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That's the year that wasDear , Until we’ve had Australia Day and the final of the Australian Open, it always seems to me that Australia is still on holidays. I hope you had a great break and are ready for the next twelve months. This is a double election year, so it is a unique opportunity to push politicians to support the policies we support, and also campaign against those who don’t. Queensland is coasting along with a false sense of security, squandering a favourable economic environment and the opportunity to create a resilient state. Housing affordability and power generation are two areas where we have particular concerns. We’re also doing work on hospitals and education, as well as one of the major problems of the state – the capture and corruption of the government and public service by self-serving trade unions. Putting these policies in front of the politicians and the public will all take money and resources. If you’re on our mailing lists and are not a member, please consider joining by clicking here. Please also consider donating to our state election campaign fund, or generally for our work. And please forward this email on to anyone you think might like to support our work. The AIP executive will be getting together in early February to plot the way ahead for this year. I’ll give you an update on our plans after that. In the meantime, I think it is worthwhile recapping what we have done over the last 12 months. MediaEvery week I’ve been on Steve Austin’s Drive program on ABC Brisbane talking about Queensland state politics. ABC numbers are smallish, but the listenership is influential, particularly as Steve is one of the few broadcasters to deal with serious issues in a serious way. I also publish weekly with the Epoch Times. The ET is a serious newspaper (hardcopy as well as online) that aspires to the sort of matter-of-fact reportage we all used to take for granted. I’ve written close to 50 pieces since I started. The Australian and the Australian Financial Review have also carried work by me during the year, including this piece on slavery. The VoiceEarly in 2023 I teamed-up with Gary Johns and some others to initiate a campaign against The Voice. While the major campaign ended-up being run by Advance, the group we were involved with did substantial early qualitative research. As part of the campaign, we were happy to host a symposium in our offices on The Voice by the Samuel Griffith Society. We also initiated a volunteer effort to man booths on the day and do on the ground campaigning. Disappointingly this offer was not taken-up by the official campaign and manning on the day was a bit of a shambles. COVID-19Partly as a result of work we did on COVID-19, starting in mid-2020 with an online seminar on lockdowns and cost benefit analysis by Professor Paul Frijters, a new organisation has been formed called Australians for Science and Freedom. We’ve also made two submissions to government:
and launched our first policy monograph “COVID-19 and Australian Federalism: The first year of our grand experiment with 21st Century governance”, as well as a book on COVID by Dr Andew Laming, the former MHR for Bowman. EnergyWe’ve been very active in the energy space hosting a number of events on nuclear energy, including a round table discussion this week between Professor Jacopo Buongiorno, the Tokyo Electric Power Company Professor in Nuclear Engineering at MIT, and some prominent Brisbane business and intellectual leaders. Last year we hosted a lunch with 17-year-old Will Shackell of Nuclear for Australia - “A new generation for nuclear”. We’ve also made two submissions to state government parliamentary committees:
Our two themes are that if you want to decarbonise the grid, as everyone seems to think we should, then you have to put provision for storage in place before you install too many renewables, and that means pumped hydro, and you also need low-emissions baseload, and that means gas and nuclear. So far the state government has paid no attention and just doubles down. Pumped hydro will be available, if it ever is, well-after it is needed, they’ve just banned gas exploration in the basin most prospective for conventional gas, and nuclear is completely off the table. LibertiesThe World Economic Forum has declared that misinformation and disinformation are the biggest threat mankind faces this year. The Albanese government seems to agree, but we emphatically do not. We put in one submission on the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill 2023, and helped to draft another from the ASF. This invidious legislation is based on bad research and proposes to police what can or can’t be said on digital platforms on the basis of whether it is “misinformation” or not. The arbiter of truth appears to be the Australian Communications and Media Authority. However the aim of the bill is obviously to censor dissent, which is made abundantly clear by the fact that it exempts the government from the bills requirements. This overreach will be compounded by the eSafety Commissioner’s proposed Online Safety Industry Standards which would require providers of things like email, messaging and chat services to monitor what their customers communicate so as to detect child abuse, terrorism, and even hate speech. Wiretapping, which is what this effectively is, used to be reserved for law enforcement officers after obtaining a warrant from a judge. Not anymore. Now it will be the domain of tech geeks who will make up their own rules as they go. The potential for abuse is huge. I wrote about this for the Epoch Times. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that the eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, is a WEF darling who thinks we need to rethink values like Freedom of Speech. This move is a complete departure from what we call the rule of law, speaking of which, I also addressed the Australian Bar Council Annual Conference on rule of law late last year. Housing affordabilityThis is a major issue as documented by our Housing Affordability Index. It is roughly twice as difficult now to service a home loan repayment as it was when the Baby Boomers were buying, but to put that in perspective, in 2020 it was only 20% more difficult – four years have made a huge difference. There is a solution to this problem, and that is more supply, but virtually none of the various government policies meant to bring it on will have any effect. We’ve also kept up our campaigns to fight rent caps and the potential abolition of negative gearing and the capital gains discount (both of which are sure to be firmly back on the agenda if Labor is re-elected federally). Celebrations and eventsThe McIlwraith Lecture last year celebrated a team of Australians over 100 years who made the Mt Isa Mine what it has become. It was our biggest yet, with an unprecedented number of students. We also inaugurated the celebration of Emancipation Day on August 1. The Abolition of Slavery Act came into effect in the UK on August the first 1834, and a small number of countries mark that occasion. We marked it with a breakfast at Tattersall’s Club and a speech by video from Nigel Biggar, author of Colonialism, a Moral Reckoning. This year we are aiming to make it bigger and partner with like-minded organisations in other states to do something national. It's an important day because it marks the beginning of the modern era where we think human rights are universal, and it is part of our British heritage that we can all be proud of. We also ran a number of functions including:
HealthWe have been contracted to do research by the Nurses Professional Association of Queensland on Queensland’s hospital system. Most of that work will be done scoping out the size of the problem and looking at how other systems handle the same issues. There is plenty of good statistical information out there, but it would appear that hospital administrators don’t pay much attention to it. Hopefully that will change. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC)Three of our directors made it to the ARC conference in London at the end of October and beginning of November. This organisation is building an international umbrella under which organisations with similar values to ours can gather and cooperate. Former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia John Anderson is one of the founders and we have been talking to him about how we can play an active role in the ARC in Queensland. The conference was a huge success, and you can see a video of our report on what happened by clicking here. Regards, GRAHAM YOUNG 
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