In 1971 there were 57 pages of federal environmental legislation. In 2016, there was an astonishing 4,669 pages.
That’s from our new report The Growth of Federal Environmental Law 1971 to 2016, authored by Morgan Begg. The Australian covered it on its front page on Saturday:
Red tape costs Australia $176 billion every year. Today the IPA’s Daniel Wild published his report on how Australia needs a Trump-style ‘one in, two out’ rule on red tape. If we had that rule since the Coalition formed government in 2013, there would be 107,885 fewer pages of red tape. Read The Australian‘s coverage of our report here.
Gillian Triggs, who last month said “sadly you can say what you like around the kitchen table“, on Tuesday received Liberty Victoria’s Voltaire Award for her commitment to freedom of speech. As Morgan Begg said in The Spectator Australia today, “by awarding a free speech prize to Triggs, Liberty Victoria not only makes a mockery of Voltaire, but also of themselves.”
Pulitzer Prize winning and former WSJ journalist Bret Stephens’ first article for the New York Times on Friday argued that people have a right to be sceptical of climate change without being called “deplorables.” I think a few readers missed the point – some New York Times subscribers threatened to boycott the paper for publishing it. MIT Professor Richard Lindzen’s speech from last week on how disconnected the climate debate has come from facts is a must read.
Listen to this 4 minute debacle of an answer from Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott on British radio from Tuesday on the UK Labour Party’s law enforcement policy. I made it 41 seconds in the first time I heard it. In this month’s edition of Standpoint, the magazine’s founder Daniel Johnson says Theresa May’s call for a snap general election is “a stroke of genius.”
Last week doctoral students at Yale staged a hunger strike, with one key difference – they can eat when they get hungry. The college’s Young Republican club had a classic response.
This is absurd. In Oregon, Mats Jarlstrom used mathematical equations to argue to the government that the state’s yellow lights should last longer before cutting to red. He was promptly hit with a $500 fine for the “practice of engineering” without a license.
In Melbourne 12-14 May you can help prove to regulators that regulations cannot keep up with technology. Register now to take place in a regulatory hackathon to use blockchain to get around regulations that clog up Australia’s electricity markets.
Article of the week:
Jeffrey A. Tucker posted this important 3,500 word article on the Foundation for Economic Education blog on Monday on how Pope Francis’ criticism of libertarianism ignores the long history of libertarianism in the Catholic Church itself.
IPA Staff Pick:
Each week an IPA staff member shares what they have enjoyed recently. Today: Scott Hargreaves
My pick this week is this 4,000 word article from Areo Magazine by Helen Pluckrose on how post-modern French intellectuals ruined the West. Written by a defender of traditional scientific method it perhaps gives too much credit to the coherence of what Roger Scruton called the “Parisian nonsense machine”, but it does map out the pernicious effects of the assault on reason.
Here’s what else the IPA said this week:
- John Roskam, Malcolm Turnbull must learn from Breitbart and fight culture wars – Australian Financial Review
- Andrew Bushnell, Locking down crime – The Daily Telegraph
- John Slater, Why should everyone else pay for your expensive university degree? – The Daily Telegraph
- Professor Sinclair Davidson, Reality is ‘the rich’ do pay their fair share – The Daily Telegraph
- Peter Gregory and Morgan Begg, Episode 8 – The Young IPA Podcast
