Institute of Public Affairs

Historian Michael Bertram, writing in 1989, identified three distinct periods for the Institute of Public Affairs: • the war years and "immediate post-war years" where Australia's economic future was in question, ending with the election of Robert Menzies in 1949; • the "Keynesian consensus" of the 1950s and 1960s and • the "sea-shift to the right" of the 1970s and 1980s. War and immediate post-war years (1943–1949) The Institute of Public Affairs was founded in 1943 as the Institute of Public Affairs Victoria, with Charles Kemp as its inaugural director and George Coles as its inaugural chair. The founders were prominent businessmen, and current executive director John Roskam says of the occasion: "Big business created the IPA". The idea to form the Institute of Public Affairs was first floated in the Victorian Chamber of Manufactures. The IPA's formation was prompted by the collapse of Australia's main right-wing party, the United Australia Party. The IPA's initial purpose was to influence Australia's post-war reconstruction, with business interests concerned that popular sentiment supported a Labor-led, collectivist post-war construction, a "prevailing clamour for a new kind of society". Throughout 1943, branches were set up in New South Wales (May), South Australia (June) and Queensland (August), although the state branches remained administratively and ideologically distinct (the SA and Queensland branches closed in the 1950s). There seems to have been a pre-existing body called the Institute of Public Affairs in Western Australia, which operated between 1941 and 1942. The IPA NSW engaged in "party political activism", The CSS was restructured in late 1943 and it again investigated the IPA's state branches. Keynesian consensus (1949–1972) During the 1950s and 1960s, the IPA "came to wholeheartedly support" Keynesian economics, with director C. D. Kemp writing "we are all socialists now". The appointment of Rod Kemp (CD Kemp's son) as executive director in 1982, along with other administrative changes that had occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, marked a shift to neo-liberal ideology that continues to this day. In 1989, the IPA NSW – which had always been administratively and ideologically distinct – changed name to the Sydney Institute, and transitioned from neo-liberal think tank to discussion forum. The research was done with the assistance of Westpac staff seconded to work on the project. Between 2009 and 2013, the IPA's annual revenue doubled to $3.2 million a year, an increase attributed by Roskam to the IPA's campaign against parts of the Racial Discrimination Act and the Gillard government's media regulation proposals. In 2013 the IPA celebrated its 70th anniversary, MCed by political commentator Andrew Bolt. Notable in attendance at the celebrations were: • Gina Rinehart • Rupert Murdoch • Tony Abbott – Liberal Opposition Leader • George Pell – Australian Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church • Michael Kroger – then President of the Victorian division of the Liberal Party of Australia and former director of the IPA • Mitch Fifield – Liberal Communications Minister • Robert Doyle – Liberal Lord Mayor of Melbourne • Denis Napthine – Liberal Premier of Victoria In August 2018, Australian Public Service Commissioner John Lloyd resigned during an investigation into correspondence he had with his former colleagues at the Institute of Public Affairs. On the day he retired, the investigation concluded that he had breached the Australian Public Service code of conduct by corresponding with the Institute of Public Affairs, but the breach did not warrant sanction. Lloyd subsequently returned to work at the IPA. In 2018, the IPA held two dinners to celebrate its 75th anniversary. The first was sponsored by Visy and took place on 21 August, the night of the first 2018 Liberal Party of Australia leadership spill. Former prime minister John Howard was interviewed at the dinner by Janet Albrechtsen about the spill, but did not explicitly support either candidate. Gina Rinehart and Rupert Murdoch praised US President Donald Trump at the dinner. The second dinner was hosted by Crown Melbourne in November, and was hosted by Janet Albrechtsen, Andrew Bolt and Brendan O'Neill. Guests included chair of Liberal Party fundraiser the Cormack Foundation Charles Goode; former Cormack board members Hugh Morgan and John Calvert-Jones; Liberal minister Alan Tudge; and Liberal strategist Brian Loughnane. In 2020, the IPA released a video featuring then-Director of Policy Gideon Rozner, calling for an end to COVID-19 lockdown measures. The video was released on 4 April, less than a week after Australia's COVID-19 National Cabinet had agreed to the lockdowns. This effectively made the IPA the first organisation in Australia to call for an end to lockdowns, a highly controversial stance at the time. In 2021, in reaction to Victorian Labor government moves to ban the public display of the Nazi swastika and other hate symbols, Roskam decried the move as "the most vicious attack on free speech ever contemplated anywhere in Australia". In 2023, the IPA collaborated with free market think tanks Centre for Independent Studies, LibertyWorks (founded by entrepreneur Andrew Cooper), conservative lobby group Advance, and several fossil fuel companies to coordinate the No campaign during the 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum. ==Finances and donors==

The IPA is funded by its membership, which include both private individuals and businesses. It has been significantly funded by Hancock Prospecting, of which Gina Rinehart is the Executive Chair. Hancock Prospecting paid the IPA $2.3 million in financial year 2016 and $2.2 million in financial year 2017, which represents one-third to a half of the IPA's total revenue in those years. These payments were not disclosed in IPA annual reports, and Rinehart's daughter Bianca Hope Heyward submitted in court that the Hancock Prospecting payments were credited to Rinehart in an individual capacity. Other businesses who fund or have funded the IPA include ExxonMobil, Telstra, WMC Resources, Philip Morris, Murray Irrigation Limited, Visy, and British American Tobacco (BAT). The Institute of Public Affairs has also been funded by Liberal Party associated entity the Cormack Foundation. In 2003, the Howard Government provided $50,000 to the Institute of Public Affairs to review the accountability of NGOs. ==Political links and networking==

The IPA Victoria was founded during World War II by businessmen in response to the feared growing power of the Labor Party and international socialism, with founder C. D. Kemp putting the case to the Victorian Chamber of Manufactures sub-committee as such: The IPA Victoria was founded as an apolitical organisation, and rejected the IPA NSW's strategy of "direct short term political action to defeat the Labor Party with an emphasis on propaganda". However, the IPA Victoria acted as a finance committee for non-Labor parties in its first year, and the IPA Treasurer at the time reportedly said that much of the IPA Victoria's funding was conditional on it being spent to "fight socialism at the coming election" (the 1943 Australian federal election). Its Publicity and Research Bureau wrote political broadcasters, provided speakers' notes to all endorsed United Australia Party and United Country Party candidates and producing advertisements. Academic and public servant Finlay Crisp described it as a "satellite" of the Liberal Party during this time, and the IPA Review had a policy of not approaching Labor figures for submissions and of muting criticism of the Liberal government. By the 1980s, the IPA had changed its policy and made space in the IPA Review for Labor politicians and "others not of the free enterprise persuasion". and has run for Liberal Party preselection. Tony Abbott delivered the 57th C D Kemp lecture in 2001 on the Coalition government's Work for the Dole program and Prime Minister John Howard delivered the 60th C D Kemp lecture in 2004, titled Iraq: The Importance of Seeing it Through. Howard has also said that its policies are influenced by the IPA, which "contributes very strongly to the intellectual debate on issues and that in turn has an impact on what attitude the Liberal Party takes". ==Research focus==

Following the 2013 federal election of the Abbott Coalition government, the IPA released a list of 75 policy initiatives (later adding another 25) to "transform Australia" which encapsulated the present direction of the IPA. The IPA is affiliated with the Atlas Network, a global umbrella organisation of free market think tanks. This changed during the late 1970s and 1980s, • abolish the minimum wage • deregulation of the Australian economy; • reduced government spending; Tobacco In the 1990s, the IPA was funded by the tobacco industry to conduct research that "attacked the science behind passive smoking". The research included a study from 1996 by John Luik that found that the impact of passive smoking on non-smokers was "trivial", and that "bogus" or "corrupt" passive smoking "threatens the central democratic values of autonomy, respect and diversity". In 2010, the IPA argued against the Gillard government's plans to introduce plain tobacco packaging, criticising it on the grounds that plain packaging may not affect the consumption of those products and that plain packaging may infringe intellectual property rights in tobacco trademarks and logos. If so, it would represent a breach of the constitutional requirement that acquisition be on just terms. Policy director Tim Wilson predicted that the government could be liable for $3 billion in compensation, a claim that was criticised at the time by Media Watch in part because media covering Wilson's claims did not mention that the IPA receives donations from the tobacco industry. The High Court ultimately ruled that no compensation was required, in British American Tobacco Australasia Limited and Ors v. The Commonwealth of Australia. Research in the decade after the policy was introduced, from Cancer Council Australia and the Australian Government found a significant decline in smoking prevalence in Australia, about a quarter of which was attributable to plain packaging. Climate change The IPA rejects the scientific consensus on the topic, i.e. that it is currently being mainly caused by human activities (in particular the burning of fossil fuels, leading to a build-up of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide), arguing that there is insufficient scientific evidence. It advocates that research in climate science should be more wide-ranging than overwhelmingly focused on attempting to prove that carbon dioxide is a dangerous climate-changing pollutant based on the inferences of hypothetical climate models. The IPA has financed several Australians who are contrarians or active in alternative climate change research. In 2008, the institute facilitated a donation of by G. Bryant Macfie, a climate change denier, to the University of Queensland for environmental research. The money was given to fund three environmental doctoral projects, with the IPA suggesting two of the three agreed topics. In 2010, the IPA published a compilation of essays by prominent climate change deniers titled Climate Change: The Facts and edited by John Roskam and Alan Moran. An expanded version with 22 essays was published in 2015 through Stockade Books and a follow-up edited by Jennifer Marohasy was published in 2017. In 2019 the IPA published an essay by Clive James, Chapter 22 of the 2017 publication, on its website, which was critical of what it called "climate change alarmism in the upmarket mass media". In 2017, Marohasy and IPA colleague John Abbot published a paper on climate change in the journal GeoResJ, also discussing the work on the IPA website, in The Spectator Australia, and in Marohasy's blog. The research concludes that much of recent warming could be attributable to natural variations, and that the "world was about as warm in 1980 as it was during the Middle Ages". Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has pointed out that some data were shifted in time by approximately 35 years, leading to the omission of warming that has occurred since 1965. Schmidt described the research as "worthless" and an example of "what happens when people have their conclusions fixed before they start the work". ==Notable people==

The following individuals are or were associated with the Institute of Public Affairs. Senior office bearers When the IPA Victoria was founded in 1943, it had a chairman (Sir George Coles); a chairman of the executive committee was chosen in 1944 (G. H. Grimwade) and a director (Charles Denton Kemp) in 1948. The executive committee was also referred to as the Industrial Committee or the Executive & Editorial Committee, and the role of chairman was subsequently renamed to president. From July 1983, the roles of president and chairman of the executive committee were combined. Staff, fellows and board members Donors, members and associates ==Publications==

The IPA Review is published quarterly. == See also ==