2011 Conference May 20-22

The first Liberty & Society conference of 2011 was held in May. We invited 34 young people from all states and territories apart for Tasmania and the Northern Territory.

Our lecturers included first time L&S presenter, Professor Judith Sloan who amongst many other positions is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne. We are very pleased that we are now able to ask L&S alumni who are now academics to join us as lecturers. Dr Jonathan Crowe and Dr Darryn Jensen who are both from the University of Queensland discussed liberal political philosophy and law. The depth and quality of the CIS staff means that we can also call on staff to lecture. Jessica Brown and Dr Oliver Hartwich handled lively debates on the controversial subject of population growth in Australia.

2010 Conference

We had 30 young people from around Australia attend the May conference.

As usual we were supported by four wonderful lecturers who stayed for the whole weekend. New lecturers were Professor Nicholas Aroney who took the Law session and Professor Warwick McKibbin talking about the ‘Economics of Climate Change’ which proved to be a fascinating session. Professor McKibbin is a very busy man and we were very grateful to him for fitting us in between returning from the Brooking Institute in the USA where he is working with the US Senate on carbon emissions.

One interesting side benefit of the L&S conferences for the attendees is the opportunity to write for the CIS and Policy magazine in particular. For example in the current Policy there are 19 pieces of writing by people who have been to a Liberty and Society conference. A number of these people go on to write for major papers and online sites.

A unique opportunity for L&S alumni in 2010 was to volunteer and be involved at the Mont Pelerin Society conference in October 2010. 10 alumni came to Sydney, worked at the conference and had an opportunity to sit in on sessions throughout the week.

2009 September Conference

As usual an engaged and open minded group attended the latest Liberty and Society conference.  It is striking how generous all the participants are, whether they agree of disagree, in listening to the (sometimes extreme) opinions of others.  Discussions ranged from the impact of the GFC, vilification laws, can we allow the economy to ‘self-organise’ and the difference between conservatism and liberalism among other topics.

The lecturers for this conference were:

• Political History - Professor Greg Melleuish– School of History, University of Wollongong
• Economics – Dr Jason Potts – School of Economics UQ
• Law - Dr Darryn Jensen School of Law UQ (L&S alumni)
• GFC – Dr Stephen Kirchner (CIS) and Dr Oliver Hartwich (CIS)
• Opening Dinner Guest Speaker:  Dr Tanveer Ahmed on Politics in Pakistan.

The attendees ranged from people studying Mining, Biotechnology, Business, Law, Commerce, Economics, Political Science and Media degrees to others starting out at Access Economics and Dept of Treasury in Canberra and WA

A couple of comments sum up the weekend.

“A fantastic conference that facilitated discussion of ideas that are severely under-represented at university”

“Truly one of the best weekends of my life . . . I reveled in the opportunity to spend all hours of the day discussing politics, economics and social justice issues.”