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New Year starts now at AIPDear , You may still be on holidays, but we're not. We've opened the year at a cracking pace, and we're hoping for the sort of innings our cricketers have been having. If you read the Sunday Mail you may have seen my op-ed on the crisis in science and the Great Barrier Reef. We have the original up on our website under the title, "Our Reef is still Great, but the research isn’t". It references a paper by Dr Piers Larcombe and Professor Peter Ridd, which could be the scientific paper of the year. It can be downloaded by clicking here. This is an important issue which goes far beyond exaggeration of the state of the reef and touches on the structure of our universities, free speech, academic rigour, and public sector governance. Tertiary education is one of our biggest export earners, a driver of national and individual well-being, and also a significant portion of the Commonwealth Government budget. It needs to maintain quality and give value for money. At the end of last year the Australian parliament passed the same sex marriage legislation. As a result Phillip Ruddock has been commissioned to chair an expert panel to examine whether Australian law adequately protects the human right to freedom of religion. The answer to that is clearly no. We will be making a submission that will build on our previous submission to the parliament's Free Speech inquiry on Section 18C. It will make out the case that religion is a subset of free speech, and individuals are entitled to their own opinions as long as they do not physically harm another. We will also argue that blasphemy laws are inconsistent with free speech and ought to be abolished, where they exist. Further, rights in this area are governed by inconsistent state legislation, and as with defamation law, this is one area where uniform legislation is desirable to prevent forum shopping and universal human rights being curtailed by parochial state governments (see for example the case of Archbishop Porteous in Tasmania). During the state election last year we campaigned on power generation and the proposed ban on developer donations to political parties. We have one discussion paper on power in the middle of preparation and we will continue to advocate the right of people involved in the development industry (which constitutes 15% of Gross State Product) to be as fully involved in politics as any other citizens. We are currently in the process of mailing out our report on donations and state politics which you can download from here. Apart from that we will be putting together a program for the first half of this year. This will include a seminar in February to look at policies and priorities for Queensland, taking account of the election result. If you have any ideas you think I should take account of, please email me. And if you want to help on any of these projects it would be great to hear from you as well. Regards,
GRAHAM YOUNG
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