Reform of Heritage Legislation
Introduction Several states have recently overhauled their planning legislation. However, the flaws in their heritage legislation put clearer and more …
-
-
Hours, Not Dollars: Rethinking the cost-of-living debate
Executive Summary Public debate about the ‘cost-of-living crisis’ often confuses nominal price increases with declining affordability. This paper argues that …
-
Drowning in a Sea of Diagnoses. How medicalising distress is overwhelming Australia’s mental health system and failing those most in need
Executive Summary At the centre of Australia’s mental health system lies a paradox. Government spending has soared, doubling and redoubling …
-
Future No Longer Made in Australia: How we lost our low-cost electricity advantage
Trouble has been brewing in Australia’s smelting paradise over the last two decades, as rising energy prices, carbon charges and foreign competition have taken their toll
-
Politics of Pressure: how government intervention left us short of gas
Introduction Australia’s natural gas sector has transformed dramatically between 1975 and 2025. What began as a series of isolated gas …
-
Taxing Tobacco into Illegality: how split responsibilities and high excise created Australia’s tobacco wars
Executive Summary Australia’s tobacco control policy has reached a breaking point. For decades, bans on advertising and steady excise increases …
-
Childcare in Australia: A new approach
Executive summary Several well-known bodies, from the Productivity Commission to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the Minderoo Foundation and …
-
Keeping Budgets on the Rails: Rules for Fiscal Responsibility
Executive Summary Fiscal rules are numerical limits to one or more of government spending, revenue, deficits and debt. Their use …
-
The Unworkable Solution: An Economic Assessment of a Cashflow Tax for Australia
Executive Summary Australia faces persistent economic challenges. Productivity growth has slowed, business investment is uneven, and real wages have lagged …
-
An economic walk on the supply side
This is an edited version of Michael Stutchbury’s keynote address to the 2025 Freedom to Choose Conference Australia is a …
-
The RBA had no choice but to tighten the screws
The government has been rightly blamed for fuelling the inflation flames with too rapid growth of its own spending. This has come not just from the federal government but from several state governments as well.
-
The only things going up now are the prices
The decisions that made higher rates unavoidable were taken in Canberra. If inflation is the fire, interest rates are the fire brigade. Labor lit the match.
-
Economic exceptionalism is dead – and rate cuts died with it
Jim Chalmers doesn’t have a central bank governor to blame for his forward misguidance or for his complaint that monetary policy may be “smashing the economy”.
-
Do we entrench our advantages or let them slip?
We’re not in danger of becoming a banana republic, like Paul Keating warned in 1986. But we are losing our exceptional prosperity and sliding back into the pack of other less prosperous developed economies.
-
Black market lit up by backfiring ciggies tax
Jacking up the price of a product usually ensures that less of it is sold. That can be a good …
-
Tip from a friend: Australia’s economy is in a slow race to ruin
Sometimes it takes outsiders to say the obvious but unwelcome things: high spending, low growth and red tape are hurting us. Why does Labor fail to see it?
-
Why the war on wokeness is actually killing conservatives in Australia
Australian conservatives — however much they might be impressed by the way MAGA has fought back against woke ideas — would do well to understand that a successful movement cannot be defined forever by what it opposes.
-
Confessions of an Industrial Relations Club reporter
A half-century on from stagflation, outdated workplace rules and union monopolies remain the biggest barrier to reversing the Australian economy’s slipping productivity and wealth.
-
Double the debt and half the fiscal clues
The Labor government’s early surpluses now look like a flash in the pan and the budget is back to a deficit – which is set to deepen.
-
A good budget means setting some rules and adhering to them
There is a long history of fiscal rules, but the overall record is patchy, with governments lacking the fortitude to stick to rules when the going got tough.
-
Angus Taylor at CIS: Economic Reform, Immigration, and Australia’s Cost of Living Crisis
Speaking at his first address outside Canberra since being elected Leader of the Opposition by the Liberal Party room, Angus …
-
Reflecting Back: John Howard and Alexander Downer on Power, Alliances and Australia
Alexander Downer and former Prime Minister John Howard join author Tony Parkinson and CIS Executive Director Michael Stutchbury for a …
-
‘NIMBYism is a cancer’: Bragg outlines housing policy vision with Peter Tulip & Michael Stutchbury
Senator Andrew Bragg and economist Peter Tulip join Michael Stutchbury for a wide-ranging conversation on Australia’s housing crisis, the politics …
-
From $43B to $70B: The NBN Disaster and Off-Budget Deception
Ever wondered how governments keep massive spending hidden from the public eye? In this eye-opening video, we dive into the …
-
Peter Costello on the Legacy of Reform and the Road Ahead
From economic reform and rising government spending to cultural shifts and the decline of liberalism, Costello reflects on the ideas …
-
Coalition’s vision for economic & productivity reform | Sussan Ley & Michael Stutchbury
At this Centre for Independent Studies lunch forum on 20 October 2025, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley delivered a major address …
-
Consumer Choice, Risk & Safety with Fred Roeder and Michael Stutchbury
Where is the line between risk and regulation? In this episode of The Stutchbury Sessions, Fred Roeder from the Consumer …
-
How Australia Lost Its Economic Edge
Australia’s economy is slowing. Productivity has flatlined, debt is soaring, and growth has frozen. What caused one of the world’s …
-
Housing Reform in NSW & New Zealand | Chris Minns, Chris Bishop & Peter Tulip
At this Centre for Independent Studies forum, NSW Premier Chris Minns and New Zealand Housing Minister Chris Bishop hosted CIS …
-
How to vandalise savings: the new superannuation tax | Robert Carling
Australia’s new superannuation tax will target balances over $3 million. Yet, what seems like a modest reform does not just …
-
Submission to Senate Inquiry into Illegal Tobacco Crisis in Australia
The federal government should pause increases in tobacco excise to weaken the profit of the black market. Australia’s aggressive policy of continuously hiking tobacco excise has created a multi-billion-dollar illicit market, inadvertently turning a public health initiative into a significant funding stream for criminal organisations.
-
Submission to Senate Education and Employment References Committee
Despite good intentions, Australia’s Early Childhood Education and Care system has expanded well beyond its original purpose as a work …
-
Submission to Productivity Commission’s Investing in cheaper, cleaner energy and the net zero transformation Interim Report
The Productivity Commission’s statement that careful emissions reduction policy design will enable gains in productivity and living standards is unfounded. …
-
Submission to Heritage NSW
This submission argues that NSW’s heritage legislation has serious flaws. In particular, costs of listing are not compared with benefits. …
-
Submission to Victorian Legislative Council Select Committee Inquiry
Victoria Planning Provisions Amendments VC257, VC267 and VC274: Submission to Victorian Legislative Council Select Committee Inquiry 1. Introduction Housing in Victoria, …
-
Submission to the Inquiry into financial regulation and home ownership
Regulation of the financial system is needed to protect depositors and avoid financial crises. However, current financial regulations go beyond these legitimate objectives to prevent mutually advantageous loans.
-
Submission to the inquiry into the Better Targeted Superannuation Concessions and Other Measures Bill
Submission to the Senate Economics Legislation Committee in relation to its inquiry into the Better Targeted Superannuation Concessions and Other Measures Bill.
-
Submission to the Inquiry into the Transport Oriented Development Program
Housing policy in NSW has been failing. It has relied on setting targets for local governments and hoping councils would adhere to them. Those targets are too low, out of date and have not been enforced. As a result, the housing affordability crisis is getting worse.
-
Submission to the Senate Economics References Committee Inquiry into improving consumer experiences, choice, and outcomes in Australia’s retirement system.
Allowing first home buyers to borrow from their superannuation would transform superannuation from an obstacle to home ownership into a vehicle towards it.
-
The Rental Crisis. Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Committee
Rents are too high. This leads to homelessness, rental stress, long commutes, overcrowding, and a host of other social problems. …
Frequently Asked Questions
The Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) structure makes mistakes likely. It concentrates responsibility on one fallible individual, the Governor, answerable to a Board of non-experts, with little requirement to explain or defend decisions in detail. Arguments are subject to little scrutiny, either internally or externally. More fundamentally, the RBA has a culture that places a low priority on getting the answers right. As a result, mistakes are frequent, persistent and costly. Among several examples, the RBA recently placed higher priority on stabilising household debt than on its conventional goals of unemployment and inflation. Previously, it targeted the current account deficit. Read more ...
Inflation is rising around the world, the sting in the tail of the pandemic economic stimulus packages unleashed by governments in 2020. The narrative thus far is that this inflation spike is transitory, even if a little more persistent than first thought. It is expected to moderate as consumer price pressures ease and markets rebalance after the large positive demand shock and surge in consumer spending of the past 18 months. Read more ...