Archived publication for 2012
Recent publications
False dawn: the Arab Spring
In a sense, the so-called Arab Spring can be said to have begun on 26 December 2010 in the Tunisian hinterland township of Sidi Bouzid, where a 26-year-old impoverished vegetable seller and father of eight, Mohamed Bouazizi, immolated himself in...
Andrew Bolt law to be supercharged by Gillard government's anti-discrimination changes
"Attorney-General Nicola Roxon's proposed changes to anti-discrimination laws announced on Monday are an attack on the fundamental freedoms of Australians," said Simon Breheny, Director of the Legal Rights Project at the Institute of Public...
Gillard government's anti-discrimination changes threaten legal rights
"The Gillard government's changes to anti-discrimination laws undermine fundamental legal rights like the presumption of innocence," said Simon Breheny, Director of the Legal Rights Project at free market think tank the Institute of Public...
Gillard government's new censorship regime worse than internet filter
The Gillard government's new online censorship policy may result in Australians having even more restrictions on their internet use than under the government's original internet filter policy, according to Simon Breheny, Director of the Legal...
25 more ideas for Tony Abbott
Following on from our 75 ideas in the last edition, John Roskam, James Paterson and Chris Berg offer 25 more ideas to reshape Australia. 76 Have State Premiers appoint High Court justices 77 Allow ministers to be appointed...
A roadmap to peace in the war on drugs
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 contributed to the toll, both prohibitionists and those for...
Power and the years of LBJ
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 Johnson. Commencing with The Path to Power in 1982,...
The essence of successful nations
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...
Why capitalism is awesome
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,...
Regulator lets the cat out of the bag: data retention not just about national security
"The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's demand to access Attorney-General Nicola Roxon's proposed data retention regime reveals how dangerous this regime could be," said Simon Breheny, Director of the Rule of Law Project at the free...