| Australia has over 1,000 years of coal, 30 per cent of global uranium supplies and a vast supply of natural gas. So why does Australia have the 4th most expensive electricity in the world (p. 24), according to the ACCC? |
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| A good start at solving this would be abandoning the National Energy Guarantee. Read Daniel Wild’s Parliamentary Research Brief from Friday, Five reasons why the NEG would be bad for Australia. Sir Bill English was deputy prime minister for 8 years of one of New Zealand’s most reformist and successful centre right governments, and oversaw a radical program that moved one third of people on welfare off it. Watch Gideon Rozner in conversation with Sir Bill about how we can help people get back to work: |
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| The number of Australians employed in small business has fallen by 330,000 over the last decade, says Matthew Lesh in his latest report, The decline of small business. The Australian featured Matthew’s research in a front page article on Wednesday. James Gunn was fired as director of the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 after disgusting decade old tweets were dug up. The outrage mob has claimed victims before, but this was a right wing outrage mob against a left wing director. As Christian Butler said in Spiked on Monday, when the right retaliates like that “there’s no pretence of principles anymore.” And if you want to know what it’s like to have the outrage mob come for you, read this fascinating 5,500 word article from Toby Young in Quillette on Monday. So while I don’t want The Daily Show host Trevor Noah fired, it would be a real shame if someone were to bring up the two race-based controversies he’s been involved with this week next time he blames Trump for unleashing racism in America. You would hate to see that happen. If you’ve been on Instagram for longer than 30 seconds you’ll know people need no assistance posting photos of themselves working out. The federal government decided to help them anyway, spending $600,000 in 18 months on “Instagram influencers”to promote health. Come along to the book launch for the new biography of Sir Joseph Carruthers, founder of the NSW Liberal Party, by IPA Research Fellow Dr Zachary Gorman. The event in Sydney on 21 August will be hosted by our friends at the CIS. Book here. |
Featuring Sir Bill English, Former New Zealand Prime Minister and Daniel Wild, IPA
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Article of the week:Consider the Helsinki press conference as #12,376 in the left’s list of “things that will inevitably bring down the Trump presidency.” Henry Olson in The Guardian explains why every time a controversy is whipped up against Trump his support only increases, going up by 6% since late 2017. You have to share it with your left wing friends. |
IPA Staff Pick:Each week an IPA staff member shares what they have enjoyed recently. Today: Peter Gregory The “I’m a communist, you idiot” Twitterspat demonstrates that the pantomime social media left/right divide is no longer a useful guide to politics because ordinary people don’t care about it, wrote Brendan O’Neill in Spiked last week. The new, exciting and real tensions are between “populists and elitists, democrats and technocrats, people who believe in the nation and people who despise the nation and the thing it contains”. |
Here’s what else the IPA said this week:
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