Archived publication for February 2009
Recent publications
Free to gamble: The roles of the gambling industry and policy in a modern Australian society
Keeping up with Kevin: Kevin Rudd's testosterone technocracy
"From time to time in human history there occur events of a truly seismic significance, events that mark a turning point between one epoch and the next." If the Prime Minister's rhetoric is anything to go by, big things are brewing. He announced...
Swan should reduce, not increase, investment restrictions
‘During the middle of a global financial crisis, Wayne Swan should be loosening, not increasing, restrictions to investment capital into Australia', Director of the IP and Free Trade Unit at the Institute of Public Affairs, Tim Wilson, said...
Remarks to the Senate Inquiry into the Nation Building and Jobs Plan
The Senate should reject the fiscal stimulus package in its current format. The package contains a lot of spending and little actual stimulus. The proposed spending is poor quality expenditure of Federal funding. Discretionary fiscal policy has a...
Rudd blames Institute of Public Affairs for neo-liberalism
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, in his essay in The Monthly, blames the Institute of Public Affairs for being the source of neo-liberalism in Australia.
How Labor factions broke New South Wales
In the six months following the 1975 defeat of the Whitlam Government, Australia's two most populous states held elections. In Victoria, the voters re-elected a Liberal government that had been in office for 21 years; in NSW they rejected one that...
The 'mining boom' myth
Mining isn't the be-all and end-all of the Australian economy. If the ‘mining boom ends', as widely predicted by politicians and other interventionists, life will go on. Apparently, Australia is even luckier than we generally think. We have...
Imposing our preferences on whaling cultures
Few issues illustrate how subjective beliefs about morality distorts environmental debate more than the issue of whaling. Many environmentalists claim to be simply advocates for the sustainable use of resources; they claim that they are not in...
Hitler's grotesque economics
Sinclair Davidson reviews The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze(Allen Lane, 2007, 799 pages). In the acclaimed television series Band of Brothers the Webster character abuses a column of German...
The ideological baggage of old Europe
John Roskam reviews The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648 to 1815 by Tim Blanning (Penguin, 2007, 736 pages). On the television show Backyard Blitz, household gardens are designed and built in a couple of hours. In Britain in the eighteenth century...