality is that the main factions of the Liberal Party are on a unity ticket” when it comes to the party’s move to the left. Nigel Farage and Tony Abbott will be keynote speakers at The Spectator Anglo-Australian Forum in Sydney next month, a no holds barred discussion of the future of business, trade, politics, and culture in a post-Brexit world. The BBC’s top political interviewer Andrew Neil will be in conversation with Farage, Abbott, IPA board member Janet Albrechtsen, federal MP Steve Ciobo, Senator Matt Canavan, and others. Get your tickets to this exciting event here: |
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| Last week hundreds of newspapers joined together in support of freedom of the press. They were joined by The Atlantic who said “it is your right… to read what you will, to write what you think, and to publish what you believe “. Unless your Christian name is Kevin and your surname is Williamson then The Atlantic will sack you as a staff writer after one article for wrongthink. Aspiring socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is staying true to her ideological roots: the congressional candidate banned reporters from attending her public town hall events last week. And here’s another socialist idea in practice: the New York coffee shop Ocasio-Cortez once worked at is closing forever due to rising minimum wages that Ocasio-Cortez wants to more than double. You can be a progressive, you can vote for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary election, you can vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. But none of that will stop Antifa from bashing your head in with a bat if you carry a US flag to protest…with Antifa. Our friends at the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance have launched the Cheap Energy Guarantee, a campaign to scrap the Paris Climate Agreement mandate, provide certainty for investment, and abolish all subsidies for unreliable energy sources. The first episode of the IPA’s latest podcast, The Great Books of Literature, catapulted to the top of the arts category charts on iTunes last week. You can catch the first episode about Charles Dickens’ Bleak House on iTunes, Podbean and YouTube. The second episode sees John Roskam and Andrew Bolt discuss Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 book The Leopard and will be released on Tuesday. |
Featuring Douglas Murray, Author of The Strange Death of Europe
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Article of the week:New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced last week that “America… was never that great.” The excellent Dennis Prager is writing a series explaining the progressive left at The Daily Signal. His first article on Tuesday discussed how these kinds of sentiments are not abnormal for them. |
IPA Staff Pick:Each week an IPA staff member shares what they have enjoyed recently. Today: Daniel Wild With all the talk of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube banning conservatives for peddling “hate”, why isn’t socialism considered the grand-daddy of all hate crimes? That’s what James Piereson sets out to answer in this great 3,700 word piece in the New Criterion. As Piereson states, 110 million people were murdered or met a premature death under the socialist and communist governments of the 20th century. Surely that counts as one massive hate crime against humanity. |
Here’s what else the IPA said this week:
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