The July 2008 IPA Review will be on the newsstands and in mail boxes within the next week, but a number of articles are available on the new Institute of Public Affairs website. If you’re not a subscriber, please consider becoming one!

I have two major pieces in this edition: a longish piece on the moral emptiness of ‘Olympism’ and other justifications for hosting the games, ‘Politics, not sport, is the purpose of the Olympic Games‘, and a book review of a collection of essays on cult, sleaze and horror films called Sleaze Artists, ‘Have bad movies edged out good?‘ My editorial discusses the Fisher Award for best magazine.

But just as exciting is the availability on the new website of the entire back catalogue of IPA Reviews, reaching back to the first edition in 1947. Over the last sixty years, we have published specially commissioned original articles by Raymond Aron, Peter Drucker, three pieces by Friedrich Hayek, Keith Hancock, many pieces by Geoffrey Blainey, as well as seminal articles on the history wars, fair trade, and Islamic liberalism. There are a lot of gems buried in the history of the IPA Review, so its certainly worth digging around.

One point to note however is how a number of the policy positions of the IPA Review has changed over the years. While the magazine has remained a consistent advocate of liberalisation, its position on small number of policy areas has changed - most notably in the social policy arena.

The magazine now takes a consistent position in favour of both economic and social liberalism. But it has always been a reflection of philosophical trends in the Australian right. As I write in the editor’s note on the website, ‘as Australian society has changed, so has the IPA Review.’