Former prime minister Tony Abbott has recently called for slashing immigration to deal with Australia’s housing and infrastructure challenges. As a result, he has sparked a debate that goes beyond ideology. Meanwhile, opinion polls indicate growing opposition to high levels of migration that have helped shape public policy in recent decades.

Has Australia’s long economic expansion been dependent on immigration? Take out population growth, would our miracle economy have gone into recession? Is a Big Australia feasible these days?

Indigenous Health – The solution is not simply “more funding”

Jennifer Buckingham From CIS In The Education Report Card Of A Current Affair

Federal Member for Higgins, Minister for Revenue and Financial Services.

Reward for Effort: Encouraging enterprise through tax reform.

Former Productivity Commissioner and CIS Senior Fellow.

Of lists undone: too hard or not trying?

Bill Leak with Sir Les Patterson at the launch of Trigger Warning

US President Donald Trump is proposing sweeping tax cuts that will affect every other country. Australia is not well placed to respond, with a lack of major tax reform since 2001. By contrast, Canada has been a successful tax reformer, with the federal-provincial corporate tax rate falling from 43% in 2001 to 27% in 2016 and the virtual elimination of capital taxes, amongst other policies.

How will tax changes proposed by Donald Trump affect both countries? Is Canada better placed because of the recent Canadian tax reforms?

The Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and the Canadian Australian Chamber of Commerce (CACC) are hosted a joint event discussing these and other questions. This event will hear from Canadian tax expert, Dr Jack Mintz, President’s Fellow, School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary and former chair of the Canada’s business tax panel that led to Canada’s reform, and Michael Potter, Research Fellow at CIS.

In his first speech since retiring, and in light of the Fair Work Commission’s ruling to reform Sunday penalty rates in the retail and hospitality sectors, Graeme Watson will speak on his more than 10 years’ experience as Vice President of the Commission.

Recently described as ‘one of the most brilliant industrial lawyers of his time’, his letter of resignation to Employment Minister Michaelia Cash outlined that in his view the operation of the Workplace Relations system was undermining the objects of the Fair Work Act of promoting national economic prosperity and social inclusion. His letter led Peter Costello to liken him to Samson in the Bible — ‘shaking the pillars of the system to bring it down on the heads of the Philistines’.

Overt capture of independent courts and tribunals is a feature of undemocratic societies, dictatorships and autocracies. It undermines a key element of democracy, the rule of law.

Alarmingly, there is clear evidence of this undermining of some of our pillars of western democracy. But capture is even more damaging when it is covert, hiding behind an air of legitimacy and independence. Society needs to be ever vigilant to this threat. Interference and capture needs to be exposed and eliminated — not avoided for fear of committing the same vice of interference. Scrutiny and holding our institutions to account based on the fundamental principles of democracy are obligations we all share.

Most explanations offered for Donald Trump’s ‘inexplicable’ victory in the American Presidential election have resorted to crude stereotypes about the opinions and attitudes of the ‘Deplorables’ – the AKA ‘low information voters’ who voted #1 for Trump. These explanations – which are offered by the same kinds of ‘insiders’ who probably thought the NSW Greyhound Racing Ban was a great idea (until it helped end the political career of a hitherto popular Premier) – simply serve to widen gap of mutual disdain and misunderstanding between the political class and ordinary citizens.

The contemporary western feminist movement has lost its way. Over the past century the feminist movement has achieved remarkable advances in securing equal rights for women in the West, but in other regions around the world women are still treated as second class citizens, the recent push for gender-equal traffic lights in Melbourne has trivialised the important issue of gender equality. Rather than fake feminist causes, how should we address the real obstacles to women’s freedom and opportunities in Australia and around the world?

Visiting US expert Kay Hymowitz from New York’s Manhattan Institute and Judith Sloane, economist and contributing economics editor at The Australian will discuss why the sisterhood is failing women on many vital political, social and cultural issues.