Cause Index

Institute of Race Relations

The IRR is an advocacy organisation that fights for your right to make decisions about your life, family, and business, free from unnecessary government, political, and bureaucratic interference. It was established in 1929 and has remained true to its founding principles for these almost 90 years.
We don’t engage in PR stunts or gimmicks such as publicly laying charges at a police station or staging a public protest that looks very dramatic but more often than not achieves nothing. Rather we have a unique track record of using rigorous analysis, face-to-face lobbying, and media exposure to get politicians, government officials, and business leaders to adopt policies that safeguard your power to decide how you want to live and raise your family. By creating public and media pressure we get policy makers to abandon bad policies and adopt better ones.

Some successes include:

Forcing politicians to delay and later halt dangerous expropriation legislation that would have given the government the power to take your home or business;
Getting the government to halt and revise BEE regulations that would have done great damage to small business owners;
Preventing the government from adopting regulations that would weaken the protections on offer to investors;
Using media pressure to get opposition politicians to abandon attempts to introduce populist policies that would have limited the political choices on offer to voters; and
Getting police management to crack down on convicted criminals employed in the SAPS.
In our office hangs a mural that reads:

We stand for classical liberalism - an effective way to defeat poverty and tyranny through a system of limited government, a market economy, private enterprise, freedom of speech, individual liberty, property rights, and the rule of law.
It is those principles that saw the IRR become the most courageous and influential anti-apartheid think tank in the world. Today, the same principles inspire all our work. If those principles align with what you believe then welcome to the team. There are millions of people just like you - join us, make sure your voice is heard, and with your help we can be successful in changing government policies that threaten our future and deny you the right to decide how you want to live and raise your family.

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