The Centre for Independent Studies Research Collection

The Legislative Fantasy. Hate Speech, Culture and Institutional Failure by Dimitri Burshtein

The Bondi Beach attack of 14 December 2025 forced a reckoning that many Australians had been quietly avoiding. Antisemitism was not, it turned out, a relic of European history or a pathology confined to the political fringes. It was here, active and emboldened. The question that followed — “what must we do about it?” — has since animated parliamentary inquiries, legislative proposals, and now a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion led by former High Court Justice Virginia Bell.
The Centre for Independent Studies has been engaged through the antisemitism research program led by the Culture, Prosperity and Civil Society program. The CIS’s work on antisemitism has been driven by the conviction that the health of a liberal democracy depends less on the architecture of its laws than on the vitality of its civil society.
This conviction runs through our most recent work on institutional resilience under conditions of moral and political stress, and it connects this project to the Centre’s civic pluralism series – Fractured Loyalties, The Ties That Bind, and Drawing the Line – each of which has explored the conditions under which pluralist societies hold together.
Antisemitism functions as a diagnostic. It is not merely an offence to be regulated or managed; rather, it is a signal of deeper institutional failure and a warning that the mediating structures once capable of transmitting civic norms across generations have been weakened, captured, or hollowed from within.
Dimitri Burshtein’s new report is a significant contribution to this ongoing work. Burshtein takes that diagnosis seriously and develops it with rigour and force. His argument is, at its core, Burkean: the informal sanctions of a healthy civil society are more powerful, and more durable, than any legislative remedy the state can devise. In making his case, Burshtein draws on comparative evidence from Germany, France, and the United Kingdom to demonstrate that the demand for more hate speech law is itself a symptom of institutional failure rather than a remedy for it. When communities lose the capacity to enforce shared norms, they reach for the state. But the state is ill-equipped to cultivate the virtues it has displaced.
This does not mean legal indifference. Violence, incitement and intimidation must be prosecuted firmly, a point about which Burshtein is clear. What his report resists, rightly, is the conceit that moral and cultural problems can be resolved by what Burshtein calls the ‘legislative fantasy’. The report also asks harder questions about institutional capture — in universities, the arts, the legal profession and the media — that deserve far greater scrutiny than they have received.
These are not peripheral concerns; they are central ones. If the commanding heights of Australian cultural life have been systematically oriented against our liberal democratic inheritance, then the challenge of antisemitism cannot be separated from the broader challenge of civic renewal. That renewal is the real work before us. In his new report, Dimitri Burshtein helps make the case for why.
To read the paper, go to www.cis.org.au

Why We Should Not Increase Capital Gains Tax by Robert Carling

Read the paper at www.cis.org.au Executive Summary.This paper is an expanded version of a submission to the Senate Select Committee on the Operation of the Capital Gains Tax Discount. The author gave evidence to the Committee at a hearing on 25 February, 2026.
Although there is much public discussion of the capital gains tax discount, there is no proposal from government on the table for us to respond to — only rumours and speculation — so our comments are broad-ranging and not confined to housing.
As well as the submission, there have been three relevant research publications on CGT issued by the CIS in 2009, 2015 and 2019. Perusal of those publications will show that we do not think much of proposals to reduce the CGT discount.
If three publications looks like an obsession, we have had a lot to say on the issue because calls for the discount to be cut or eliminated have been a persistent theme of tax policy debate ever since the defeat of the Howard government, which put the 50% discount in place in 1999. Along with superannuation concessions and negative gearing, the discount has been a favourite whipping boy.
Cutting the discount is variously seen as a key plank of tax reform, a revenue-raising measure, the key to lowering house prices, and a solution to intergenerational and vertical inequality. Our submission argues that it is none of those things, or at least not in significant measure, and that the 50% discount is justified.
In brief, we make the following points:
The principle of taxing nominal capital gains at lower rates than ordinary income is unexceptional and was recognised in Australia’s first model of CGT in 1985. The 50% discount in 1999 replaced what was essentially a different form of discount in the 1985 model based on indexing the cost base of assets to CPI inflation combined with an averaging scheme that limited the effect of lumpy capital gains pushing taxpayers into higher tax brackets.
The pre-1999 arrangements produced a variable discount, but for average rates of return on assets and inflation rates and various asset holding periods it can be demonstrated that the effective discount often fell in the 30–45% range — and that is leaving aside the additional benefit of averaging. The point is that the 50% discount is not much more generous than the average result of the policy it replaced.
To those who say the 50% discount over-compensates for inflation, in some cases it does and in some it compensates or even under-compensates, but the key point is that it was never intended solely to compensate for inflation. It was meant to be a general incentive for saving and investment, which is needed now more than ever in view of stagnant productivity.
On housing, several researchers have estimated that cutting the CGT discount would reduce house prices by a few per cent while increasing rents by a similar amount. These effects are tiny relative to other influences on prices and rents. CGT affects much more in the investment world than housing, so housing considerations should not drive CGT policy.
The claimed revenue costs of the discount vastly overstate the revenue that could be gained from any reasonable change. The claimed distribution of that revenue cost across income deciles is meaningless. Cutting the CGT discount would barely move the dial on income and wealth distribution.
Changing the CGT discount on its own is not tax reform, but it could have a place in broad tax reform that substantially reduces marginal rates and reduces the large disparities in the tax treatment of different forms of saving. However, nobody in government is talking about that.
The key conclusion is that there is a very strong case for some form of tax concession for capital gains relative to full marginal rates. This concession should go beyond simply allowing for inflation. While various structures are possible to satisfy this condition, the current 50% discount (and one-third discount for superannuation funds) has the advantage of being simple and well understood. It has been the basis for investment decisions over the past 26 years and is therefore entrenched in the accumulated stock of investments. There is no strong case for changing it.Read the paper at www.cis.org.au 

Growth that Builds: Beyond the immigration blame game by Marian Tupy.

Immigration and housing affordability have become politically inseparable in contemporary Australia. With rents high, home ownership increasingly out of reach, and housing supply persistently undershooting official targets, it is tempting to conclude that fewer migrants would mean lower prices. That argument has intuitive appeal. More people require more homes. In tightly-constrained markets, additional demand pushes up rents and prices.
But intuition is not policy. The evidence suggests a more nuanced reality: migration increases housing demand, yet whether that demand translates into sustained price pressure depends fundamentally on the responsiveness of supply. Where planning systems restrict land use, delay approvals, and cap density, even modest demand shocks quickly become price shocks. Where supply is flexible and institutions allow building to respond, the long-term affordability effects are far smaller — and can even be offset by stronger economic and housing growth.
This paper argues that Australia’s housing crisis is primarily a supply failure, not simply a headcount problem.
 It examines international and Australian evidence on migration and housing markets, including research on zoning restrictions, supply elasticity, and labour bottlenecks in construction. It also considers the role of skilled migration in strengthening the productive capacity of the economy — particularly in the very occupations needed to design, approve and build more homes.
The central point is straightforward. Australia does not face a binary choice between skilled migration and affordable housing. It faces a policy choice between maintaining restrictive land-use systems that convert growth into scarcity, or reforming those systems so that population growth can be absorbed through construction rather than capitalised into higher prices.
In short, the housing shortage is not an inevitable consequence of migration. It is the predictable result of constrained supply.
The choice is not ‘immigration or affordability’In Australia today, mass immigration is a political non-starter partly because many voters see the increased cost of housing as one of the country’s most urgent cost-of-living problems. A more plausible approach to immigration is narrower and more practical: a focused intake of skilled migrants who can help Australia innovate, raise productivity, and fill capability gaps without automatically worsening housing shortages.
True, a growing population raises housing demand, but the size of the cost effect depends on whether supply can respond. Skilled migrants can strengthen the supply side of the economy, including the people and systems needed to approve, design, and build more homes. In that sense, the real choice should not be ‘immigration or affordability’. 
It should be whether Australia combines skilled immigration with faster homebuilding and better land-use rules.
Australia’s housing shortage and the concomitant affordability decline is real, as Sam Fox and I noted in a recent CIS report. But it does not follow that more skilled immigration must make matters worse. The key word is must. In a city where housing supply is fixed, adding more people pushes up rents and prices. In a city where supply can expand, the same population growth can be absorbed with much smaller price effects; especially over time. The research supports both parts of that claim. The argument is not that demand disappears. The argument is that policy and supply response decide whether demand becomes a lasting affordability problem.Start with the point that critics get right. Albert Saiz’s well-known U.S. study finds that immigration inflows raise local rents and housing values in destination cities, with an estimated effect of about 1% on rents and values for an inflow equal to 1% of a city’s population. That is a real demand effect that no serious account of the housing problem should deny.
But Saiz’s broader work shows that housing supply differs sharply across cities because of geography and regulation. In plain language, some places can build — but don’t. If a city’s house building program is constrained by planning rules, height limits, approval delays, and political veto points, then any demand shock, including migration, turns into a price shock faster. If supply is flexible, more of the shock turns into construction.Read the whole paper at www.cis.org.au  

Future No Longer Made in Australia: How we lost our low-cost electricity advantage by Zoe Hilton and Michael Stutchbury

In the second half of the twentieth century, Australia’s cheap, reliable electricity attracted heavy industry to our shores. By 1990, power-hungry copper, aluminium, lead, manganese and zinc smelters had popped up in each of the eastern states that would one day form the National Electricity Market (NEM). As Matthew Warren, former chief executive of the Australian Energy Council, the Energy Supply Association of Australia and the Clean Energy Council, describes the Australian grid:
In 2000, the coal and gas used were abundant and cheap, and the hydro was provided by rainfall. It was by international standards, about as cheap and reliable an electricity system as you could build. Its brutal simplicity, reliability and low cost had attracted global industries including aluminium and other processors. These were ‘the good old days’ of cheap and reliable electricity in Australia.
But trouble has been brewing in Australia’s smelting paradise over the last two decades, as rising energy prices, carbon charges and foreign competition have taken their toll. These forces have eroded the comparative advantage Australia once enjoyed, shuttering existing industries and dissuading investors from building new ones. Government promises of a ‘renewable energy superpower’ Future Made in Australia built on intermittent renewables, batteries and hydrogen are looking increasingly implausible.Read the paper here:  https://www.cis.org.au/publication/future-no-longer-made-in-australia-how-we-lost-our-low-cost-electricity-advantage/ 

The Rule of Law, Excessive Regulation and Free Speech by Paul Taylor

Recent Australian laws risk undermining fundamental freedoms and weakening the principles that underpin a democratic society.In The Rule of Law, Excessive Regulation and Free Speech, Dr Paul M Taylor argues that government responses to challenges such as misinformation, online harms, privacy and hate speech are increasingly disproportionate and, in some cases, ineffective.“While governments are right and bound to protect citizens from genuine harm, measures that curtail political expression, encourage censorship, or prioritise one right over another threaten the very principles of accountability and fairness that the rule of law is designed to safeguard,” Dr Taylor says.The paper highlights several recent developments, including:
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.He calls for a renewed commitment to rule of law principles: transparency, proportionality, accountability, and full respect for fundamental human rights.“The rule of law is meant to be more than just theoretical,” Dr Taylor says. “It ensures that power is exercised fairly and responsibly, that laws are clear and predictable, and that rights are properly protected for all. If these principles are weakened, democracy itself is diminished.”The paper concludes with a call to reassert the rule of law in Australian governance, warning that without vigilance and cultural commitment, recent trends may erode freedoms that citizens have long relied upon.
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.

Our Prosperity is Slipping Away: Submission to Economic Reform Roundtable by Michael Stutchbury

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.  “Rather than taking the policy decisions necessary to sustain growth, the political process has descended into a contest over redistributing shrinking wealth.  
“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. #auspol #economics 

The Productivity Problem. Australia’s Growth Slump Is Undermining Prosperity | Jim Cox

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.The paper identifies a triple threat:
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.“Prosperity is not automatic,” Cox concludes. “It requires deliberate choices: investment in skills, encouragement of risk-taking, and institutions that reward creativity rather than rent-seeking.”“The prize is a richer, fairer and more resilient Australia.”A subsequent paper by Cox, which proposes options — including a new initiative — to best boost productivity growth rates to promote greater prosperity, will be published by CIS on Thursday, August 14.Jim Cox is a prominent economist and former Deputy Chair and board member of the Australian Energy Regulator, and former chief executive of the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal. He has held positions with the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Social Policy Secretariat of the Department of Social Security.

Leviathan on the Rampage: Government spending growth a threat to Australia’s economic future | Robert Carling

Australia’s government expenditure has surged to a post-war high (except for the pandemic-era spike) of 38–39% of GDP, up from 34–35% before the 2008 global financial crisis, a new Centre for Independent Studies paper outlines. In Leviathan on the Rampage: Government spending growth a threat to Australia’s economic future, economist Robert Carling warns that federal spending alone has climbed from 24–25% to 27.6% of GDP since 2012–13, fueled by a culture of entitlement and relentless program expansion in social services, defence and debt interest. Key Findings
Real per capita federal spending has risen 1.8% on average annually since 2012–13, far exceeding Australia’s 0.5% productivity growth and more than double real GDP growth.
A dozen fast-growing programs — including the NDIS, aged care, defence, schools, Medicare and child care — account for 63% of the increase in federal own-purpose spending in that period and now represent around half of such spending.
Public debt interest is projected to rise 9.5% a year for the next decade, as higher rates refinance pandemic-era borrowing and ongoing deficits push debt up further.
Off-budget ‘investments’ — from student loans to energy transition funds — add a further $104 billion in hidden spending over five years.
 Drawing on Bastiat’s warning that “the state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else”, Carling argues Australia has crossed a tipping point. “More than half of voters now rely on government for most of their income — through wages, benefits or subsidies — creating a formidable bloc against restraint,” he says. “The honeymoon of debt-funded largesse is over. Without a determined reset of expectations, Australia risks sliding into a European-style welfare state — slower growth, higher taxes and a culture where ‘voting for a living’ replaces ‘working for a living’.” Carling urges immediate expenditure reform, not just tax tinkering. His reform menu includes: 
Rolling reviews of major programs to cut waste and lift effectiveness.
Fiscal rules to cap per-capita spending growth below GDP growth.
Freeze public-service numbers and shift from consultants to permanent staff.
Shelve new spending ideas — including universal child care and expanded Medicare dental cover.
Return to structural surplus by 2029–30, echoing successful consolidations of the 1980s and 1990s.
 Robert Carling is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and a former World Bank, IMF and federal and state Treasury economist.#auspol #economics #australiannews 

Early Numbers, Big Ideas - Fostering Number Sense in Young Children by Nancy C. Jordan and Nancy Dyson

A new Centre for Independent Studies paper underlines the importance of developing early number sense in children, with advice for both parents and teachers, as well as invaluable exercises.In  Early Numbers, Big Ideas. Fostering Number Sense in Young Children, authors Dr Nancy C. Jordan and Dr Nancy Dyson say children's trajectories in mathematics are shaped early. and the development of early number sense will reap benefits in later schooling and adult life.  “Foundational mathematical knowledge at school entry is a strong and consistent predictor of later achievement, with effects that persist through primary and even secondary schooling,” Dr Jordan says.“Children who begin school with low numeracy skills are significantly more likely to continue struggling with mathematics across their schooling years, and early gaps in understanding tend to widen over time if left unaddressed,” she says.“All the evidence reinforces the need to ensure all children get off to a strong start in developing key foundational skills — particularly number sense — during the early years of schooling.”Number sense involves three key strands that work together — knowledge of numbers, understanding relationships between numbers, and grasping elements of number operations. Research shows that teaching all three together helps make explicit the connections between these three strands, especially for children who struggle with number sense. “Making connections between these three strands is essential for a firm foundation of number sense, starting with smaller numbers and visual representation,” Dr Jordan says. “Fluency rooted in number sense is the goal.“Instruction for the development of number sense should also use linear representations of number whenever possible to emphasise the linear nature of numbers and prepare children to think about numbers on the number line. “By the time children reach Foundation or Year One, many can see that numbers follow a linear pattern, with each number being exactly one more than the previous one.  This understanding lays the foundation for using the visual number line, a critical tool for organising and comparing all real numbers.” Dr Jordan and Dr Dyson’s paper is structured in three parts. The first section defines number sense and outlines its significance in early cognitive and mathematical development. The second section explores how difficulties with number sense arise, how they can be identified through effective early screening, and why timely identification is essential. The final section presents practical, evidence-based instructional strategies and classroom routines that educators can use to support number sense development in all learners.
 
Dr Nancy C. Jordan  the Dean Family Endowed Chair and Professor of Education at the University of Delaware. Her research centres on how children learn mathematics and why many struggle, particularly in early and middle childhood. Prof Jordan authored numerous highly cited articles, with recent work appearing in the Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal of Learning Disabilities, Developmental Psychology, and the Journal of Research on Mathematics Education, among others. Dr Nancy Dyson is a research associate at the University of Delaware where she received her doctorate, studying under Dr Nancy Jordan and Dr James Hiebert. The focus of her research is developing and testing instructional approaches and curricula for students who struggle with mathematics. She has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals and has made numerous conference presentations on this topic.

Economic Challenges Ahead for the Government: A CIS Review

The re-elected government faces a long list of economic challenges, some of them created or exacerbated in its first term. This CIS review discusses some of the major challenges: budget repair; fiscal reform; productivity growth; and housing. Read the paper here: https://www.cis.org.au/publication/post-election-economic-challenges/ 
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