Policy is what counts, not post-modernism

The Centre for Independent Studies’ 50th year provides an opportunity to assess half a century of ideas and policy impact that helped create today’s Australia. As John Maynard Keynes famously wrote, people underestimate the power of ideas.

Today, I’ve cast my eye over an impressive CIS timeline put together by editor Sue Windybank and graphic designer Simone Ericsson that will soon grace the foyer of our 131 Macquarie St office. It highlights policy impact from taxi deregulation and liberalised shopping hours to tackling school reading failures, indigenous disadvantage and the regulations restricting housing supply. Where they didn’t listen to us, such as our 2012 warning on the NDIS ‘monster’, we’ve been proven right.

Our 50th anniversary also may help counter alt-history narratives that rope CIS into a shadowy global network of right-wing think tanks. One ABC online example this week confirms how the national broadcaster has been captured by post-modernism and its identity politics offspring now driving antisemitism and other social divisions.

Thankfully, Gareth Hutchens’ article at least dispenses with the persistent conspiracy theory that Greg Lindsay founded CIS in 1976 under the direction or influence of British businessman Antony Fisher, who had set up London’s Institute for Economic Affairs and later the global Atlas Network of pro-market think tanks. Greg established Australia’s classical liberal think tank independent of any such person or institution.

Hutchens’ ABC account rightly points to the influence of the IEA and economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman on Margaret Thatcher— but misses Australian Labor.

After the Whitlam government and the unions blew up the economy, new Labor Treasurer Bill Hayden met the Nobel prize-winning Friedman in April 1975. Four months later, Hayden’s only budget speech declared that Australia was “no longer operating” in a “simple Keynesian world”.

Also missing is how the post-Keynesian ‘neo-liberal’ agenda was implemented in Australia by the Bob Hawke and Paul Keating (pictured) Labor government that reversed the union wage blowout, floated the $A, deregulated the financial sector, dismantled  import protection, cut government spending, reduced excessive tax rates and privatised government business enterprises. Overlay it with scary music if you like, but Labor’s aspirational  neo-liberalism laid the foundation for Australia’s modern prosperity.

The ABC article eventually gets to its objective: to highlight a Greens-led Senate committee that seeks to connect a network of pro-market think tanks to climate change denialism, misinformation and disinformation.

Mrs Thatcher, of course, put climate change on the political map in the late 1980s. And from what I can tell, no CIS research has queried the phenomenon of human-induced global warming, though our researchers are increasingly questioning the carbon emission policies that have destroyed Australia’s traditional cheap energy advantage.

In our submission to the Senate committee, I reject academic claims that CIS policy work is directed or funded in any way by the Atlas Network or that CIS is part of some malign conspiracy. CIS research is under the control of its executive director.

Claims of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ risk becoming a Trojan horse for increased government control over individual free speech and the CIS brand of civil society research that promotes choice, opportunity and prosperity. Only a month in, 2026 looks like an echo of 1976 as current events confirm how our work is needed more than ever.