Recent publications
The Biggest Loser is the Nanny State
The recently concluded reality TV show, The Biggest Loser, contains some surprising lessons for public policy. Of all the reality television shows bombarding us, The Biggest Loser best combines entertainment with the spectacle of social...
Plain packaging FOI documents
Plain packaging FOI request from IP Australia.
Better safe?
At the beginning of 2010, the British and US governments approved the introduction of body scanners at international airports. In both cases, the impetus behind their implementation was the case of Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to...
Why we love Mad Men
Nanny State Polling Data
Full data from the Nanny State polling conducted by Galaxy Research on behalf of the IPA.
The demise of British liberty
The last decade has seen British liberties savaged. The British state has accumulated unprecedented power and the instinct of politicians and bureaucrats is always to expand their power base even further into areas unknown in peacetime. Even in...
Mark Webber right on Australian Nanny State
"Mark Webber was spot on calling Australia a nanny state. But it's set to get worse as local, state and federal governments plan to tax, regulate and ban away individual choice and responsibility on every aspect of our lives", Director of the IP...
From the Nanny State to the Bully State
During the course of this decade we will witness a global battle over the fate of the nascent Bully State. The Bully State will be this decade's ‘bad cop' to the Nanny State's ‘good cop' of past decades. The past generation of welfare...
Hypocrisy greets (another) closure of the Collingwood Tote
It was hard to miss the recent closure of an inner urban Melbourne pub. For days the media at both state and national level covered the story, and even The 7.30 Report devoted several minutes to it. This particular pub had a long-held reputation...
The GST is a massive fat tax
Many public health activists claim that a tax on fatty food is necessary to tackle obesity. The critics of this fat tax idea point to a number of studies revealing the limitations of such a scheme. A 2005 US study of a 10 per cent fat tax on dairy...