Opinion & Commentary
Opinion and Commentary contains media articles written by CIS researchers.
Categories
For richer or poorer, we're still a lucky country: Don't exaggerate the extent of poverty in Australia
The Australian economy experienced remarkable growth during most of the 1990s. Yet social researchers are still claiming that poverty is extensive – and even that it is getting worse. The latest...... Read More
Risk of being burnt in the melting pot: There are costs to a society in taking in more asylum seekers
Asylum seekers have become, in parallel with terrorism and consequent on it, the first major crisis of the 21st century. Terrorism and asylum seeking have been created by the failure of many governments...... Read More
The wasted decade: In the 90's, America had unprecedented power, but did little with it. It must now rue its lost opportunity.
In the lead article of the current issue of the US journal Foreign Affairs, Fouad Ajami describes the 1990s as "a lucky decade, a fool's paradise". It is an assessment that sets one thinking - about decades...... Read More
The great drink-driving scandal: Police road blitzes are wasteful and an affront to our liberties
Over the last Labour Day weekend in NSW, 106,396 people were apprehended by the police in a major operation lasting 72 hours. Of these, 105,950 (99.6 per cent) were found to be innocent and were released;...... Read More
A generation drowns in boos: Repairing society's attitude to rearing children would be revolutionary
The Centre’s eight-year research project, Taking Children Seriously, has established empirically that at least this generation’s children get the best start to life in the environment Peter Saunders...... Read More
Children pay the price of gender feminism war
For some radical feminists, males are patriarchal oppressors and the family is their torture chamber. Hence their taboo on men talking about the effects of feminism upon family life and the rearing of...... Read More
The damage done by the decline of marriage
In the past generation, Australian family life and marriage have undergone a revolution that has left wounds in the lives of thousands of adults and children, and, directly or indirectly, in the quality...... Read More
Morality and Foreign Policy
Recent events have generated a great deal of discussion about morality and foreign policy.... Read More
A clumsy hand is no help: Governments are no good at social policy
US founding father and third president Thomas Jefferson was right after all: “The government that governs least is the government that govern best”.... Read More
Tried and true way to economic growth
The Heritage Foundation in Washington has just published its economic freedom ratings for 2002, with Australia ranking in 14th position – that is, behind the economic high fliers who set world-best institutional...... Read More
Uni student quota system is unfair and inefficient
Although the unlucky ones don’t yet know who they are, more young Western Australians than normal seem likely to miss out on a place at university next year. This will come as a nasty surprise to people...... Read More
To populate or not to populate...
The question of legal and illegal immigration is likely to occupy the incoming federal government for some time to come.... Read More
What future exists for Afghanistan? Any solution must address the drug trade and the plight of women
The lands of central Asia have a sorry history of warfare, dating back to the times of the “silk road” linking Europe and Asia. My “mission” notes from thirty years ago argued that there was...... Read More
Why multicultural Australia is less welcome
Now that the electorate has shown resounding support for a principled approach to asylum seekers, a serious debate is emerging about what Australia can do for refugees and what we should do, in our own...... Read More
Set our unis free
It takes some imagination to describe Australia’s universities as showing ‘clear indications of market failure’, but academics Len Bahnisch and Iean Russell do so in their recent article (7/11) advocating...... Read More
The next battle is against tribalism: Nation building will not succeed in post-Taliban Afghanistan
Nomadic tribes have been at war in Afghanistan, among themselves and with their neighbours, since time immemorial. Afghanistan is not a country in any meaningful sense,. but a scattering of tribes...... Read More
Loss for education before polls closed
Even before the polling booths closed on 10 November, the higher education interest groups had lost the election.... Read More
How 'liberal' is the Liberal Party?
Last weekend, Australians re-elected John Howard’s Liberal Party for a third term in government. It was a hard-fought campaign, and some commentators are claiming that it has left the nation ‘bitterly...... Read More
In defence of traditional liberalism
Recently in The Australian Financial Review a left-wing economist – for reasons difficult to fathom a regular columnist on that paper – accused The Centre for Independent Studies of opposing democracy...... Read More
Central control dilutes quality
The recent Senate report, Universities in Crisis, declared that our universities are experiencing an ‘unmistakable deterioration in quality standards’. It is a common view, and we hear regularly about...... Read More
