Iron, Ideas, and Abundance: Supply Side Mistakes and Lessons.

From the billion tonnes of iron ore dug out of the Pilbara to the decades-long export ban that once kept Australia poor, this episode revisits how lifting restrictions unlocked one of the greatest booms in our history. It’s a lesson in abundance: when governments get out of the way, entrepreneurs and investors unleash prosperity.

Why are Australians voting for bigger government? In this episode of The Stutchbury Sessions, we explore the paradox of a wealthy nation choosing more handouts, higher spending, and larger public debt. From cost-of-living subsidies to universal childcare, Australians are increasingly embracing policies that expand the welfare state, even as they fuel deficits and weaken productivity.

Drawing on CIS research from Robert Carling and recent remarks by Liberal leader Sussan Ley, we unpack the rise of “voting for a living,” where more than half of Australians now rely on government for most of their income. What does this mean for future taxpayers, younger workers, and Australia’s long-term prosperity?

Join us as we tackle the culture of dependency, the risks of a $1 trillion public debt, and the political challenge of saying no to endless handouts.

Read or listen to Robert Carling's Research: https://www.cis.org.au/publication/leviathan-on-the-rampage-how-the-growth-of-government-is-draining-australias-economic-vitality/

Recent Australian laws risk undermining fundamental freedoms and weakening the principles that underpin a democratic society.

The proposed misinformation bills, which would have incentivised excessive censorship without adequate safeguards for free expression.

The expansion of the eSafety Commissioner’s powers, raising concerns about transparency, accountability and overreach.

The rushed passage of privacy and social media legislation, with inadequate parliamentary scrutiny.

The introduction of criminal hate speech provisions that lower the threshold for liability and remove long-standing protections for legitimate public debate.

According to Dr Taylor, these examples suggest that governments may be adopting an increasingly protective stance that risks subordinating individual freedoms to collective interests.

Dr Paul Taylor is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the T. C. Beirne School of Law, and Fellow of the Centre for Public, International and Comparative Law; Adjunct Professor at the School of Law, The University of Notre Dame Australia; and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Feed your intelligence with policy research and commentary designed to enhance our liberal democracy. Join Michael Stutchbury and guests every Thursday for your 10 minute briefing. 

Listen to our new show, The Stutchbury Sessions on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, iHeartRadio, PlayerFM or listen on your browser.  

In this episode of Liberalism in Question, host Robert Forsyth engages in a thought-provoking discussion with Mark Leach, co-founder and CEO of "Never Again Is Now", on the rise of anti-Semitism in Australia, the erosion of Western liberal values, and the need for cultural renewal. They explore how anti-Semitism is a broader threat to Australian society, rooted in declining confidence in Western civilisation's core principles like individualism, equality, and pluralism.

👉 Relevant Research:

The Future of Australian Multiculturalism: https://www.cis.org.au/publication/the-future-of-australian-multiculturalism/ 

👉 Help Australia:

In this inaugural edition, CIS Executive Director and former Editor-in-Chief of the Australian Financial Review, Michael Stutchbury, outlines how Australia once enjoyed extraordinary prosperity, built on bipartisan reforms of the 1980s and 1990s that liberalized markets, cut tariffs, and opened the economy to global competition.

Yet, since prosperity peaked in 2011–12, signs of decline have mounted: stagnant productivity, shrinking real incomes, persistent deficits, mounting debt, weak business investment, soaring energy costs, and a lower growth potential as estimated by the RBA.

The problem is not simply cyclical, Stutchbury says. As politics shifted from creating wealth to redistributing it, spending grew while reform stalled. New entitlements and universal programs have expanded government outlays, crowding out private investment.

To restore prosperity, Australia must pursue the four reforms outlined in this episode.

Australia has reinvented itself before; it must find the courage to do so again.

In this episode, Rob sits down with Trisha Jha, a policy analyst at the Centre for Independent Studies, to explore the relationship between liberalism and education. They discuss how liberal principles, like individual freedom, pluralism, and limited government, may require an educated population to survive. 

Trisha Jha is a Research Fellow in the Education program, where she leads a stream of work on the science of learning, as well as projects on school improvement and educational policy. Trisha has previously had roles as a secondary teacher, including through the Teach for Australia program, in state and independent schools in regional Victoria. She has also worked as a senior policy adviser to opposition leaders in Victoria.

She holds a Masters of Teaching with a specialisation in Research from Deakin University and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from the Australian National University.

👉 More from Trisha Jha:

👉 Help Australia’s Educational Standards:

All our links: https://linktr.ee/centreforindependentstudies

Australia’s extraordinary modern prosperity, built on the supply-side economic liberalisation of the 1980s and 1990s and boosted by the China-fuelled resources boom, is being squandered.

In Our Prosperity is Slipping Away: Submission to Economic Reform Roundtable, Michael Stutchbury writes that urgent reform is needed to stop the slump.

“History shows such periods of relative affluence are rare and temporary, as seen in the 1850s–80s, early 1950s and late 1960s–early 1970s,” Stutchbury says. “Australia’s most recent peak in prosperity occurred in 2011–12 and has been in decline ever since. 

“The Reserve Bank’s downgrading of productivity forecasts confirms an unacceptable low-growth future.” 

The paper urges the Economic Reform Roundtable to reject this trajectory and commit to making Australia “an aspirational and enterprise-driven high-growth nation bursting with investment opportunities”.  

It argues that this means reinstating credible fiscal rules, restraining government spending, and undertaking genuine tax reform — beginning with indexing personal income tax scales to curb bracket creep 

“The tax system is weighing on the economy but piecemeal 'tax reform' should not become a mechanism to validate the increase in the size of government that already has contributed to declining absolute productivity,” Stutchbury says. 

Housing shortages, caused by restrictive zoning and planning laws, must be addressed alongside a broader removal of “thickets of regulation” that stifle business dynamism. Education reform is also critical to reverse declining literacy, numeracy, and lifetime earnings. 

Finally, energy policy must restore Australia’s low-cost advantage, reversing trends that have driven up prices, undermined competitiveness, and fueled costly protectionism. 

Michael Stutchbury is Executive Director of the Centre for Independent Studies. 

Watch here: https://youtu.be/DgqdELXU4BI

👉 More from Robert Carling: 

👉 Help Australia’s Economic Prosperity 

For all references and graphs, read the paper here: https://www.cis.org.au/publication/the-productivity-problem-australias-growth-slump-is-undermining-prosperity/ 

Key Findings:

Labour productivity growth has halved, sliding from 2.4% a year in the late 1990s to just 1.2% in recent years.

Australia is falling further behind the United States, with the productivity gap now wider than it was in the early 2000s.

Business investment – a driver of growth – is subdued, starving firms of the latest technology and techniques needed to compete globally.

Cox outlines that even small, sustained improvements in productivity compound into large gains. Conversely, persistently slow growth risks turning policy development by political parties into a zero-sum scramble for slices of a shrinking pie, undermining social cohesion and democratic norms.

Dwindling innovation diffusion, in which Australian firms are adopting new ideas more slowly than global leaders.

Rising regulatory burden, with Commonwealth legislation now containing 356,198 restrictive provisions, up 80% since 2005.

Cultural change, with surveys revealing fewer Australians now see work as “very important”, while support for environmental protection over economic growth has risen.

Cox calls for a new wave of micro-economic reform, smarter regulation that does not stifle experimentation, and a renewed national conversation about the values that underpin innovation.