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Media and news in MarchDear , I’m competing with the budget I know, but this report was due to go out in March. You will get a budget report in a day or so. Climate changeI made a decision a long time ago not to get professionally involved in the arguments around the science with respect to climate change. It’s fairly complex, and rarely do you change anyone’s mind. And in a sense it is irrelevant to public policy. The position we find ourselves in now is that a significant proportion of our population has been panicked into thinking that urgent action is necessary to deal with an increase in temperature. It doesn’t matter whether that conclusion is right or wrong, they are going to demand solutions. In that world our role is to advocate for a least harm approach, telling everyone to take a deep breath and tackle this issue methodically. Coal is an important part of our generation mix, and will remain so for decades. Which is what I told the readership of the Courier Mail. Didn’t seem to make much impression on Australia’s school kids, some of whom decided to demonstrate against climate change, and coal, so The Spectator published this piece giving them a Socratic lesson in the morality of mining fossil fuels. One victim of the climate panic is Australian manufacturing, a fact I drew attention to with this media release about the demise of Ipswich firm Claypave. Not all manufacturing will suffer. Plenty of people will be employed selling EVs, and building the infrastructure to charge them, if Labor is elected, although doesn’t look like Labor has done its research, so maybe this won’t eventuate. HousingHousing is part of a web of investment and tax issues, including negative gearing and capital gains tax, and it is one of our most basic human needs. Our Economic Researcher, Nicholas Umashev, updated and refined our previous housing affordability index, and we launched the first of a quarterly series using ABS statistics to track the relative cost of housing as measured by repayments and deposits. Despite what you might have thought, housing is pretty affordable for most of us on an historical basis, apart from those wanting to buy their first home, where the initial deposit is a huge hurdle. Let’s hope the government adopts our proposal to allow first home buyers to borrow some of their deposit from their super fund. PollingOur research on Australians’ attitudes to retirement savings figured very prominently in The Australian. It’s an area where the government is ahead of Labor on most issues, but where, regrettably most Australians have bought the line that negative gearing deductions ought to go. This is for a mix of reasons. Mostly they don’t seem to think that it will make houses more affordable, they just think it is fair. We also conducted research into the New South Wales election, detecting that voters were unhappy with both sides, although they rated the Liberals ahead of the Labor Party. The only thing that we saw that could stop Ms Berejiklian winning was the possibility that she would not get enough preferences from minor parties. As it was, she must have, although the NSW Electoral Commission’s stats are pretty hopeless so I have not been able to check that yet. Minor party voters will be the key to the federal election as well, I suspect. We will poll federal voting intentions soon, and our final polling on New South Wales is yet to be released. Fact BitesLike a sound bite, a fact bite is designed to give a sense of an issue, without being a deep dive. They are a way of getting our positions in front of decision makers without having to do a major study. We also hope our bites have a bit of a nip in them, and make readers sit up. Fact Bite #1 looked at the GDP per capita question. Turns out it looks slightly better for the coalition than Labor over the last 40 or so years, which doesn’t take account of the time it takes to fix an economy, when you’ve inherited a broken one. Fact Bite #2 tackles some issues to do with electrical vehicles. Christchurch Mosque and Western Civilisation Reading GroupThe most momentous event during the month was the shooting at the Christchurch Mosque. Didn’t take 24 hours for people to be allocating blame. Apparently we have a white supremacy problem, and it is all the fault of people who support organisations like ours because we are adocates of patriarchal, CIS normative, European culture, advocating neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism, nationalists and nativists, who naively believe they live in one of the best countries in the world, or some such concoction of epithets and insults. That story is wrong. I doubt whether the terror attack would have happened without Al Qaeda, ISIS, 9/11, Charlie Hebdo or even the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. Certainly mass immigration of Muslim populations is an issue, but 30 years ago when the mass immigrants were Vietnamese, no one thought to take it out on a congregation in a Buddhist temple, so it is not just immigration. I’m trying to find time to write about this in detail, but I’d put the root cause with Muslim grievance, which has justified in the mind of the attacker, his opposite reaction. What has caused Muslim grievance? That is a more complex issue, with religious roots in Islam itself, but also philosophical roots in the West, where structuralist, post-structuralist and postmodernist theorists have weaponised colonialism as a means of convincing some Muslims that they are victims with a legitimate grievance against the West. On the other side via identity politics, relativism, extreme forms of utilitarianism, and even nihilism they have provided a pathway where unmoored Westerners can commit crimes that swim against the norms of the West. We live in an increasingly violent society, where people feel it is justified to break the law on a point of personal “principle”. It’s not casual violence that I’m talking about, the crime statistics are clear that sort of violence is actually decreasing, but things like the organised thuggery of the CFMMEU, or the extortion of Greenpeace against members of the Business Council of Australia. Apart from exposing the intellectual lineage of violence and destabilisation, another solution to this problem is to re-establish Western norms as society’s norms, within a set of moral, as well as ethical, boundaries, and to displace postmodernism from the public square. To that end Ralph Bowles and I are exploring the idea of a Western Civilisation Reading Group which would have a similar ambition to the Ramsay Centre, but outside of the university. We’re looking for collaborators. If you’d like to be involved, email me graham.young@aip.asn.au. Finally Budget 2019In depth analysis will follow in a separate email, but this graph from Sinclair Davidson of RMIT, tells an interesting story. 46 years ago, the election of the Whitlam government increased government spending, and we’ve never managed to recover to the previous position. As a result taxes have increased, but as you can see from the two averages, never quite enough to match spending. Post the GFC taxation dropped to the lowest since the end of the Whitlam era, but spending was the highest for a decade. The next 10 years more than reversed the Howard years when income was consistently higher than expenditure, with cumulative taxation in that period at an historic high. The current projected surplus will be generated by an historically high tax take, in advance of the treasurer’s promise to keep it at 23.9% of GDP. I find that a little depressing. But what is even more depressing is that the Shorten government, if there is one, promises to be a scaled down version of the Whitlam one. We’re just getting on top of the GFC a. How long will the repair job on Shorten take? Keeping in touchIf you want to follow what we are thinking between newsletters, you can follow us on Twitter or Facebook. I also maintain separate Facebook and Twitter accounts where I post less institutional tweets and posts. And don't forget to checkout the website from time to time. Regards, 
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