The primary obligation of the Australian government is to serve the Australian people. This means that policies should only be enacted where they are in Australia’s national interest, argues Daniel Wild in this report.

According to this paper, red tape costs the Australian economy $176 billion, 11 per cent of GDP, each year in foregone economic output. Similarly, in the US red tape is estimated to cost $2 trillion annually, or 12 per cent of GDP.

Section 487 (s. 487) of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act extends special legal privileges to green groups to challenge federal environmental project approvals, even when their private rights are not directly affected by that project. Since the introduction of the EPBC Act in 2000, major projects have spent approximately 7,500 cumulative days...

In September 2015, Malcolm Turnbull was elected leader of the Parliamentary Liberal Party, thereby becoming Australia’s twenty-ninth Prime Minister. In his first press conference as Prime Minister, Mr Turnbull pledged that ‘this will be a thoroughly Liberal Government. It will be a thoroughly Liberal Government committed to freedom, the individual and the market’. The Turnbull...

Executive summary: This report demonstrates that a serious problem exists with respect to fundamental legal rights in Australian law. Our research has focussed on the extent to which four such fundamental legal rights are abrogated in current acts of the federal parliament: 1. The presumption of innocence and burden of proof 2. Natural justice 3...