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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

For decades now some of the most important public policy that's shaped our country, hasn’t been designed by politicians or public servants – it’s come from think tanks.

Among the most influential in Australia is the Institute of Public Affairs, the IPA – a right-wing think tank that prides itself on being the policy brain of the conservative movement.

But the organisation is in decline, it’s generating less new ideas and it’s finding it harder to get the support of business.

Today, National correspondent at The Saturday Paper Mike Seccombe, on the decline of the IPA.

It’s Wednesday October 5

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RUBY:

Mike, you've been looking at the Institute of Public Affairs, the IPA, and historically they've been a pretty influential think tank on the conservative side of Australian politics. To begin with, could you just tell me a bit about who they are exactly and how they would view their role?

MIKE:

Well, the IPA, as you said, is a think tank. They've been a place that has developed, you know, ideas and policies that have largely been adopted by the Coalition, but also by Labor. They've also been a training ground for Conservative politicians, particularly, you know, for the free market, libertarian sort of wing of the coalition, you know, people like Tim Wilson, Senator James Patterson, Mike Nahan, former treasurer of Western Australia, was an alumnus, so was Louise Staley, the former Treasury spokesman in Victoria, so they've had a pretty, pretty good production line of Liberal politicians over the years. But I think we can safely say that they're in decline and they're in fact they said themselves they're in decline at the moment, which is a pretty big deal when you consider how much influence they've had in the past and you know, how long they've been around.

RUBY:

Okay. So how long have the IPA been around for? And can you tell me a bit about who created the organisation and what the original vision was, I suppose?

MIKE:

It was set up in 1943 following the collapse of Australia's major Conservative Party, the United Australia Party, which I might add, bears no relation whatsoever to Clive Palmer's party of the same name. But anyway, the IPA during that period of vacuum on the conservative side of politics was set up by business interests in opposition to the perceived socialism of the Curtin Labor Government.

Archival tape -- Unknown Person:

“The institute was established in 1943 by leading businessmen to help counter the push in Australia towards a socialist planned economy and to provide policy alternatives which could build an economy based on free enterprise.”

MIKE:

And its founders included the chairman of BHP and Coles National Australia Bank, the head of the Herald Weekly Times newspaper group, Keith Murdoch, father of Rupert…

Archival tape -- Stuart Littlemore:

“The names on the IPA’s board are harbingers of its message…

Archival tape -- Voiceover 1:

“Rio Tinto limited…”

Archival tape -- Voiceover 2:

“BHP limited…”

Archival tape -- Voiceover 1:

“Western Mining Corporation…”

Archival tape -- Voiceover 2:

“The Shell Company of Australia limited…”

Archival tape -- Voiceover 1:

“AMP limited…”

Archival tape -- Voiceover 2:

“Philip Morris Australia…”

MIKE:

…Among a bunch of other very influential business people. So, you know, it was very much a baby of big business.

Archival tape -- Stuart Littlemore:

“Casino owners are well represented, along with the miners, tobacconists, and money-lenders…”

MIKE:

At the time, think-tanks, so-called, were a relatively new idea; I think the IPA was the first that could legitimately be called such in Australia.

Archival tape -- Unknown Person:

“The IPA became one of the leading voices in public debate supporting free enterprise, limited government, democracy and individual freedom.”

MIKE:

But at the height of influence of these conservative think tanks, they proliferated greatly. In 1976 we had the Centre for Independent Studies, which is not quite as reactionary as the IPA. Then we had other outfits that were like the H. R. Nicholls Society, you know, devoted to labour market reform, the Lavoisier Group devoted to climate change denial, the Bennelong Society devoted to pushing back against Aboriginal land rights and opposition to mining. The same things happened around the world.

Archival tape -- Unknown Person:

“The end product of this ‘think-tank’? Scenarios - scripts for the 21st century.”

Archival tape -- Herman Kahn:

“Let’s admit that the affluence, the skills, the technology will really make life better in all kinds of ways. But, you know, we also know these things can go badly…”

MIKE:

Organisations like the Rand Corporation in the US did external research for the US Armed Forces, the Council on Foreign Relations. These think tanks became incredibly influential and there are hundreds of them now in the US, including quite a number of influential conservative slash right wing ones, you know, like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, which has links to the IPA in Australia, the American Enterprise Institute. There's a lot of them.

RUBY:

Okay. And can we talk a bit about what it was that these think tanks were actually advocating for? Are there any particular policies in Australian history that you can trace directly to things that the IPA has researched and lobbied for?

MIKE:

Oh, definitely cutting taxes, you know, which we've seen round after round after round of cuts to corporate and personal tax rates, limiting the power and size of government. They would like to see government shrunk, privatisation being one of the main ways by which government would be shrunk, you know, taking government enterprises and flogging them off. Financial deregulation, labour market deregulation, the privatisation of government assets, for example, you know, the Howard government selling off Telstra, the Commonwealth Bank, all the power utilities around the country and I think almost every state except Queensland, you know, the privatisation of public transport, you name it, there's a lot of it. So yeah, they've had big influence, particularly on the conservative side, but also to some extent under the Hawke and Keating Labor governments, they adopted a lot of neo liberal ideas which they called economic rationalism.

It's mainly a story of conservative side of politics, but it's changed politics in general. If we go back to the era of Margaret Thatcher in Britain, you know, Ronald Reagan in the United States, John Howard in Australia, these were the people that advanced a lot of the ideas pushed by these think tanks. And to be frank, the economic ideas they advocated haven't really changed much since that time. They haven't had any new ideas for a long time. And this is true not just in Australia but globally. And a lot of those Australian ones that I mentioned before, you know, they are on the wane. And particularly interesting I think is the fact that big business, which after all set up the IPA, is increasingly disinclined to fund it. 20 or 30 years ago, big corporates lined up in their dozens to throw money at the IPA. That corporate support has collapsed now.

RUBY:

We'll be back after this.

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RUBY:

Mike, let's talk a bit more about the decline of the IPA. It seems like it's experiencing a pretty spectacular collapse in support among big business which traditionally supported the organisation. So let's go into what it is that has caused this.

MIKE:

Well, I spoke to John Roskam about this. He was the executive director at the IPA for 17 years until just a few months ago. But he complained that now not one of Australia's biggest companies, the ASX 100 companies, now supports the IPA. And when he spoke to me, he conceded the decline in influence of the IPA and right wing think tanks in general, particularly when it comes to advancing their core economic agenda.

Archival tape -- John Roskam:

“Both the Coalition and the Labor Party are far more inclined to look at policy solutions and suggestions from the Centre and the Centre-Left than the centre right or neo-liberal think tanks, for want of a better term.”

MIKE:

And he also said that his disillusionment with the policy thinking of the centre right of politics over the past ten years was quite acute. 20 or 30 years ago, he said the centre right was a lot more vibrant than it is now.

Archival tape -- John Roskam:

“And I think it'll be fair to say that those on the centre right of politics have been tremendously disappointed by the eight and a half years of Federal Coalition government.”

MIKE:

And he reckoned that attempts at the kind of right wing economic reform that he's talking about officially ended in the 2014/15 Abbott Hockey budget when they tried to introduce some quite radical reforms and were rejected by the public, by commentators, by the Senate in a lot of cases and to some extent by their own party, because a lot of it hit the fence.

Archival tape -- Joe Hockey:

“Heavy lifting comes down to individuals. The corporate sector is a vehicle, a vehicle that represents us as individuals. We work for the corporate sector if we're employed by a company. So therefore, we all have to contribute. And as individuals, at the end of the day, it comes down to individual taxpayers.”

Archival tape -- Sarah Ferguson:

“Well, let's talk about permanence, then, because you have introduced a levy for high income earners, but it's a temporary levy, and yet the changes to the family payments are permanent…”

MIKE:

It proposed a co-payment for Medicare, it proposed cuts to legal aid, including for Indigenous Australians and domestic violence victims…

Archival tape -- Joe Hockey:

Okay, so that's the promise that we said we'd deliver lower taxes. We're getting rid of the carbon tax. We're getting rid of the mining tax. We're delivering tax cuts without a carbon tax. In addition to all of that, we are trying to fix the budget.”

MIKE:

…it targeted family tax benefits and pensions for cuts. There was going to be a 20% cut to university funding. It raised the pension age, it kept redundancy payments. It sought to raise prices under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. Broken election promise of paid parental leave scheme. You know, all these swingeing cuts. And it was just wildly unpopular and bits began falling off it almost immediately. You know, they were either abandoned or defeated in the Senate.

Archival tape -- Joe Hockey:

“Our job is to lay down the policy that is good for the nation. Now if Labor and the Greens don’t want to support that, that's their call…”

MIKE:

And basically, according to Roskam, you know, everything has been frozen since on the conservative side of politics.

RUBY:

Yeah, I do remember that budget. And it was catastrophic, wasn't it, for Joe Hockey, who was the Treasurer at the time? It was…I don't think I remember seeing a more unpopular Treasurer than him at that moment.

MIKE:

That’s right.

RUBY:

And so given that, though, given how badly those ideas went down back in 2014, did you get any sense from John Roskam that, you know, if these ideas aren’t popular, maybe it's because they're no longer the right ideas?

MIKE:

That they're not good ideas? No. He blames the conservative parties for policy timidity and he blames the sort of polity in general for being too comfortable.

Archival tape -- John Roskam:

“I think the nature, as I said, the nature of think tanks is changing because 30 years of prosperity has meant that no government has thought they needed to continue to reform…”

MIKE:

And he also, which I think is interesting, blames the business community, you know, formerly the big supporters, for being too concerned with social issues and what he calls virtue signalling. So, you know, the IPA still has some business supporters. You know, Gina Rinehart is a donor, for example, but Roskam just doesn't accept that there might be something wrong with the policies that the right wing think tanks continue to push. Instead, he thinks that people just aren't listening anymore, that instead they're going to the competing think tanks from the sort of centre left of politics. And he's right, you know, the sort of centrist to centre left think tanks are definitely dominant now. And the reason they are is because they are producing evidence based, data driven research that outfits like the IPA no longer do. What the IPA in particular tends to do these days is much more in the line of punditry than policy, I think you would say.

RUBY:

Hmm. Yeah. So it sounds like the real problem for the IPA is that they're not really coming up with any new ideas, they're not conducting new research. They're still kind of pursuing the same ideas that they did 20 to 30 years ago. And as a result, they're not really gaining much traction anymore.

MIKE:

Yeah, that's right. And furthermore, they're much less focussed on, you know, economic reform, which was their core business at one point. Much more interested in sort of culture war issues these days. And that's good for their business model in a way, because when business doesn't support them and businesses, you know, makes cool calculations according to its interests, it's dependent then on sort of individual philanthropy and the way you get that stirred up. Is by finding those culture war issues that will activate, you know, certain people to dip into their pockets. So let me give you an example of the sort of culture war stuff they come out with. Georgina Downer, daughter of the former foreign minister Alexander. She was an adjunct fellow at the IPA prior to her two unsuccessful attempts in 2018 and 2019 to win the South Australian electorate of Mayo for the Liberals. And during her couple of years with the IPA, she appeared frequently as a television commentator and she produced a lot of articles, some of which ran in the mainstream media on a whole range of issues. But I could find no evidence that she produced any actual research. You know, there was one piece shortly after the election of Donald Trump in the US that she flew into print to say what a great thing this was, because Trump would dramatically cut taxes. He would reject, and I'm quoting her here, “liberal internationalism, political correctness and the progressive politics of urban elites”, as well as the, quote, “international environmental movement and its fatwa against carbon”. So, you know, that gives you a taste for the sort of stuff they're putting out.

RUBY:

Hmm. Okay. And so, Mike, do you think that what we're seeing is a decline in support for the types of ideas that the IPA has successfully advocated for for a long time, because the types of policies that it's pushed, things like deregulating the labour market, we know that that's led to less protections for workers. And ultimately, I think it's safe to say that we do live in a world now that is more unequal than the Australia of 30 years ago. So do you get the sense that as the knock on effects of these policies has become clear, that the ideas themselves have just fallen out of favour?

MIKE:

Exactly. You're exactly right. And I should say, not only do I get the sense, but the data tells us. I mean, that's what these other organisations have been so successful at, is putting the data out there through the media to the public telling us these things. They tell us that climate change is real, you know, whereas the IPA is still denying it and they're not producing any, any research to that effect, they’re just producing polemic. But then when you look at their economic policies, you know, the sort of supply-side, trickle-down economics that, you know, came from Reagan and Thatcherism, you know, well, as you say, that served to increase inequality. Deregulation of the labour market has yielded flatlining wages. You know, privatisation all too often results in reduced services. The global financial crisis showed us clearly the perils of deregulating the finance sector. The COVID 19 pandemic demonstrated the necessity of competent, well-resourced government, and also, I might say, the fragility of globalised supply chains. So, you know, I think the evidence points to the fact that the kind of ideas that they advanced 30, 40 years ago, some of them good, some of them not so good, but they've gone as far as they can. And we are now seeing the downside and that's a large part of the decline in their influence.

RUBY:

And so if they've gone as far as they can and now that the organisation that thinks of itself as I suppose the policy brain of the right doesn't have any new ideas, what does that mean for the right? Are there any new genuine ideas for the right to rally around?

MIKE:

You know, I think there are plenty of issues around where the right could still be influential. I mean, you know, I'm not arguing that all good ideas come from the left of politics. If we take Australia's declining education standards, for example, the Centre for Independent Studies has done some quite interesting research on that. Whether you agree with its conclusions or not, it's based on proper research. Whereas the IPA is simply trying to drive a new history curriculum that advocates, you know, quote, “Western values”, unquote, you know, that kind of cultural stuff. So, yes, they're pretty much devoid of ideas. They're stuck in culture wars, and frankly, they're just not winning them.

RUBY:

Mike, thank you so much for your time.

MIKE:

Thank you very much for yours.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today,

The man accused of raping Brittany Higgins is now in court, after the criminal trial began yesterday in Canberra. Former Liberal party staffer Bruce Lehrmann has pleaded not guilty to one count of sexual intercourse without consent against Brittany Higgins in Parliament House on March 23, 2019.

Almost six weeks have been set aside for the trial.

And interest rates rose again on Tuesday afternoon. It’s the sixth month in a row that the Reverse Bank of Australia has raised the official cash rate target, this time by 0.25 basis points, to a target of 2.6 per cent. In a statement, the Reserve Bank wrote that:

“The Board is committed to returning inflation to the 2–3 per cent range over time,” and that in pursuit of that goal “further increases are likely to be required over the period ahead.”

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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