The Hon. Anthony Albanese MP has represented the Inner West of Sydney as the Federal Member for Grayndler since 1996. Following the election of the federal Labor government in November 2007, he became the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, and Leader of the House of Representatives. In 2010, Anthony was named Aviation Minister of the Year for producing Australia’s first-ever aviation white paper. In 2012, he was named Infrastructure Minister of the Year by London-based publication Infrastructure Investor. In June 2013, Anthony became Deputy Prime Minister and took on additional responsibilities as Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. In July 2016, he was appointed the Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Cities and Regional Development and the Shadow Minister for Tourism. On 30 May 2019, Anthony was elected unopposed as Leader of the Australian Labor Party.
Dr Liz Allen is a demographer and social researcher who teaches research methods and researches population dynamics at the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods. She uses her analytic skills to provide much-needed information about data and population dynamics. Liz has written numerous pieces for The Conversation, scholarly articles in academic journals, and contributions to research reports. She was named in the inaugural ABC Top 5 Humanities and Social Sciences academics in Australia in 2018. In 2019, she published her first book, The Future of Us: Demography Gets a Makeover.
The Hon. Mark Butler MP has been a federal Labor member since 2007 and is the Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy. Mark served as Minister for Ageing and Australia’s first Minister for Mental Health in the Gillard Government. He has also held the ministries of Housing, Homelessness, Social Inclusion, Climate Change, Water and the Environment. In 2013, Mark was awarded the Alzheimer’s Disease International Award for Outstanding Global Contribution to the Fight against Dementia. He served as National President of the ALP from 2015 to 2018 and is the author of Advanced Australia: The Politics of Ageing, published in 2015, and Climate Wars, published in 2017.
Terri Butler MP is the Shadow Minister for the Environment and Water. She has been in the parliament since the 2014 byelection in which she succeeded Kevin Rudd as the Member for Griffith. During her time in the parliament she has worked on issues as diverse as innovation, supporting AFLW, marriage equality and employment services. She holds a BA/LLB (Hons) from Queensland University of Technology and a Grad. Dip. Econ. from the University of New England. Prior to entering the parliament she worked at the Australian Services Union, became a partner at a Queensland law firm, and founded Maurice Blackburn’s Queensland employment and industrial law practice.
Dr Jim Chalmers MP has been the Federal Member for Rankin since 2013, and Shadow Treasurer since June 2019. Before his election to parliament, he was the Executive Director of the Chifley Research Centre and, prior to that, Chief of Staff to the Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer. He has a PhD in political science and international relations and a first-class honours degree in public policy. Jim’s most recent book, Changing Jobs: The Fair Go in the New Machine Age, co-authored with Mike Quigley, was published in 2017. His book about the global financial crisis, Glory Daze, was released in July 2013.
Osmond Chiu is the Senior Policy and Research Officer at the Community and Public Sector Union (PSU Group) and a Research Fellow at Per Capita. He has worked in policy roles for over a decade in the public service and trade union movement, and his writing has appeared in a range of publications, including the Sydney Morning Herald, Guardian Australia, Canberra Times and South China Morning Post. He is a directly elected rank-and-file member of the NSW Labor Policy Forum.
Dr Julie Connolly is a Research Fellow at Per Capita. She was formerly the Deputy Director of Policy and Research at the Brotherhood of St Laurence, and a lecturer in the School of Political Science & International Studies at the University of Queensland. Julie has particular expertise in poverty reduction, refugee settlement, mental health and stability policy, and has worked across the not-for-profit, public service and education sectors.
Emeritus Professor Mike Daube AO was Professor of Health Policy at Curtin University from 2005 to 2018 and Director of the Public Health Advocacy Institute of Western Australia. Before this, he was Director General of Health for Western Australia and Chair of the National Public Health Partnership. Mike has been a leader in public health in Australia and internationally for more than forty years. He has been President of the Public Health Association of Australia and the Australian Council on Smoking and Health, and chair, patron and member of many international, national and state government and non-government committees and organisations. He has published widely on public health issues and has worked for many years with the World Health Organization, governments and NGOs in more than forty countries. Among numerous national and international awards, he was the 2018 Western Australian of the Year.
Emma Dawson is Executive Director of Per Capita. She has worked as a researcher at Monash University and the University of Melbourne; in policy and public affairs for SBS and Telstra; and as a senior policy adviser in the Rudd and Gillard governments. Emma has published reports and articles on a wide range of public policy issues and is a regular contributor to Guardian Australia, the Australian Financial Review and various ABC Radio programs nationally. She is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
Dr John Falzon is Senior Fellow, Inequality and Social Justice at Per Capita. He is a sociologist, poet and social justice advocate and was national CEO of the St Vincent de Paul Society from 2006 to 2018. John has written and spoken widely on neoliberalism and the structural causes of inequality. He is the author of The Language of the Unheard (2012); a collection of poems, Communists Like Us (2017); and several book chapters; and regularly contributes to Arena, the Canberra Times, Eureka Street, The Guardian Australia and other publications. He is a member of the Australian Services Union.
Professor Clinton Fernandes studies the future operational environment that Australia’s military will face in the 2030-2050 timeframe. He examines the potential use of emerging technologies such as bioengineering, nanotechnologies and advanced materials and manufacturing methods. He is a former Australian Army officer and teaches at the University of New South Wales.
Emma Germano hails from Mirboo North, where she is Managing Director of her family mixed operation I Love Farms, which has a firm focus on sustainability and strives to connect consumers with Australian farmers to increase community understanding of food and fibre production. Emma is the current Victorian Farmers Federation (VFF) Horticulture Group President and President of the VFF Industrial Association. She also sits on the vegetable industry Market and Value Chain Strategic Investment Advisory Panel and has previously held tenure on the Victorian Vegetable Growers Executive Committee and as the VFF Horticulture Group Vice President. Emma is a Nuffield Scholar (2014), with her research examining global export opportunities for Australian primary producers.
Emeritus Professor Roy Green is Special Advisor and Chair for UTS Innovation Council, at the University of Technology Sydney. Roy graduated with first-class honours from the University of Adelaide and gained a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he was also a Research Fellow. He has worked in universities, business and government in Australia and overseas, including as Dean of the Macquarie Graduate School of Management and the Business School at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Roy has advised and published widely in the areas of innovation policy and management, and trends in business education. He has undertaken research projects with the OECD, European Commission and Enterprise Ireland.
Dr Elizabeth Hartnell-Young has experience as a teacher and school principal, research director and public servant. She is an Honorary Fellow in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education (University of Melbourne) and was a Visiting Professor at Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta. Researching in the learning sciences, she explored physical and virtual learning spaces in schools in England and Australia, and consulted to higher education. Elizabeth led the registration of online courses for educators at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). She is a board member of the Skyline Education Foundation and chair of its Futures Committee, and a long-time member of the Australian Labor Party.
Professor John Langmore AM was an economic adviser to the Australian Labor Party 1976-84 and proposed the negotiation of the Prices and Incomes Accord. From 1984 to 1996 he was the Federal Member for Fraser. John retired from parliament in 1996 to become Director of the UN Division for Social Policy and Development for five years and then Representative of the International Labour Organization to the United Nations for two. He has published extensively, including the books Dealing with America: The UN, the US and Australia and To Firmer Ground: Restoring Hope in Australia. He is currently a professorial fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
The Hon. Andrew Leigh MP is the Federal Member for Fenner and Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury and for Charities. He is a former professor of economics at the Australian National University, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. Andrew is the author of nine books, including Reconnected: A Community Builder’s Handbook (with Nick Terrell). He is a keen marathon runner, and hosts a podcast titled The Good Life: Andrew Leigh in Conversation. Andrew lives in Canberra with his wife, Gweneth, and three sons, Sebastian, Theodore and Zachary.
Peter Lewis is an Executive Director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company, and Director of the Centre for Responsible Technology. He is one of Australia’s leading public campaigners, with more than two decades’ experience in media, politics and communications. Peter has been behind some of Australia’s most successful and innovative campaigns, including ‘Every Australian Counts’ for the National Disability Insurance Scheme and ‘Never Alone’ for the Luke Batty Foundation. He oversees the fortnightly Essential Report and is a regular columnist for Guardian Australia. In June 2019 he published Webtopia: The World Wide Wreck of Tech and How to Make the Net Work.
Dr Kate Lycett is a co-funded National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and National Heart Foundation Early Career Researcher at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI). Her research interests span child mental health, sleep, obesity, cardiovascular health, epidemiology, public health, and wellbeing at both the individual and societal levels. Kate is also an NHMRC Research Fellow in the School of Psychology at Deakin University; an Honorary Fellow, Prevention Innovation at MCRI; and an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Melbourne.
The Hon. Jenny Macklin is a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Melbourne in the School of Government. She served twenty-three years as the Federal Member for Jagajaga, and was the first woman to become the Deputy Leader of the Australian Labor Party, a position she held from 2001 to 2006. Jenny served as the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and the Minister for Disability Reform in the Rudd and Gillard governments. As minister, she oversaw the Apology to the Stolen Generations and development of the Closing the Gap framework, the introduction of Australia’s first national Paid Parental Leave Scheme, the largest-ever increase to the Age Pension, and the design of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
Thomas Mayor is a Torres Strait Islander, a wharfie and a union official for the Maritime Union of Australia, and a signatory of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. He has tirelessly advocated for the proposals in the Uluru Statement, and is the author of Finding the Heart of the Nation: The Journey of the Uluru Statement towards Voice, Treaty and Truth, published in 2019. His book tells his story, the story of the Uluru Statement, and the stories of the remarkable people he met on his campaigning journey; a children’s version was published in June 2020.
Lachlan McCall is an economist and unionist who has worked in the fields of industry policy, electricity markets and microeconomic reform. He is President of the Young Economists Network at the Economic Society of Australia ACT and convener of the ACT Fabian Society. He holds a BA and a Master of International Relations and is currently completing a Master of International and Development Economics at the Australian National University.
Professor Janet McCalman AC is known for her award-winning books Struggletown, Journeyings and Sex and Suffering. As a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, she has always been fascinated by the experience of historical cohorts and the interplay between private life and the public world of politics and policy. She has taught the ecological history of humanity and the history and politics of public health. Janet’s research has included major cradle-to-grave studies of white settler poverty, Aboriginal Victorians, former Tasmanian convicts and the First Australian Imperial Force; for the latter two, she worked with volunteer genealogists and retired health professionals. For seven years she wrote an opinion column for The Age.
Professor Rob Moodie AM is Deputy Head and Professor of Public Health at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, and Professor of Public Health at the University of Malawi College of Medicine. He worked in refugee camps in Sudan for Save the Children and Medicins Sans Frontières; then for Congress, the Aboriginal community-controlled health service in Alice Springs. Rob worked for many years on HIV prevention for the Burnet Institute and the World Health Organization, and was the inaugural Director of Country Programs for UNAIDS. He was CEO of VicHealth from 1998 to 2007 and from 2008 to 2011 he chaired the National Preventative Health Taskforce. He advises WHO on the prevention of non-communicable diseases.
Dr Shireen Morris is a constitutional lawyer. She was a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at Melbourne Law School before becoming a senior lecturer at Macquarie Law School. Shireen is a Research Fellow at Per Capita and a committee member at the John Curtin Research Centre. She was a senior adviser on Indigenous constitutional recognition at Cape York Institute for many years, driving advocacy for a First Nations constitutional voice. This was the subject of her PhD thesis—now a book, A First Nations Voice in the Australian Constitution, published in 2020. She is the author of Radical Heart: Three Stories Make Us One and editor of A Rightful Place: A Road Map to Recognition. Shireen regularly writes and commentates in the media.
Clare O’Neil MP was elected to the parliament as the Federal Member for Hotham in 2013, and re-elected in 2016 and 2019. Following previous appointments as Shadow Minister for Justice and for Financial Services, in June 2019 Clare was appointed Shadow Minister for Innovation, Technology and the Future of Work. Immediately before entering parliament, she worked as an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company. In that role, she worked with CEOs of Australian companies helping them to solve their most difficult problems. Clare has Arts and Law degrees with Honours from Monash University and a Master of Public Policy from Harvard University, where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar. The book she co-authored with Tim Watts MP, Two Futures: Australia at a Critical Moment, was published in 2015.
Michele O’Neil is the President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. She began her working life as a waitress and went on to work in the community sector with homeless young people and then in the clothing industry. Before being elected as ACTU President in 2018, she represented workers in the textile, clothing and footwear industry as an organiser and then Branch and National Secretary of the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia (TCFUA). She represented her union nationally and internationally and led campaigns to win world-leading rights for workers, including a model of supply chain accountability that increased pay and conditions for some of Australia’s most exploited workers. Following the amalgamation of the TCFUA and the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) in 2018, Michele was CFMEU Vice President.
Emeritus Professor Stephen Parker AO is honorary professorial fellow at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne, and Global Lead for Education and Skills at KPMG. He was a legal academic before taking up administrative positions at universities, including Dean of Law at Monash University, Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Monash University and then Vice-Chancellor at the University of Canberra. He writes and commentates extensively on education matters in Australia and internationally, and has a podcast called Talking Tertiary.
Andrew Petersen is the CEO of the Business Council for Sustainable Development Australia. He was the Partner of the Environment and Development Group of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Legal from 1999 to 2006, and then the Legal and Advisory Lead of PwC Australia’s Sustainability and Climate Change team from 2007 to 2010. Andrew was an accredited auditor under the New South Wales Government’s Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme (2003-05), a verifier under the federal government’s Greenhouse Friendly Initiative (2003-06), a representative on the Business Council of Australia’s Greenhouse Gas Committee (2002, 2003) and in 2005 an industry delegate to the Australian Government’s representation at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC).
Dr Tasmyn Soller is a junior doctor working at Royal Darwin Hospital. She has a passion for public health, in particular addressing the root causes of non-communicable diseases. She has worked as a clinician in the Kimberley, Northern Territory, metropolitan Melbourne and Oxford. In addition, she has worked with the World Health Organization in Copenhagen, assisting governments to create effective non-communicable disease policy, and with the Centre for International Child Health. As an emerging public health practitioner, Tasmyn is focused on the translation of research into effective policy and practice.
Professor Fiona Stanley AC, FAA, FASSA, FAHMS is the Founding Director and Patron of the Telethon Kids Institute; Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Western Australia; and Honorary Professor at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. She is a former director at the Australian National Development Index (ANDI), and directed the University of Melbourne’s 2013 Festival of Ideas. Trained in maternal and child health, epidemiology and public health, Fiona has spent her career researching the causes of major childhood illnesses. Her major contribution has been to establish the Telethon Kids Institute, a unique multidisciplinary independent research institute focusing on the causes and prevention of major problems affecting children and youth; and to establish the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth, a national organisation of researchers, policymakers and practitioners. For her research on behalf of Australia’s children and Aboriginal social justice, she was named Australian of the Year in 2003; and in 2006 she was made a UNICEF Australia Ambassador for Early Childhood Development.
The Hon. Jay Weatherill joined the Minderoo Foundation in early 2020 as Chief Executive of its Thrive by Five initiative. Jay previously served as the forty-fifth Premier of South Australia, leading a Labor state government from October 2011 to March 2018. He is an ambassador for the international children’s education organisation Reggio Emilia, and is on the board of a research project for the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth. Prior to his political career, Jay set up a law firm specialising in employment law. He holds Law and Economics degrees from the University of Adelaide and has recently been appointed as Industry Professor at the University of South Australia. Jay now calls Perth, Western Australia, home with his wife, Melissa, and two daughters, Lucinda and Alice.