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Australian families are feeling the pinch of the cost-of-living crisis gripping the nation as inflation, record energy bills, and housing costs and rents skyrocket. The federal government is throwing fuel to this fire by adding more people than the population of Tasmania to our nation over the next two years. This unsustainable blow-out to migration, tipped to reach a whopping

This article is written by Dr Doug Mitchell for the IPA. With the worst of the pandemic subsiding, attention has slowly shifted to government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular focussing on some of the more draconian measures: lockdowns, mandatory masks and vaccine mandates. Given the horrors of what is unfolding in China, these measures are very much a

The IPA has today released a new research paper by Senior Fellow, Dr John Abbot, highlighting the recurrent patterns of drought and flooding rains in Australia – challenging claims that recent weather events were unprecedented – and exploring the potential of AI techniques to provide more skilful long-lead monthly forecasts than those provided by the Bureau of Meteorology’s GCM models,

I live by the sea and like walking along the coastline including scrambling over the rock ledges in Noosa National Park. All the way from Noosa to Sydney it is possible to find wave-cut platforms etched out of the sandstone towards the bottom of the cliff faces. The sandstone is very old, thought to date from the time of the

It’s to the credit of the Institute of Public Affairs that it is interested in the idea of an Australian canon and it would be a mistake to see the list it released late last year – primarily of our significant books but also of paintings, songs and films – as some conservative plot. Besides, there’s the memory of a

This article from the Summer 2020 edition of the IPA Review is written by German chemistry professor and environmentalist, Fritz Vahrenholt. Sometimes you have to go up in the air to better appreciate the big picture. From the helicopter perspective, many patterns and connections become clearer. This also applies to the climate system: 2,000 years ago, it was warm (Roman

This article from the Spring 2020 edition of the IPA Review is written by Private Health Australia’s Policy and Research Director, Ben Harris. If you want to know why private health insurance is expensive in Australia, here are some of the culprits. Private health insurance is highly over-regulated. There are hundreds of pages of laws, rules and regulations dictating what health

This article from the Spring 2020 edition of the IPA Review is written by IPA Adjunct Fellow, Matthew Lesh. Environmental catchcries of the early 21st century are apocalyptic: “Billions of people are going to die,” “life on Earth is dying,” and “Governments aren’t addressing it”. Religious undertones are abundant. It is good and evil. The end is nigh. Human sin

Economic modelling in a new report released today by the free market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs has found that the COVID-19 elimination strategy adopted by Commonwealth and state governments could cost up to $319 billion, the equivalent to 23% of GDP, from 2020 to 2022. The report, titled Medical Capacity: An Alternative to Lockdowns finds that the

This article from the Winter 2020 edition of the IPA Review is written by bushfire expert Dr Christine Finlay.* As bushfires peaked in the Australian summer of 2019-20, we heard a lot of the myth of climate change as the prime cause of the flames’ spread and severity. In this article I address climate change but also a second myth,