The Centre for Independent Studies Research Collection

About The Centre for Independent Studies Research Collection

The Centre for Independent Studies Research Collection. Stay up to date with the latest CIS research, policy papers and opinion pieces and commentary. CIS promotes free choice, individual liberty and the open exchange of ideas. We aim to make sure good policy ideas are heard and seriously considered so that Australia can prosper.

Publisher

cisresearch

Category

news · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

15 Aug 2023

Latest episode

7 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

40 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   7 Sept 2026

   Wrong way – go back How Australia’s workplace relations system is holding back growth, wages and opportunity | Graeme Watson

   This is the audio version of Wrong Way – Go Back: How Australia’s Workplace Relations System is Holding Back Growth, Wages and Opportunity, a Centre for Independent Studies paper by former Fair Work Commission vice-president Graeme Watson. For the full paper, go to: https://www.cis.org.au/publication/wrong-way-go-back-how-australias-workplace-relations-system-is-holding-back-growth-wages-and-opportunity/ Watson argues that Australia’s workplace system is uniquely prescriptive and uniquely complex — National Employment Standards, 122 modern awards, and a bargaining regime stacked on top of one of the world’s highest minimum wages. The 1990s consensus of Hawke, Keating and Howard put a fair safety net under enterprise-level deals that lifted productivity and real wages. From 2022 to 2025 that rationale was reversed: more prescription, revived multi-employer and pattern bargaining, expanded arbitration, and individual claims that reward speculation over merit. Productivity dropped out of workplace policy even as growth slumped and real wages flattened. The paper’s answer is to go back: regulation as a guardrail, not a handbrake. Watson sets out 16 first-step reforms, including a simplified small-business award, annual salaries instead of overtime complexity, employer consent for multi-enterprise bargaining, a productivity test for agreements, tighter unfair-dismissal and general-protections rules, and cost orders against unreasonable claims. Australia cannot regulate its way to prosperity. Read the paper at the link above.

2. 

   2 Jun 2026

   Banana Republic Redux: How Australia is surrendering gains of the reform era | Alex Sanchez

   Banana Republic Redux: How Australia is surrendering gains of the reform era | Alex Sanchez Read here: https://www.cis.org.au/publication/banana-republic-redux-how-australia-is-surrendering-gains-of-the-reform-era/ Key points • Australia is losing the economic gains achieved during the Hawke-Keating reform era of the mid-1980s after the Banana Republic shock comment. • High taxes and regulations are reducing Australia’s global competitiveness. • Genuine reform requires reducing government size and fostering market-driven growth. Also … • The policies of the past decade are reversing the cost-cutting and economic openness achieved during the reform era. • Increased regulation and government intervention raise business costs, deterring investment and innovation. • Higher taxes and expanded public spending fail to address stagnant productivity and economic growth. • Restoring competitiveness requires deregulation, reducing costs for businesses, and limiting government intervention in the economy. Read here: https://www.cis.org.au/publication/banana-republic-redux-how-australia-is-surrendering-gains-of-the-reform-era/

3. 

   25 Mar 2026

   The Legislative Fantasy. Hate Speech, Culture and Institutional Failure by Dimitri Burshtein

   The Bondi Beach attack of 14 December 2025 forced a reckoning that many Australians had been quietly avoiding. Antisemitism was not, it turned out, a relic of European history or a pathology confined to the political fringes. It was here, active and emboldened. The question that followed — “what must we do about it?” — has since animated parliamentary inquiries, legislative proposals, and now a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion led by former High Court Justice Virginia Bell. The Centre for Independent Studies has been engaged through the antisemitism research program led by the Culture, Prosperity and Civil Society program. The CIS’s work on antisemitism has been driven by the conviction that the health of a liberal democracy depends less on the architecture of its laws than on the vitality of its civil society. This conviction runs through our most recent work on institutional resilience under conditions of moral and political stress, and it connects this project to the Centre’s civic pluralism series – Fractured Loyalties, The Ties That Bind, and Drawing the Line – each of which has explored the conditions under which pluralist societies hold together. Antisemitism functions as a diagnostic. It is not merely an offence to be regulated or managed; rather, it is a signal of deeper institutional failure and a warning that the mediating structures once capable of transmitting civic norms across generations have been weakened, captured, or hollowed from within. Dimitri Burshtein’s new report is a significant contribution to this ongoing work. Burshtein takes that diagnosis seriously and develops it with rigour and force. His argument is, at its core, Burkean: the informal sanctions of a healthy civil society are more powerful, and more durable, than any legislative remedy the state can devise. In making his case, Burshtein draws on comparative evidence from Germany, France, and the United Kingdom to demonstrate that the demand for more hate speech law is itself a symptom of institutional failure rather than a remedy for it. When communities lose the capacity to enforce shared norms, they reach for the state. But the state is ill-equipped to cultivate the virtues it has displaced. This does not mean legal indifference. Violence, incitement and intimidation must be prosecuted firmly, a point about which Burshtein is clear. What his report resists, rightly, is the conceit that moral and cultural problems can be resolved by what Burshtein calls the ‘legislative fantasy’. The report also asks harder questions about institutional capture — in universities, the arts, the legal profession and the media — that deserve far greater scrutiny than they have received. These are not peripheral concerns; they are central ones. If the commanding heights of Australian cultural life have been systematically oriented against our liberal democratic inheritance, then the challenge of antisemitism cannot be separated from the broader challenge of civic renewal. That renewal is the real work before us. In his new report, Dimitri Burshtein helps make the case for why. To read the paper, go to www.cis.org.au

Who has been a guest on The Centre for Independent Studies Research Collection

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Nancy C Jordan
• Nancy Dyson
• Peter Kurti
• Robert Carling
• Gene Tunny

Podcast Authority Score: 11 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

11

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

27