While studying philosophy at Macquarie University in the early 1970s, Mr Lindsay became interested in the ideas underpinning a free and open society. A maths teacher by training, Mr Lindsay taught for some years at Richmond High School in Western Sydney, and while there, founded the Centre in 1976. Since then, he has overseen the development of CIS into Australia’s largest independent think tank covering the three major policy areas – economic, social and international.
He has been active in the international liberal movement and is a former President of The Mont Pelerin Society (www.montpelerin.org). He is a member of the Council of Macquarie University
Posted: 8:00 am on 12th March 2012
I only met James Q. Wilson twice, and one of them was when he was on an extended trip to Australia in 1997 and delivered the Centre’s John Bonython Lecture, The Morality of Capitalism. Jim delivered a masterful talk worthy of one of the more important intellectual figures of the last 100 years. The topic certainly rings true today. It’s hard to believe that this thoughtful and courteous man is…
Posted: 1:55 pm on 28th November 2011
In an item in today’s Australian Financial Review about a businessman involved in a takeover, another story emerged that had me wondering yet again just how far things had gone in cossetting kids from everyday life and also respecting the ability of adults to make sensible decisions about child safety. The man, a father of a primary school aged son, was due to play in a school fathers-and-sons cricket match,…
Posted: 5:09 pm on 1st November 2011
A few weeks ago I posted a piece about Qantas and the problems it was having with its unions and raised some questions about its future, its management and everything else that was pretty obvious. At the time, the airline was enduring some nuisance stoppages and an irritating campaign by its pilots broadcasting to a captive audience a message about the worth of Aussie pilots on the Aussie airline. The…
Posted: 3:45 pm on 29th October 2011
I woke early in London this morning to find that New Zealand Business Roundtable Executive Director and my friend Roger Kerr had died after a year-long battle with melanoma. At Consilium in July this year, Roger was made, along with John Howard, an Alan McGregor Fellow of the CIS. Posted below is the citation I read at the award presentation. The other recipient of this year’s Alan McGregor Fellowship is Roger…
Posted: 3:39 pm on 21st October 2011
In a wide-ranging presidential address to the Mont Pelerin Society recently in Turkey, Kenneth Minogue described Istanbul as a city bridging the spirituality of the East and the materialism of the West and the symbolic but ambiguous contrast between tradition and modernity. Traditions are essentially social while modernisation is individualistic. I’ll say more on this at a later time. Professor Minogue also recounted a well-known story that says much about…
