The federal election in May has installed a new Labor government in Canberra, and much is being made of the campaign run by teal independents who unseated six Liberal MPs from some of the wealthiest electorates in Australia.

My electorate of Kooyong was one such electorate that is now represented by a teal candidate, Dr Monique Ryan.

It was evident from the beginning of the election campaign that Dr Ryan was posing a serious challenge to former treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who represented the seat of Kooyong.

It was not because Dr Ryan’s campaigners outnumbered Frydenberg’s or she had more posters, T-shirts and flyers visible around the neighbourhood. It was because the supporters of Dr Ryan knew what they stood for. Fighting for climate action may be a misguided goal but it signified ‘a goal’ to her supporters – and they believed in it and were enthused to fight for it.

I had the opportunity to meet Josh Fydenberg as a constituent at one of the campaign events.

Josh spoke knowledgeably about the economy and his government’s achievements, and then invited questions. As he had spoken at length about how much his government was doing to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, I asked him, ‘What about nuclear energy? Is his government looking to transition to nuclear energy?’

Josh’s answer was illuminating. He said that nuclear energy was a great option but post the Fukushima accident it was too difficult to build a consensus for development of nuclear energy in Australia because of entrenched opposition.

But issues like a transition to nuclear energy is exactly what we should be talking about. Incidentally, Finland’s Green Party has just adopted a fully pro-nuclear stance! [Read here] If the Coalition had adopted the same policy, the party and its supporters would have had a substantial response to the teal independents’ demand for climate action.

In fact, as IPA Executive Director John Roskam said in his analysis of the election in the Australian Financial Review:

The key point of differentiation they once had against their opponents – as responsible economic managers – the Liberals gave up years ago.

Hence, the question, what is now the Liberal Party?

Which is a question some thoughtful Liberals have been asking for a lot longer that just since Saturday. And they’ve been pondering what exactly has the Liberal Party achieved in eight and a half years in office federally. And they’ve been pondering what would Morrison have done if somehow the Coalition had won a fourth term at the weekend. To that question, many thoughtful Liberals reply ‘not much’.

The truth is the federal Liberals haven’t known what they stand for since May 2014. [Read here]

The Liberal Party Lost By Standing For Nothing
If you stand for nothing, eventually no one stands behind you.
The new National Curriculum fails Australian children

One of the issues that wasn’t addressed during the election campaign was our children’s future – is our society truly preparing them to thrive in an increasingly competitive and difficult world?

Which is shocking given what they experienced during the pandemic. Our children are coming out nearly two years of interrupted education, remote schooling, being periodically locked into their houses and complete social isolation. Our children are not OK.

On all the sad metrics relating to mental health – suicides, suicide ideation, self-harm and anxiety disorders – Australians below the age of 25 are doing poorly. I don’t want to quote numbers on such a distressing issue, suffice to say that the pandemic has grossly exacerbated what was already a downward trajectory on mental health.

Educationally, their performance is also dropping dramatically. Between 2003 and 2016, Australian children fell from 10th to 25th in the world in Maths, from 8th to the 14th in Science and from 4th to the 16th in Reading as per the the Programme for International Student Assessment or PISA as it is popularly known. And this year, for the first time, the proportion of Year 12 students in the country studying the highest level of Maths is below 10 per cent. [Read here $]

So how does our newly minted National Curriculum plan to stem the fall? By getting Year 1 students ‘creating and performing addition and subtraction stories told through First Nations Australians’ dances’. I kid you not! You can see it with your own eyes here.

As the IPA Director of Foundations of Western Civilisation Program Dr Bella d’Abrera said in The Australian:

What the national curriculum authority has produced is a political document infused with a pagan-green ideology. This is apparent in the health and physical education syllabus, as years 9 and 10 are taught to ‘engage in nature experiences to understand how these activities can promote the development of eco-identity...’ [Read here]
New Curriculum, Same Old Leftist Ideological Bent
This is something Bella had warned us would happen, if the proposed National Curriculum was sent back to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) for a revision, without any public viewing.

It is only a matter of time before Australians realise their children are being cheated out of a decent education and start voting primarily as parents – rather than as homeowners or wage earners. The trend is already growing in the US. Be it the gubernatorial elections in Virginia or the banning of critical race theory from schools in various US States – parents are forthrightly speaking up for the education and mental wellbeing of their children.

The IPA has been preparing for this eventuality with a program that will give the tools to parents, grandparents and teachers to reclaim back their children’s education. I’ll share more with you in my next monthly update to you.

Internet censorship must be fought

The Institute of Public Affairs was the first organisation to draw attention to former Minister for Communications Paul Fletcher’s dangerous proposal to give the Australian media regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the power to decide what constitutes ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ and demand the removal of content from social media platforms on that basis.

Despite the change of government, this proposal will most likely continue with support from the Australian Labor Party.

But the IPA is determined to fight this dangerous move. Last month, IPA Director of Legal Rights Program Morgan Begg wrote a letter to all Members of Parliament calling the proposal what it is: government mandated speech censorship.

As Morgan writes in the letter:

The idea that debate needs to be suppressed to protect against harms to “democratic processes” is a draconian and arrogant assumption that belongs in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, not in a genuine liberal democratic society. That a regulator would presume to exercise this kind of control over the electoral process, including what people are allowed to say in an election period, is completely inconsistent with Australia’s democratic traditions which have historically placed a high value on the freedom of political communication. [Read here]

Federal Government Must Abandon Plan For Internet Censorship
And I’m happy to report the media is finally paying attention. The Sydney Morning Herald ran a major piece on the issue liberally sharing the IPA’s concerns with the legislation. As it says:

The IPA argues that the code’s aims are so vague and broad that the authority could be put in a position of adjudicating the truth or falsity of contentious claims — some of which are initially accepted as true but later proven false. Begg pointed to disputes around pandemic restrictions and the authenticity of material on the laptop of US President Joe Biden’s son Hunter as areas where established “truths” had later been disproven. [Read here$]

If our leaders think they have heard the end of this, they are wrong. The IPA is determined to oppose this proposal to the end. I hope I can count on your support against this terrible proposal too.

From the land of floods and droughts

The extreme weather events in NSW and Queensland earlier in the year played a role in giving the Climate 200 candidates a push. It promoted a sense of unease – pushed by the media and activists – that rainfall in Australia has become more extreme, and it is because of the atmosphere becoming warmer and wetter because of climate change.

But there are feelings and then there are facts. And it is facts that interest IPA Senior Fellow Dr Jennifer Marohasy.

In a new IPA research report, Are Extreme Rainfall Events Increasing in Frequency? Case study of the 2022 floods in Eastern Australia, Dr Marohasy and journalist, editor and independent researcher Chris Gillham, analyse rainfall records from 20 locations that fall in the flood zones and which have the longest continuous rainfall records.

Here are the key findings from the report:

Crohamhurst in Queensland still holds the 24-hour record for the wettest ever day in Australia with 907mm of rainfall in 1893. Why wasn’t this considered in 2022 by the Bureau of Meteorology? Because the station was closed by the BoM in 2003.
The BoM claimed that Lismore in NSW had a new 24-hour record of 146.8mm set in 2022. However, this figure is based on rainfall records from Lismore airport weather station that was opened only in 2003. When combined with the rainfall records of the former weather station in Lismore at Centre Street, the wettest day in Lismore was 21 February 1954 with 334.3mm of rainfall.
The longitudinal analysis of the rainfall records across the 20 locations (many going back to the 19th century) show no consistent increase in the frequency or intensity of rainfall. [Read here]
The research has been provided as a submission to the NSW Flood Inquiry.
The Great Renewable Energy Con

Last month, IPA Executive General Manager and IPA Review Editor Scott Hargreaves and IPA Director of Policy Gideon Rozner had the pleasure to sit down with Dr Benny Peiser to break down the greatest con of our times: net zero and the renewable energy sector.

Dr Peiser set up the UK-based Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2008 to highlight the challenge of harmful policies envisaged by governments to mitigate global warming.

In the discussion, Dr Peiser shares how Europe’s chickens are coming home to roost with its net zero dreams leading to soaring energy prices and its dangerous dependence on Russian gas. He warned against Australia taking the same perilous road by allowing dependence on China to exploit our lack of energy security.

Dr Peiser gave a reality check to all those who think that Australia’s efforts to go net zero can bring global temperatures down:

The Western governments are all talking to each other and putting pressure on each other, and they manage to convince or press the prime ministers into these targets which they think they can sell as a big success, but of course, we know that the rest of the world couldn’t give a monkey’s about these targets. I mean, the Indians are saying, ‘Yeah, we are also doing net zero in, I don’t know, 2070, and by the way, we need about a trillion per year or something like that, and if you send us the check, we’ll sign up to it’.
He went on to warn Australians:

The point I’m making is that we know from history that most of the big wars in the 20th century were fought over energy. Energy will be one of the most important, if not the most important resource for energy security around the world, and if Western governments in the US, in Canada, in Australia, in Europe don’t realize how important it is, they will damage their own position and throw away one of the most important cards they hold. [Watch here]
Federal Government Must Abandon Plan For Internet Censorship
If you’re interested in following the IPA’s research on climate, energy and net zero more closely, I would recommend subscribing to Scott’s monthly climate and policy update. [Subscribe here]