I have published my first book: The Growth of Australia’s Regulatory State: Ideology, Accountability, and the Mega-Regulators which concerns the consequences of the recent growth of regulation has on political governance and accountability:

Regulation is a political activity. It sets the framework for the market economy by defining the boundaries between private action and government action. Yet those boundaries are not fixed. Australian governments are growing the body of regulation - and the resources dedicated to regulating - at an ever increasing pace.

This growth in regulation has more than just economic consequences. It has signicant political implications, as regulatory agencies are increasing their power and inuence. Furthermore, those agencies are animated by a new regulatory ideology which favours interventionism and ‘armtwisting’, adding to the powers of regulatory agencies.

Hard copies of the book are available from the Institute of Public Affairs for $14.95, or digital copies available at the link above.

I have a piece in The Age on paid parental leave, arguing that perhaps a large increase in the immigration intake would solve the same problems, but cheaper.

Latest IPA Review has arrived in my hot little hands - should be in mailboxes and newsagencies within the week.

The IPA Review, we are happy to announce, is graduating from a quarterly magazine to a bimonthly magazine - that is, six times a year. This is partly because of the large growth in sales and subscriptions that have greeted the magazine over the last three years that I have edited it, and partly to be more contemporary and political after the fall of the Howard government. To do so, we also have given the magazine a bit of a revamp and added some new sections.

I have a number of pieces in this edition: the major one on the politics of dystopian movies, as well as one responding to an attack on the Institute of Public Affairs by Shane Cahill writing for Overland magazine. I also have a book review of Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip.

I have a piece in The Age on the 2020 summit: “Rudd summit puts con into consensus“

I’ve been asked to contribute to the Australian Libertarian Society blog - I have a piece up there now about the need for a libertarian approach to culture and aesthetics.

Writing about the environment is hardly my day job, but nevertheless, the biggest response I have had to an oped so far was for last week’s “Isn’t all this talk of an apocalypse getting a bit boring?” in The Age. The piece used the fortieth anniversary of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb to make the case for general optimism about the future - on almost every measure, the world is getting healthier, cleaner and richer.

In response, Colin Fraser of a consultancy called Solutions Unlimited (I can’t seem to find this business on the web) has written a piece agreeing that Ehrlich was spectacularly wrong, but nevertheless The Population Bomb still has relevance - it was just a little hasty in its predictions.

But it isn’t failed predictions that makes Ehrlich’s book notable. What is far more instructive what he believed that the world would have to do to counter the population crisis. In the chapter ‘What needs to be done’, Ehrlich advocates the developed world setting demographic targets for developing nations, and using aid dollars to pursue those targets. He goes on:

While we are working towards setting up a world program of the general sort outlined above, the United States could take effective unilateral action in many cases. A good example of how we might have acted can be built around the Chandrasekhar incident I mentioned earlier. When he suggested sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children, we should have applied pressure on the Indian government to go ahead with the plan. We should have volunteered logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles and surgical instruments. We should have sent doctors to aid in the program by setting up centers for training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies. Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause. …We must be relentless in pushing for population control around the world. [emphasis added]

Ehrlich’s book is notable because it so casually advocates forced sterilisation for a crisis that never came, and it still has many defenders forty years down the track. Failed predications are common, although few perhaps as influential as Ehrlich’s. But The Population Bomb’s anniversary should be remembered because it clearly demonstrates the willingness for environment activists to quickly drop their pretense of humanism when convenient. This tendency is as clear today as it was in 1968.