Centre for Independent Studies

Grim reality of the NDIS leviathan | The Stutchbury Sessions

Grim reality of the NDIS leviathan
“It will start big and get bigger and grow to become the new leviathan of the Australian welfare state,” CIS scholar Andrew Baker further predicted of Labor’s National Disability Insurance Scheme in his 2012 policy monograph.Even the Productivity Commission failed to pick the looming NDIS fiscal disaster from the worthy goal of providing support to permanently and significantly disabled Australians...
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Defending 'Neoliberalism' from the Left and Right

The hard lesson of Australia’s protectionist past is that propping up uncompetitive and high cost industries invariably poses a burden on other sectors, including on the mining, gas and farm exporters that actually support our prosperity.  
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The Australian Dream is Dead | Parnell Palme McGuinness

Over the past several decades, Australian society has undergone profound economic, social, and cultural change. Education pathways have lengthened, housing costs have far outpaced wages, family formation has been delayed or disrupted, and government intervention has expanded across nearly every stage of life. Public policy has attempted to keep pace with these changes. But there is a growing mismatch between the aspirations young Australians hold and the reality they experience.
This CIS research (https://www.cis.org.au/publication/generation-trapped-housing-handouts-and-the-collapse-of-young-australians-life-satisfaction/) examines the lives, aspirations, values, and perceived barriers of Australians aged 18–34. Drawing on original qualitative interviews using conversational AI and quantitative research conducted by Spectre Strategy on behalf of the Centre for Independent Studies, it finds young Australians do not aspire to radically different lives than previous generations. Financial security, home ownership, meaningful work, family, and children remain core goals. What has changed is the degree to which these goals feel attainable.
👉 Read the research: https://www.cis.org.au/tribes
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Infinite possibilities from the dark side of the moon

Donald Trump’s threats to destroy the ‘whole civilisation’ of Iran this week jarringly contrasted with the out-of-this world American achievement of sending a four-member crew as far from Earth as any humans had gone. 
 
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Middle East oil shock fuels panic vote-buying | The Stutchbury Sessions

Australia’s new economic decline is colliding with the breakdown of the liberal rules-based orders for global trade and security. The post-pandemic and oil shock push for more sovereign capability and supply-chain self-reliance will eat into national income just as living standards are under pressure.
Resolving this tension will require more, not less, of the pro-market —or neo-liberal — policy agenda of the Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello era to reboot productivity and economic growth.
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Four lessons from the energy crisis of 1970s

I was in Canberra this week, in part to hear International Energy Agency head Fatih Birol warn that today’s oil price shock will rival the twin Middle East energy shocks of the 1970s. 
The 1973 and 1979 shocks promoted using smaller and more fuel-efficient vehicles. And it prompted a wave of nuclear energy development in Japan, Europe and North America. Today’s oil price shock will have comparable repercussions, Birol predicts.  
Here’s the four take outs I picked up at a National Security College conference, where I was on a panel, and the annual Minerals Council of Australia Minerals Week Conference, where I moderated a session:  
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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

Inflation Expectations | The Stutchbury Sessions

RBA governor Michele Bullock has jacked up her cash rate by 25 basis points for the second month in a row because of two words that can strike fear into the heart of central bankers: “inflation expectations”. 
What does this mean for you? 
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"The 50% discount is unfair" and other CGT myths | Robert Carling & Michael Stutchbury

The criticisms and characterization of the 50% capital gains tax discount over many years have been full of misunderstandings, myths and distortions in the conventional narrative on how capital gains tax works, how it compares with the capital gains tax that it replaced in 1999, and the economic consequences of making the capital gains tax burden heavier. The myths and distortions are biasing the public discussion towards increased taxation.
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👉 Further reading: 
Why We Should Not Increase Capital Gains Tax: https://www.cis.org.au/publication/why-we-should-not-increase-capital-gains-tax/
10 CGT Myths Busted: https://www.cis.org.au/publication/10-cgt-myths-busted/

Why We Should Not Increase Capital Gains Tax by Robert Carling | Research Collection

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