Tag: IPA Review

A review of Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip.

In 1931, some 10,000 American tourists travelled to the Soviet Union in order to see what the great Soviet Experiment could offer their depression ravaged country.

But the tourist traffic heading the other direction was much lighter. Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip is the travelogue of two Soviet satirists, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, as they crossed the United States, scribbling reports for Pravda readers back home. Like the American fellow-travellers who were merrily shuttled from Potemkin village to Potemkin village, the report of their journey reveals more about their home country and culture than the country they ostensibly went to investigate.

The resulting photoessay, which was originally published in the Russian magazine Ogonek, (roughly equivalent to Life) reproduced the snapshots taken by Ilya Ilf on their journey with their satirical impressions of their trip. American Road Trip is a delightfully naïve interpretation of American society in the depression era.

In this book edited by Erika Wolf, a historian of Soviet art, Ilf’s photographs are affectionately reproduced for the first time in an English language publication. Ilf’s photographs are more happy-snaps than Ansell Adams. Many photos appear to have been taken by sticking the camera out of the windows of their car. The book is full of slightly askew pictures of things the two Russians found interesting, or at least notable – some ‘handsome and unusually elaborate’ species of cactus, the childhood home of Mark Twain, an advertisement for whiskey that incorporated a statue of a horse, and a sign that notified visitors they were entering the little town of Moscow, Ohio.

There are some photographs of more political importance. A swaying sign in the street with the lettering ‘REVOLUTION IS A FORM OF GOVERNMENT ABROAD’ is, to Ilf and Petrov, bourgeois intimidation of the working class. (As Erika Wolf notes, the joke was on the Russians-the sign was instead an advertisement for a popular humour anthology illustrated by Dr Seuss. Ilf and Petrov were the foremost satirists of the Soviet Union, but they were unable to recognise the work of their American colleagues.)

For the most part, Ilf’s camera is non-political. Indeed, American Road Trip generally avoids direct political criticism. Ilf and Petrov are obviously fond of the country they are studying. They are fascinated by the advertising they see plastered across their trip, and direct much of their satirical energy towards Coca-Cola and cigarette advertising:

The fiery writing burns all night long above America and all day long the garish billboards hurt your eyes: ‘The Best in the World! Toasted Cigarettes! They Bring You Success! The Best in the Solar System!’

When we read how foreign the most basic and innocuous advertising seems to the two Russians-they are surprised that that towns advertise themselves on billboards beside the highway-we don’t gain a better picture of the United States in the 1930s, but of the Soviet Union. They are highly sympathetic to the Native Americans living on reservations, predictably seeing them as remnants of a social structure in opposition to the dynamic capitalism of the east and west coasts. (Although as Erika Wolf notes, Ilf and Petrov are once again tricked, as a Native American who pretends to be unaware of civilisation was actually a famous photographer and clown dancer on tour.) Similarly, a trip through North Carolina confirms their Soviet views about American race relations – deep in the Jim Crow era, it is fair to say they had a point.

What does surprise the modern reader is the unfocused rage they direct towards American filmmaking. ‘We watched at least a hundred picture shows and were simply depressed by the amount of vulgarity, stupidity and lies’. Certainly, it would be hard to defend the vast piles of films which were produced to fulfil contractual obligations in the studio system during Hollywood’s Golden Age, but cheaply written and produced movies are hardly a unique feature of American cinema. The cookie-cutter productions of Soviet cinema during the ideologically rigid Stalin era are, on average, of a far lower quality than comparable American films, and have certainly held up worse over time. Ilf and Petrov may have been outraged more by the ideological content of Hollywood films than their quality.

American Road Trip is certainly at the margins of Soviet culture in the 1930s, but it is more than a historical curiosity. Satire was a major part of Russian culture before and after the October Revolution. The lives of Illya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov illustrate how mixed the bureaucratic approach to political satire could be. Their 1928 novel The Twelve Chairs flirts with political criticism, but they remained in favour-other well-known satirists, such as those in OBERIU literary collective, were killed in Stalin’s purges for sedition.

Ilf and Petrov do little more than reflect dominant Soviet thinking about their ideological opponent, but they are never heavy handed or propagandistic. American Road Trip purports to be a study of the United States, but instead fascinatingly reveals the strength of Soviet ideology and the Russian mindset.

‘When you change the government’, argued John Howard in the last few days before the election, ‘you do change the direction of the country’.

Paul Keating’s clarion call proved to be just as ineffectual the second time round. That could perhaps be because it obviously isn’t true. Despite the high level of state economic and social intervention in Australia, the nation isn’t steered by Captain Government.

As Tim Wilson writes in this special section on liberalism after the Howard government, part of the problem that the Coalition faced in its final years was the unwillingness of the government to grapple with key demographic and social changes. Similarily, as Ken Phillip notes, in industrial relations the rise of independent contracting has been meteoric—to the extent that there are now far more self-employed people than there are members of a union — but the cause of this change was economic, not legislative.

Between 1996 and 2007 a lot of things happened, and very few of them were the consequence of Commonwealth legislation.

The ‘change the country’ line was doubly inappropriate because of the status quo strategy of the Rudd opposition. Federal Labor’s big ticket items may have been climate change and broadband, but fibre optic networks and carbon trading don’t win elections. Rather, it was Labor’s mantra of ‘economic conservatism’ that was specifically designed to repudiate Howard’s argument. To try to emphasise their credentials, Rudd and Gillard’s repeatedly affirmed the independence of the Reserve Bank — as if that was ever up for grabs.

The message was simple: vote for the ALP, and they won’t change the country. But if you vote for the Coalition, they will embark on another round of industrial relations reform, and the country certainly will change. The Howard government became alienated from its own record of conservative governance.

The 2007 election re-established the status quo brand in the minds of political strategists. It will likely go down as one of John Howard’s major legacies, and it is largely a positive legacy. With the government’s extraordinarily flattering economic record, it is no wonder that voters prefer more of the same.

Unfortunately, brand status quo has applied to areas which advocates of liberal philosophy — that is, the ideological combination of limited government and the open society — would prefer it did not. As Des Moore shows in his piece on the Howard government’s spending and taxing record, despite their professed sympathy with small government principles, the Coalition delivered no reduction in discretionary spending and its election promises foreshadowed no future reduction.

Along a wide range of public policy areas, the Howard government could have done more. Industrial relations reform was used as a federal power grab, rather than as a push towards common law contracts. Taxation reform drove yet another stake into the already terminal federal compact.

Other reforms were barely reforms at all—the 2006 changes to media law did little to free up a stifled commercial media sector. It is hard to avoid concluding that the government’s approach to reform was about quantity, not quality. Economic reform packages may have started out well-intentioned, but when they emerged from the meat-grinder of parliament, they too often represented steps backward.

This mixed record — the Howard government was extremely successful at managing the economy, but disappointing at reforming it—is reflected in this IPA Review issue by the conflicting, but not irreconcilable, accounts by Tom Switzer and Christian Kerr.

Liberalism’s dilemma

Nevertheless, elections are not won or lost on the size of government, weak media regulations, or eroding federalism. Elections are won on appeals to the status quo, issues such as immigration, or security fears. Federal seats are won on vacuous — and, as Richard Allsop points out, for federalists deeply concerning — issues such as graffiti, hoons and train lines. It isn’t just that voters are not interested in liberal policies. In many cases it has proven far easier to win votes with an illiberal platform.

Part of this gulf between the policy preferences of voters and liberal policy preferences has been explained well by Bryan Caplan in his 2007 book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. In it, Caplan nominates four biases held by the average voter that are not empirically justifiable. The ‘make-work bias’ is a tendency to equate economic growth with jobs, rather than productivity; the ‘anti-foreign’ bias ignores the importance of foreign trade; the ‘pessimistic bias’ overplays contemporary economic problems; and the ‘anti-market’ bias underestimates the benefits of market exchange.

Caplan’s four biases go most of the way to explaining the distance between liberal philosophy and Liberal Party policy. As a consequence, the Coalition’s loss of government illuminates sharply a debilitating problem that liberalism faces in 2007.

What role can liberal philosophy have if it can’t be successfully marketed to voters? Certainly, ideology cannot be the sole guide to policy. This is the classic dilemma for libertarians seeking public office. As one American libertarian noted, ‘There is no mass constituency for seven-year-old heroin dealers to be able to buy tanks with their profits from prostitution.’

Liberal political parties are unlikely to win future government on a platform of radical change, except in times of crisis. The four biases of the irrational voter mean that dramatic increases in immigration or a reduction in the minimum wage are hardly tickets to electoral success. In an era of status quo politics, it appears that ideology is, on net, an electoral negative rather than a positive.

But conversely, the final years of the Howard government demonstrated what can result when a political party has no philosophical base, lacks the fiscal restraint imposed by ideology, and simply purchases the votes it needs. Sooner or later, voters — or in the case of the 2007 election, the opposition — punish them for their directionless expedience.

Perhaps one reason why liberalism seems impossible to market to voters is because it hasn’t yet been tried. No major party has gone to an election — from opposition or from government — with a full programme of social liberalism and economic liberalism.

In her piece, Louise Staley starts to examine what an array of liberal social policies might look like. Importantly, she argues that ‘liberal’ in this context is not merely a synonym of ‘left’, but neither is it ‘conservative’. Instead, liberalism needs to develop its own approach if it is to break through the social policy impasse. But this is an area where modern liberal thought is conspicuously lacking, and filling that hole will need to be a part of any liberal revival.

There is the possibility, too, to develop an economically liberal message that may resonate with voters. The Howard government suffered from its abstract message — ‘economic growth’ is far less concrete than fibre-to-the-node and the Kyoto Protocol. Voters may instead respond to campaigns targeting over-bureaucracy and regulation, particularly as they affect business and community life. The record levels of regulatory and legislative activity during the Howard government provide ample scope to do so. It is fair to say that such a campaign would be a direct repudiation of the Howard record.

Ronald Reagan campaigned along these lines, although it should be noted that Australia lacks the anti-statist political culture of the United States. But if the Rudd Labor government turns out to be anything like the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, this regulation is likely to increase exponentially — presenting possible policy targets such as privacy and bureaucratisation.

Nevertheless, again we reach a strategic bottleneck — campaigns against the Nanny State may swing voters towards liberal parties at the margins, but probably not deliver two dozen seats. Arguing that a consistently liberal message could win an election would be convenient, but doesn’t seem to be true.

In this IPA Review, we have assembled a range of approaches to this challenge. What is not under question however is the need for liberalism in Australia, and the challenges which liberals face — limited government and the open society remain ‘simple and obvious’ goals regardless of their electoral popularity.

It’s not too often that we can look enviously at the political state of a country buried deep in the European Union. Brussels is not just the capital of Belgium, but it is also the de facto capital of the EU, hosting the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, the European Council and one of the seats of the European Parliament.

So it is either fitting or ironic (I can’t figure out which) that Belgium has now been, for more than six months, without a government to call its own. As we quietly recover from the shrill hangover of the 2007 federal election, it’s worth considering how Australia could have been if no government had been successfully elected in November.

Since the 10th of June, Belgian politicians have been — at least as this edition of the IPA Review goes to press — unable to form a government coalition. This failure is the result of the adversarial relationship between French and Dutch speaking political classes, in particular, from the demand by Flemish nationalists for more autonomy over taxation and welfare policy in Flanders (a region that has traditionally favoured centre right parties; the francophone region of Wallonia appropriately prefers their politics to have a more socialistic flavour.) The former government remains in power, but only in a caretaker capacity, and the semi-former prime minister is set to step down once a replacement government is available.

Sure, not having a government has its disadvantages. The great economic reforms which have propelled Australia up the ranks of economic performance would not be possible from a government that couldn’t get out of caretaker mode. Similarly, the important reforms Australia needs — workplace changes which deliver deregulation rather than centralisation, the sale of remaining government enterprises, reform of communications and occupational safety regulation, corporate and financial services deregulation, and so on — all require a rather active government.

But on the positive side of the ledger, having no government also means having a government that can’t mess things up. Governments cannot extend their reach into the economy without a capacity to legislate. Indeed, as Belgium is a central member of the EU, no government also means no government able to increase its international obligations. As the Flemish free-marketeer Paul Belian has written, the inability of the Belgian Parliament to approve European Commission directives means that ‘in its hour of ungovernability Belgium is now more sovereign than it has been in the past 50 years.’

This special edition of the IPA Review arrives in newsagencies and letterboxes at a significant moment for the cause of limited government and open society in Australia. At the dramatic end of a nominally liberal/conservative government, we have assembled the nation’s best liberal and conservative commentators to try to describe the legacy of the Howard government and the causes of its demise. But more importantly, this IPA Review engages with the question—what next for liberalism? Has the cause of liberty advanced or retreated over the last decade? What are the next steps?

This edition also contains the full complement of non-election related commentary. Sam Gregg engages with Christian leaders who would ignore or reject free market economics for a socialist Christianity, Paul Monk holds anti-nuclear campaigners up to the harsh light of logic, and Chris Murn tries to host a Christmas street party. Pieces by Alan Moran, as well as Sinclair Davidson, Alex Robson and Chris Textor, dig further behind the claims of price-fixing by Visy and Amcor and reveal that not every criminal has committed a crime.

Even without a functioning government, Belgian government services continue to be delivered. Rubbish is still collected, social security payments are provided—even, as Paul Belian points out, taxes continue to be collected. While the government is in caretaker mode, government activity cannot be reduced, but neither can it be extended. As a result, the promises of more pork and populist extensions of middle class welfare which characterise Australian federal election campaigns may, indeed, obscure the fact that when the federal government is in caretaker mode for the election, that could be the best six weeks that government ever has. Cynics should hope for stalemate and inertia.

A review of Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England by Emily Cockayne (Yale University Press, 2007, 335 pages)

For Europe, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the rise of the nation state and the consolidation of sovereign power. It was a period in which the Baroque and Rococo movements celebrated the aesthetic potential of art, and in which we can first glimpse modernity in the fields of political theory, the media, commercial endeavours and industry.

But it was also very disgusting.

Two recent films graphically depict the repulsive squalor of urban Europe on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, based on Patrick Suskind’s novel of the same name, describes the ghastly scent of eighteenth-century Paris — from its gruesome montages of fishmongers, rotting meat, manure, to the heat and stench of the tannery to which the protagonist is apprenticed. The perfume of the title is the ultimate contrast to the film’s visceral portrayal of urban life.

In The Libertine, the 2nd Earl of Rochester — played by Johnny Depp — pursues his rakish lifestyle amongst the squalor of Restoration London. While wealth largely protects Rochester from the filth experienced directly by the protagonist in Perfume, his end is nevertheless gruesomely unglamorous. It is not revealing too much about the plot to write that Rochester’s debauchery leads to the macabre but inevitable contraction of syphilis.

Emily Cockayne’s Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England keeps the attention firmly on all this unpleasantness. Influential and great individuals figure in her survey of everything that was repulsive about life in the period, but only incidentally.

Samuel Pepys is awoken in 1660 to discover that ‘a great deale of foule water’ had seeped into his parlour from his neighbour’s house. Alexander Pope is disgusted by the ‘large tribute of dead dogs’ floating down the Thames. Jonathan Swift, frustrated by the roar of a vegetable merchant hawking his wares to passers-by, complained that

Here is a restless dog crying cabbages and Savoys, plagues me mightily every morning about this time. He is at it now. I wish his largest cabbage was sticking in his throat.

Thomas Hobbes also pops up in a section on the ugliness of growing old: 60 years old, but dressed in a manner inappropriate for his age, and a little bit ‘French’.

As Cockayne writes in the first chapter, Hubbub is designed to provide an alternative to the customary histories of the period — which tend to focus on the pleasures of the times — by looking at all that is noisome and disgusting. Drawing from diaries, paintings and illustrations, court records, government archives, and even maps and architectural drawings, Cockayne lovingly combs the margins of the period to document all the possible grievances that an individual could have with everyday life. No nuisance is left unacknowledged. She neatly divides the book into separate categories of complaints: ‘ugly’, ‘itchy’, ‘mouldy’, ‘noisy’, ‘grotty’, busy’, ‘dirty’ and ‘gloomy’.

Some of these grievances seem, at least upon their first citation, relatively petty. Hobbes may invite ridicule for having dressed too young and French for his age, but vanity certainly did not disappear with France’s ancien régime. Ugly people were ridiculed, but being ugly did not seem to harm career prospects, at least for men; women were at a much greater disadvantage, and those with physical deformities even more so.

As Cockayne’s sources are by necessity biased towards the literate upper class, it is not surprising that the din of everyday commercial traders and street sellers receives a great deal of attention. The poet Nicholas Breton summed up the situation well by noting that ‘the cry of the poore is unpleasing to the rich’.

And some of the poor must be forgiven for perhaps thinking that this essentially aesthetic complaint had the backing of the force of law. Two individuals were convicted of vagrancy in 1685, despite their protestations that they were shilling for work: one yelling ‘have you got any knives to grind?,’ the other ‘have you got any worke for a tinker?’.

Similarly, satirists singled out ugly, scruffy and apparently atonal buskers for ridicule.

Cockayne notes that the wealth of the new merchant class combined with increased literacy had architectural consequences. In the early sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a study tended to be located on the outside of an urban dwelling to maximise light. The heightened sensitivity to noise felt by a literate occupant meant that, by the eighteenth century, studies were mostly located in the centre of buildings to minimise street noise.

Some of the complaints were mere nuisances. Others were certainly not. ‘Itchy’ and ‘mouldy’ make for very uncomfortable reading.

Sometimes the source of an itch was the ubiquitous wigs of the period. Wearers would shave their heads for fitting, but the rough underside of the hairpiece would have caused much discomfort. Wigs could accumulate dirt and become greasy and disgusting.

Poor quality clothing was not helped by almost non-existent hygiene. It is difficult to discern how often or how thoroughly people washed in this period, but what little evidence we have does not flatter — rare was the ‘wet wash’. (It is alleged that Louis XVI took just one bath in his life.) While the diarists of the period rarely mention bathing, Pepys manages to slip in a note that he ‘rubbed myself clean’. Soaps were either greasy irritants or extremely expensive.

Worse still was the food. It is no surprise that one of the most popular cookbooks of the era, Hannah Glasse’s 1747 The Art of Cookery, had a section to teach aspiring cooks how to clear a room of bugs. Cockayne’s descriptions of the deteriorating food quality of this period are as close to gut-wrenching as a history book can get. Her description of everything that could go wrong with pork is indicative of the culinary challenges of the time:

While rootling in the back alleys and dunghills, pigs picked up contamination from city industries and noisome ditches filled with night soil and street sweepings. Mingling with dogs increased the circulation of disease and intestinal worms. Pork from city pigs needed to be cooked thoroughly to ensure it did not cause illness or worm infestation … Pork with flabby fat and a hard ring, or with any part that felt ‘clammy’, should stay on the block.

Butcher shops open to the elements were susceptible to mud splashes and insect contamination. Fruit was prone to disease: apples were dismissed by one contemporary author as ‘unwholesome’.

But not all of the risk for food shoppers was unintentional. Shoddy merchants often knowingly disguised rotting meat or stuffed bread with filler — grit, wood, sand, and even stones were used to make up weight.

The list of unpleasantness is nearly endless. Choking smog so blanketed London that people detected house fires not by the smell of smoke, but by the crackle of flames devouring wood. The pavement was so uneven as to be dangerous. The wheels of carts bumping along poorly laid streets would shed their lubricating fat, which would combine with animal dung, soot and other filth.

The Thames was so ‘impregnated with the filth of London,’ said a character in Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, that ‘human excrement is the least offensive part’.

Cockayne’s catalogue of the filth of urban England is hardly balanced. There are scores of histories extolling the virtue of the polished and refined city lifestyle (albeit upper class city lifestyle), and to match each description of filth with a counter example of the luxuries of elaborate sixteenth century English gardens would be fatuous.

But she does address the overwhelming question that Hubbub raises — if the city was so bad, why did it continue to grow? City life was certainly filled with unpleasantness, but individuals were aware of the need to accept trade-offs in order to prosper. As Cockayne writes,

There were consolation prizes for those citizens prepared to put up with congested roads and grimy houses. The prospect of finding secure employment, with the opportunity to specialise and diversify, attracted migrants to the cities and induced them to settle, despite the risks and squalor.

‘Muck and money go together’ said a contemporary proverb. So too did the social interactions, arts and cultural life offered by urban density. And while the primary source for Hubbub is a seemingly endless list of contemporary complaints, individuals were able to acclimatise and cope with the vast majority of daily nuisances.

Furthermore, Cockayne rarely leaves the city limits. Rural life had its own share of complaints — urban unpleasantness was so visible to contemporaries because it was relatively new. Living and working in the English countryside was scarcely the idyllic life portrayed in Marxist anti-Industrial Revolution tracts, or even by John Stuart Mill or William Cobbett.

Even so, at the end of the period of Cockayne’s survey, London was progressing towards a cleaner, healthier place, despite the conspicuous acceleration of the Industrial Revolution in the last few decades of the eighteenth century. Indeed, this period has modern political significance. Modern environmentalists point the finger at the Industrial Revolution as the originating point of today’s environmental problems — Leonardo DiCaprio’s upcoming The 11th Hour will reportedly do just that.

But as Hubbub reveals, long before even the most revisionist historian dates the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Londoners were complaining of ‘duskie cloudes’ over the city. Traditional biofuels such as wood, coal and charcoal were big sources of lung damage. The shift towards electrification that came in the early twentieth century may have spurred a great increase in the use of natural resources for energy generation, but it also shifted noxious smoke out of the kitchen and the living room.

The improvements in sanitation, public works, masonry — Cockayne details how poor craftsmanship meant that buildings in this period tended to fall down without warning — medicine and food technologies achieved during the Industrial Revolution have increased living standards far beyond the imagination of seventeenth-century diarists. Whatever environmental challenges we face, we are not served well by naïvely utopian paeans to pre-industrial Europe or by appeals to wind back development.

Annoyances such as toothaches, itchy clothing, excessive noise and drunken neighbours are all recognisable to twenty-first-century Australians, but to be so immersed in it is not.

In the security scare that followed September 11, it became something of a sport for American news organisations to sneak prohibited items through airport screening security.

So when The Chaser — the Australian political satire group — loosely disguised themselves as the Canadian delegation convoy, and easily passed the security at APEC, it wasn’t surprising. The media pounced on the incident — after all, not much else was happening of interest at APEC. The Chaser’s War on Everything, when it aired the next week, achieved its highest ratings ever.

The Chaser is part of a genre of satirical news programs, which include the US’s The Daily Show and its spin-off, The Colbert Report that are gathering loyalty from the apparently ‘disengaged’ youth demographic.

(It is conspicuous that the commentators who bemoan the Australia’s ‘disengaged’ youth always assume that once they become engaged they will immediately become Left activists. But what if all those yoof got off their bed, put down their headphones, and en masse joined the Young Liberals?)

The popularity of satirical news programs with youth audiences has led some on the Left to view these programs as the saviour of democratic engagement. But satire is a double edged sword. It doesn’t always do what you think does.

Some on the Left have cottoned on to the uncertain potential of satirical news. One piece last year in the Boston Globewas titled ‘Why Jon Stewart Isn’t Funny’, and it argued that the host of The Daily Show, through his relentless satire of Washington buffoonery, encouraged political complacency.

The article claimed that The Daily Show leads audiences to adopt a ‘holier than art thou attitude toward… national leaders’ and undermined ‘any remaining earnestness that liberals in America might still possess’. Given the dreary sanctimony of so many of those in the American Left, if this is true then Jon Stewart does a fantastically important public service. But the Boston Globe writer is spot on. Satirical news programs display an extremely cynical attitude towards the political class.

After all, making fun of politicians is really easy, and fantastically rewarding. The Colbert Report and The Chaser’s War on Everything are able to take advantage of the self-seriousness and cautious approach to the media that politicians harbour. Stephen Colbert, in his ‘Better Know a District’ interviews, successfully tricks junior politicians into making outlandish statements. (‘It was wrong to break the law to get people out of slavery — that’s what you just said’) And The Chaser is never funnier than when they are harassing humourless politicians at their press conferences.

But Left politics relies on the heroic politician, blessed with intellect and political cunning, to enact policies in the ‘national internet’ for the betterment of ‘society’. Cynicism about the type of people who choose to go in to politics and the capabilities of government action does clash with the ongoing hunt in the left for the political saviour.

For this reason, The Chaser’s jokes may seem fairly leftwing, but by undermining the sacred authority of the political class, satirical news tends to be more libertarian than socialist. A generation raised on cynicism and sarcasm are far less likely to jump on the bandwagon of a charismatic leader-type.

The IPA Review has been sceptical of governments, politicians, regulators and other self-appointed ‘leaders’ for sixty years, and this edition is no different. Sinclair Davidson and Ken Phillips criticise the ideological baggage of the union movement, in teaching and construction respectively. Tim Wilson treats yet another call for a government petrol price inquiry with the contempt it deserves. Jennifer Marohasy and Alan Ashbarry decry the cultural divide of forest politics. And in our cover story, Nicholas Eberstadt stares directly into the eyes of the anti-natalists, and asks what they have against children.

Wolfgang Kasper reminds us that federalism is more than just anachronistic ‘State’s rights’, as the Prime Minister seems to consider it. Instead, the principles of federalism are at the heart of liberal government. And Richard Allsop completes the thankless task of reading recent Prime Ministerial biographies, to try to discover more important things than the hometown of John Howard’s grandfather.

There is, of course, the standard array of book reviews, complaints about regulation, personal digs at high-profile environmentalists, and references to Adam Smith that have made the IPA Review Australia’s leading free market review of politics and public policy