and financial stability "all very necessary". This changed during the late 1970s and 1980s, when the IPA adopted an economic rationalist or neo-liberal position, with the IPA saying in 1988 that: Recent economic positions of the IPA include: lower taxation; abolish the minimum wage deregulation of the Australian economy; privatisation of government bodies like Australia Post, Medibank, the SBS, the Australian Institute of Sport, the National Broadband Network, CSIRO and the ABC; reduced government spending; greater transparency in government; the elimination of existing programs of welfare targeted at Indigenous Australians, with the aim of encouraging transition to work, self-reliance and high incomes; maintain or increase the current level of immigration; the reduction of Australian Public Service benefits and allowances. Tobacco In the 1990s, the IPA was funded by the tobacco industry to conduct research that "attacked the science behind passive smoking". The research included a study from 1996 by John Luik that found that the impact of passive smoking on non-smokers was "trivial", and that "bogus" or "corrupt" passive smoking "threatens the central democratic values of autonomy, respect and diversity". In 2010, the IPA argued against the Gillard Government's plans to introduce plain tobacco packaging, criticising it on the grounds that plain packaging may not affect the consumption of those products and that plain packaging may infringe intellectual property rights in tobacco trademarks and logos. If so, it would represent a breach of the constitutional requirement that acquisition be on just terms. Policy director Tim Wilson predicted that the government could be liable for $3 billion in compensation, a claim that was criticised at the time by Media Watch in part because media covering Wilson's claims did not mention that the IPA receives donations from the tobacco industry. The High Court ultimately ruled that no compensation was required, in British American Tobacco Australasia Limited and Ors v. The Commonwealth of Australia. Climate change The IPA accepts climate change is real but rejects the scientific consensus on the topic, i.e. that it is currently being mainly caused by human activities (in particular the burning of fossil fuels, leading to a build-up of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide), arguing that there is insufficient scientific evidence. It advocates that research in climate science should be more wide-ranging than overwhelmingly focused on attempting to prove that carbon dioxide is a dangerous climate-changing pollutant based on the inferences of hypothetical climate models. The IPA