Centre for Independent Studies

Lionel Shriver: ”I’ll write what I damn well please”

The arts are battered and boxed in by the proliferating dos and don’ts of political correctness, the predations of gotcha identity politics and the hypersensitivities of the #MeToo movement.
The John Bonython Lecture is the annual Gala event for the Centre for Independent Studies. Designed to advance the principles of free choice, individual liberty, defend cultural freedom and the open exchange of ideas – this year’s lecture was no different.
Award winning American author and opinion writer Lionel Shriver delivered this year’s lecture. She eviscerated the modern-day obsession with identity politics, political correctness and the hypersensitivities of the #MeToo movement that are threatening creativity.
Shriver’s breakout novel We Need to Talk About Kevin has sold over 1 million copies and was made into a feature film starring Tilda Swinton.
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Time to get tougher with China?

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s increasingly hardline rule at home and growing assertiveness abroad show few signs of moderating despite recent pushback. If anything, Beijing is becoming more uncompromising — whether it be over the Uighurs in Xinjiang and protests in Hong Kong, or in the South China Sea as its military power grows.
Meanwhile, Australian attitudes towards the PRC are hardening. Protests have broken out over Confucius Institutes on university campuses, and there have even been calls to nationalise the Darwin port leased to a Chinese company a few years ago.
But can Australia afford to get tougher with China? One in three of our export dollars are earned in Chinese markets and further economic opportunities beckon. Or should the question be: can we afford not to get tougher with the PRC, as the divergence between our values and security interests grows starker?
Join human rights advocate and CIS scholar-in-residence Anastasia Lin, chairman of Vantage Asia Holdings and China Matters advisory board member Jason Yat-sen Li, and CIS adjunct scholar and Sydney University political sociologist Salvatore Babones for a discussion of these issues and more. The discussion will be moderated by Sue Windybank, convenor of the CIS China and Free Societies program.
Anastasia Lin is a human rights advocate and the 2019 scholar-in-residence at The Centre for Independent Studies. She is also the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s ambassador for China policy and a senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.
Jason Yat-sen Li is Chairman of Vantage Asia Holdings, a Senate Fellow at the University of Sydney, and an advisory board member of China Matters.
Salvatore Babones is a political sociologist at the University of Sydney and an Adjunct Scholar at The Centre for Independent Studies. He is author of the CIS report, The China Student Boom and the Risks It Poses to Australian Universities.
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Anastasia Lin: China and human rights

China uses its trade power as leverage to infiltrate institutions and bully virtually every Western nation. Anastasia Lin knows this firsthand, having grown up in Communist China and faced down the regime as an international human-rights activist. Even after Chinese rights advocates immigrate to the West, the Communist Party uses their family members in China as leverage to silence and intimidate them. The free world should unite to counter Beijing’s abuse.
Anastasia Lin, an actress and Miss World Canada 2015, is the Centre for Independent Studies scholar-in-residence in 2019. She is the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s ambassador for China policy and a senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.
In 2015, Lin was denied a Chinese visa to attend the 65th annual Miss World contest on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, because of her outspoken advocacy for human rights and religious freedom in China.
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China debate: John Mearsheimer vs Hugh White

For years, Australian policymakers have balanced China’s desire for an enhanced regional role with our desire for U.S. protection. However, contrary to the Canberra consensus, there is going to be an intense strategic rivalry between our major trading partner and our major strategic ally.
According to John Mearsheimer, one of America’s leading foreign-policy thinkers, Washington will not let China become the dominant military power in the region without putting up a serious fight. In these circumstances, it’s naïve to think that Australia can sit on the sidelines and get the best of both worlds: unconstrained trade with China while keeping the U.S. security umbrella over its head. Canberra must support Uncle Sam.
However, Australia’s future will be dominated by China, says one of Australia’s leading strategic thinkers Hugh White. Treasury forecasts show that the Chinese economy will be about 80 per cent bigger than America’s within a dozen years. In this environment, Canberra must prepare for the new strategic terrain in the wake of America’s declining leadership, and we would be unwise to support Washington in a confrontation with China that America probably cannot win.
John Mearsheimer is professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and author of "The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities" (Yale University Press).
Hugh White is professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra and author of Quarterly Essay “Without America: Australia in the new Asia” (November 2017).
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Australia’s choice in a US-China conflict

As China converts its growing economic power into military power, it will seek to dominate Asia the way the U.S. has dominated the western hemisphere since the 19th century.
Washington will go to great lengths to prevent China from seeking regional hegemony. The tensions over tariffs, Taiwan and Hong Kong are just the beginning of a deteriorating Sino-American relationship.
Australian foreign-policy elites seem to think that they can either wish away the intense security competition or that, if the conflict materialises, Canberra can sit on the sidelines: China and the US can duke it out while Australia is safe, secure and prosperous. Perhaps, but this is not how international politics works.
John Mearsheimer is professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (W.W. Norton, 2001).
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Racial politics in modern America

As our 2019 Helen Hughes lecturer, Michael Ondaatje surveys the increasingly tribal political landscape of modern America. Paying special attention to the toxic racial politics of the Trump era, explain why the dream of a “post-racial” society has died, and how it might be revived.
The United States is more divided today than at any time since the Vietnam War era. Society is fracturing along crude identity lines. Anger and grievance are ascendant. Obsession with common enemies overrides concern for the common good. According to some experts, America is at the crossroads.
Professor Michael Ondaatje is Pro Vice-Chancellor (Arts and Academic Culture), and Professor of American History, at Australian Catholic University and Dr Jeremy Sammut, is a senior research fellow and the director of the Culture, Prosperity and Civil Society Program at the Centre for Independent Studies.
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Corporate Virtue Signalling

Dr Jeremy Sammut and Maurice Newman – former chairman of the Australian Stock Exchange and columnist with The Australian newspaper – had a conversation about what can be done to stop corporate political meddling and to ensure that business keeps out of politics.
Major Australian companies are increasingly involved in contentious political debates – such as Indigenous Recognition – that are not the business of business, and are all in the name of what is known as “Corporate Social Responsibility”.
In his new book Corporate Virtue Signaling: How to Stop Big Business from Meddling in Politics, CIS Senior Research Fellow Dr Jeremy Sammut, argues that if the CSR activists operating inside Australia businesses get their way, companies will become political players campaigning for ‘systemic change’ behind ‘progressive’ social, environmental, and economic causes.
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The banking sector after Hayne

How do policymakers and regulators balance restoring trust in our financial system with maintaining the flow of credit? Australia’s banking industry had long had a reputation for being among the world’s safest for investors. Its reputation has been tarnished in recent times after the explosion of scrutiny from the Hayne Royal Commission.
Hear from Anna Bligh, Chief Executive Officer at the Australian Banking Association, and Simon Cowan, Research Director at the Centre for Independent Studies.

Post-election challenges for the centre-right

For sound analysis of the state of conservative politics, please join Sir Bill English (former New Zealand prime minister), Sir Craig Oliver (former director of politics and communications to British prime minister David Cameron and currently a Principal with global CEO advisory firm Teneo) and Jennifer Hewett (national affairs columnist with the Australian Financial Review).
Plus, as Britain makes a chaotic exit from the European Union, the Tories are in dire straits, having copped a drubbing in the recent local elections and preparing for the worst in the upcoming European Parliament elections. In New Zealand, meanwhile, the centre-right National Party is in Jacinda Ardern’s shadows.
What’s the state of conservatism in Australia, Britain and New Zealand? Where to now? Can the Liberals, Conservatives and National party remain broad churches? And what will be the likely impact of Brexit on Australian/NZ/UK relations?
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Forty years after Thatcher’s election

With Britain’s ruling Conservative Party in disarray, and against the backdrop of a chaotic British exit from the EU, there is a real danger that Britain is lurching to the left. Join us to get an in-depth analysis of the British Conservative crisis and the rise of millennial socialism.
Forty years ago, Margaret Thatcher led her Conservative Party to victory and set the scene for a wave of privatisation and deregulation across the Anglosphere. From the Keynesian mindset that delivered economic stagflation and the “winter of discontent” in the 1970s, the UK, as well as the US, Australia and New Zealand, moved to an era of sounder policy and more durable prosperity.
Today, as the cause for competitive markets and free enterprise appears quixotic, it is easy to forget how depressing things looked four decades ago and how the economic reforms unleashed by the Thatcher Revolution led to a golden age.
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